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Comment by starbugs | Hacker News Reader

First of all, kudos for trying this.

So far I've only read comments that have a strong tendency towards the destructive or even pejorative end of the spectrum. I think that's unfair considering all the effort they are putting into this.

Having said that, I'd like to know what distinguishes this from e.g. Facebook in the long term. It's easy to put out a manifesto and pledge that you are never going to do bad things. It's also easy to come up with a vague theoretical business model that doesn't really say how it will work.

Let's assume they succeed with this – there is nothing that enforces these early statements anymore and soon investor pressure will lead to an outcome similar to the established success stories.

That's why I think you have to be much more different if you really aim to make a difference at scale.

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They're not just trying this. They're asking for money from regular folks with no real sustainable revenue model apart from "we're crowd-funding" [0]. People are free to donate as they like, but I think the whole pitch is not entirely honest.

[0] https://www.open-book.org/en/faq

You should read their FAQ on Kickstarter [1]. There they answer why their project is not federated, what revenue model they aim for, and why they aren't a non-profit.

Here's their take on the business model:

>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.

>We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.

>Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the...

If their revenue model is based on people selling each other stuff, it will end up the LinkedIn for MLM.

The Enterprise play sounds like a Holy Grail project. A social network, project management, ActiveDirectory/LDAP all-in-one? As a side project to fund a social network?

>The Enterprise play sounds like a Holy Grail project.

To me it sounds like they want to do what most other social networks do, make businesses pay for their profiles and features.

The trading part I'm doubting as well. That's something quite difficult to set up and scale. So it doesn't bode well when they don't offer a proper explanation.

> That's something quite difficult to set up and scale.

Especially if the admins lock themselves out of the kind of data you need for fraud prevention.

> There they answer why their project is not federated, what revenue model they aim for, and why they aren't a non-profit.

No, they don't.

Federation-wise, there's not a single word on federation. They talk about decentralization, not federation. To quote my other comment:

> Instead of "Will I be able to run my own instance?", think: Will I be able to follow an Openbook account from my Mastodon account?

As for the business model, I really need more than "atomic digital units of value" and "our ambitions go way beyond that". The last sentence does tell me something, but that something directly contradicts their stand on decentralization.

As for why they aren't a non-profit, they generalize pretty much every non-profit and say that they "don't grow exponentially" (without defining what they mean), and they mention names that do indeed grow year after year.

At the end, none of those three questions are answered for me.

Federation is a sub-category of decentralization, so if they reject the latter it's usually obvious they don't plan to support the former either.

Besides, their reasons for not running a decentralized service do apply for a federated service as well, and as far as I can see, they're using the terms synonymously anyway.

Whether those are good enough arguments, that's another debate.

>At the end, none of those three questions are answered for me.

Well, it's still their answer, and that's what my post was about.

In their (now archived) ideas repo, one guy suggested ActivityPub. But they rejected that specification as not fitting with their requirements. See: https://github.com/OpenbookOrg/ideas/issues/1

Very interesting that their main reason for rejecting ActivityPub is GDPR. Basically, you can't delete information after its been federated out.

This seems to go to far. Give the users control over their data in your system AND give them control over how their data is sent to other systems.

Edit: In the linked issue, OpenBook CEO said that you can't delete mastodon accounts, but Mastodon got that feature a couple weeks after his post:

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/3728

> This seems to go to far. Give the users control over their data in your system AND give them control over how their data is sent to other systems.

Depending on how you define "system", being unable to track and/or delete data federated out might put you in a hazardous position around GDPR. It's not just about users controlling their own data. It's also about system operators being able to enumerate who they shared data with, what safeguards and processes they follow, and so on.

I consider fundraising a part of trying. Without funding it's just not possible to do anything and maybe that's the reason why there are so many open points here.

With regard to your point on the business model. I've criticized exactly this in my comment. I think they need to put more work into this.

If people are willing to donate without a better understanding of their plans then I'm disproven (for now) and it's their right to do so :)

>I think that's unfair considering all the effort they are putting into this.

Putting in effort into something does not insulate you from criticism.

Constructive criticism would be nice though, right?

Sure, but that wasn't my point. I was rebutting your statement. I was not saying what would or would not be nice.

Honestly, I have a completely different read on the content of the comments on this page. I think you are going out of your way to find "pejorative" and "destructive" comments. The majority appear to be pretty well thought out by my eyes. Most people seem to be questioning the efficacy of openbook's approach to the problem. It is obviously something people care a lot about and there are a lot of very legitimate issues with openbook's approach that have been discussed on this page.

You quoted a piece of my comment out of context and then said that "putting effort into something does not insulate you from criticism".

I never said that.

I said that the comments I read up to the point in time when I wrote my comment looked not exactly constructive or helpful.

I agree that later some people made up their minds and contributed helpful criticism.

That does not invalidate my point though.

Maybe we wouldn't have to deal with things like FB anymore if qualified people would use their time to come up with a solution instead of pointing out what does NOT work all the time.

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