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The Freedom Box Alternative to Facebook

spectrum.ieee.org

20 pointsjambus19 comments

One fundamental problem, I just don't understand in these distributed social network systems is what happens when youur "social box" goes down, electricity cut, or in the case where someone doesn't want their PC running a power bill all day long. In houses where people don't use a local server or don't need anything on all the time (this is a realistic scenario in my experience), how does this work in the context of the freedom box.

Does that mean my social presence is offline when I am ??

Seems fundamentally flawed.

As far as I can tell, the Freedom Box is the server, so you would only go offline if you unplugged the wall wart containing the software. It also seems like there's a chance that you wouldn't go down if your internet went down, as long as you had enough of a concentration of Freedom Boxes nearby that your packets could be delivered via mesh to someone whose internet had not gone down, or directly.

This Freedom Box stuff is new to me, and I'm finding Moglen talking about it very difficult to parse. I'm going to try the speech at http://freedomboxfndn.mirocommunity.org/video/4/freedom-in-t...

If this allows my friends to get off facebook, and allows me to get back the sort of community of distant friends that I had when I was on facebook without the middlemen and any ominous privacy implications, I'm all for it. Also, I'd love to directly share content with non-technical people I know without the overhead of domain names and webhosting.

At the price point of <= $100 dollars in return for an actual physical product, I'm sure I could get most to all of my friends to use it. Myself, I'll just install the software to my HTPC (which has evolved into the central server for my house) for free, but I think that with a price point that low, my non computer-savvy friends would pay to get off of facebook in return for something they could touch, wasn't complicated, and couldn't be shut down at the whim of some corporate board.

Just my thoughts though. If you require a presence on the social web regardless of power cuts, then I guess it's a dealbreaker for you.

Please don't get me wrong, I really like the idea, I just think that my non tech savvy friends will immediately dismiss the idea of "normality" we have come to assume with the facebook pages always being on.

The hard truth is many of the people I talk to use facebook primarily to look at other peoples pages, if you look at facebook chat now and see exactly how many are online, it at best makes about half of your friends invisible.

I think this is a better solution than facebook if feasible to implement

If all of that facebook-page-type-stuff was saved on the wart, then we wouldn't be prevented from browsing through it while they were personally offline with their computer powered down. I assume that would be the plan - but if I'm wrong, I would share your doubts about this catching on as a drop-in facebook replacement.

-edit-

To be clear, I'm imagining pictures, an activity stream, a presence server, and maybe a calendar and a blog sitting directly on the wart - independent of a separate computer to such an extent that a person wouldn't even have to own an actual desktop or laptop to use the appliance to its full extent, maybe just a cell phone app to update these things, or even updating them through public or other people's computers over the internet. If friendly neighbors left their freedomboxes open to your through traffic, it might not even necessitate a local internet connection.

Ok, sorry my original comment was incorrect, I meant "by me being offline" by the physical device being unplugged or say electricity lost. And yes the wall plug idea is nice and really I would love this to be a reality, but there will have to be some sort of breakthrough in this distributed nature.

Some sort of p2p hosting solution, not sure how it would work exactly.

Noticed from the Kickstarter page:

"Such boxes exist in the form of plug computers and mesh routers, tiny, inexpensive machines that can take the place of other electronics in your life, that draw so little power (often as little as 5W) that they can be run off of batteries or solar panels."

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/721744279/push-the-freed...

> Seems fundamentally flawed.

Would you call your RL social presence flawed? If you're not physically with a group of friends, your social presence in their group is also "offline" physically, but you are still socially present in the group through their thoughts and conversations.

If you think, however, that the data-hungry "social" model of FB is the way to go, then yes, the FreedomBox is fundamentally flawed for you. Point being that the makers of FreedomBox think the FB model is fundamentally flawed.

While that paradigm works in RL, how exactly would this translate to this freedom box idea, a 404 page? I just don't see how it will work, ok perhaps a sort of system where @ mentions or the equivalent are parallel to being in peoples thoughts while not actually being there, and the fact that your "social server" is online means you are online in the way you are online in IM.

If on the other hand, you want a social page such as Facebook, this model doesn't work, as no one would be able to access your page and images or any other part thats actually on your server.

Also the facebook model is not one that I think will stick and I do believe that it won't be the end all of this social game. However, I think that users running their own servers is unrealistic. How many "non-techy" users run their own servers for a blog system for example? And if this social network which we talk about is the one to replace or even supersede the facebook era, then it has to be a one click plug in situation.

The same could be said of existing centralized systems: If a centralized social networking service (e.g. Facebook) goes down, then nobody can get your information from that service.

With a distributed and federated system, you could have multiple copies of your data on geographically separated boxes. They could keep in sync with each other, and if one went down, the others could provide the needed information.

While I accept the point, how do you explain how X amount of users are going to keep all their servers running if they want an online presence?

Facebook going down, while not an impossibility is less likely than a power outage in a person's home. Geographically seperated boxes unless in some sort of hosted environment where you choose your host and they manage your servers but then you seem to not really escape facebook's grasp but rather distribute it to many servers?

"...how do you explain how X amount of users are going to keep all their servers running if they want an online presence?"

They don't have to keep all of their servers running. Only one needs to be available at any given time.

The management of servers could be done by the owner, the owner's friend, the owner's third cousin, the gal from Geek Squad, Aunt Millie in Burbank, Comtastic Enterprises LLC, or Arthur Higginbottom Jr.

To replace the firewall/router AND host all my private personal data in one box, I'm going to need a ton of convincing about security. This appliance will be a hot target for exploits, and they're going to have to do an incredible amount of ongoing testing and updates. I can't imagine this is feasible for the $100 price tag they are quoting.

There is an inordinate amount of philosophising in the freedombox camp. Really it's just a distro project, and nearly all of the packages required already exist. What remains is just an easy installation procedure such that you can enter some details and are then ready to go. They should put the philosophy and speculation about alternative platforms to one side and make a serious effort to start releasing early, because there are folks out there who could really benefit from these devices.

If the amount was ordinate, they wouldn't have come up with the idea and work on the implementation in the first place. So the issue is what you think about their philosophy and implementation.

http://youtu.be/T-CkD98FJ24

Do you have a tl;dr? The title is bad already, "freedom or tyranny". I think there is more to this than good vs. evil. But looking at RMS, you can see that black/white thinking can produce licenses that work great in the hands of people who think more colorful (the free software scene).

Why can't this be a software application instead?

Oh pardon me. It was answered. Although the answer doesn't make any sense, atleast to me.

That was my first question too. Why not just make it out of a modified software firewall? That way you can run it on your wireless mobile devices as well, and not be vulnerable when connecting from Starbucks or wherever.

It looks like they have plans for that too. The physical box part is apparently for Apple-ish, plug-and-play ease of use, while software will also be available:

>James Vasile: Well right now we’ve convened a technical advisory committee. These are people who have deep expertise in the various difficult things that the Freedom Box is going to have to do extremely well. And those people are right now coming up with a road map for development that will lead us to actual software that can be loaded onto boxes, not just Freedom Boxes, I mean, if you want to load this onto your PC that will be an option although you’ll need somewhat more technical knowledge than simply plugging in a box. But we’re at the road-map stage right now. People are planning the architecture and figuring out what existing free and open source software we can pick off the shelf and put in the box to do most of the things that we’re planning on accomplishing.

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