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Comment by jlgbecom | Hacker News Reader

The combined size of social networks that aren't Facebook is over 1.5 billion people, probably more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi...

Facebook has the most users in one place, but the dust is nowhere near settled on where everyone will end up.

This bodes very well for a decentralized solution. I doubt Diaspora will be the first (I think Appleseed (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org) is much more likely), but ultimately, it will be an easily implemented protocol with mature cross-platform libraries that'll really take it down.

This is a good PR move on Facebook's part, because it willfully misinterprets people's frustrations with Facebook. It's not that you didn't have a local copy of your data, it's that you had no control over your data when it was out in the wild. This will take some wind out of the sails of the decentralized solutions, but the armada is still coming.

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Scanning your link,

It seems like the majority of the non-Facebook figure comes from Chinese language sites. Since social networking sites will quite likely be segmented by language for the foreseeable future, I don't think this really counts. In the English-language world, Facebook has serious network effect and you would be hard-pressed to combine all of FB's competitors into anything.

I agree dispersed social networking is coming... I'm not sure if "control" of data is the way to phrase the "problem"... Still, creating a dispersed network where each contributor controls where their data goes is a very hard problem.

Sort by Registered Users. You don't even need the Chinese language site (QZone).

Habbo + MySpace + Bebo + Orkut + Friendster + Hi5 = 679 million. Assuming 50% cross-over (which is a very high estimate), that means 340 million unique users, for just six social networks.

And that is nothing to sneeze at.

I was mistaken.

The sites I hadn't heard of aren't Chinese language sites but failed English language sites. But they are still failed sites. I don't go to my two Myspace pages, ever.

Orkut is not really competing with Facebook. It's huge in Brazil, but has very few English speaking users left.

And in India, where Orkut used to be big, almost everyone I know has migrated to Facebook, so those numbers include a large number of accounts no one is using

Is anyone trying to solve the data control problem right now?

The thing is, I doubt a decentralized social networking approach would really be allowed by the Chinese government. This kind of solution can only really gain ground in very open countries if at all...

I don't want to take this too far off-topic, but: why Appleseed? I hadn't heard of them until just now.

Tons of working features, a more well-defined roadmap, (much) more experience, and it's way easier to install (LAMP vs Rails). Also, Appleseed is a full social platform, that allows you to build components and extend it. Diaspora is more of a single application, it doesn't have any kind of modular framework to build off of. I don't think Diaspora will ever be dead in the water, but it just has so much catching up to do, and not small stuff, big architectural stuff that doesn't really benefit from the "many eyeballs" advantage of popular open source.

My sister is in four social networks other than Facebook. I don’t think it matters. (Five if you insist on counting MySpace.) She would pick Facebook if she had to.

> The combined size of social networks that aren't Facebook is over 1.5 billion people, probably more.

How much of that overlaps with Facebook? Approximately 500 million? Also, they're measuring total registrations: FB has probably close to a billion registrations on their 500 million actives. All that statistic tells you is that FB has room to grow.

Let's assume there's total overlap, meaning everyone who has a non-FB account also has a FB account. Now let's assume all of those smaller, but substantially sized, networks started inter-communicating. Who would stay on Facebook? Why would you stay on the centralized network with 500 million people when you can spend all your time on the open network with 1.5 - 2 billion people?

As for active versus registrations, we can't be sure of that from anyone, but rest assured, a decentralized network has much greater potential than Facebook does. Especially in the rest of the world where Facebook isn't nearly as popular.

500 million vs 1.5 billion is a meaningless metric regarding which social network people will use. They will use the one their friends are using, and no one has near enough friends for those gigantic numbers to have any relevance.

If it's such a useless metric, why is it always brought up as a clear example of Facebook's unmovable dominance?

It's a useless metric in regard to an individual person's decision to use facebook as opposed to something else. People don't care that facebook has 5 million users, they care that their friends use it. If all/most of their friends started using something else, they would too, regardless of whether that new network had 5 billion people or 5 hundred.

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