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Comment by siculars | Hacker News Reader

I hope these guys are able to get some traction. Distributed social networks that can replace twitter and facebook are the only way forward.

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I'm not so sure they are the way forward. They're clearly the way forward if you dislike being "locked-in". But is being locked-in always a bad thing? Nope.

We could easily have a distributed web search engine to replace google. It could run on everyones machine, and it'd be awesome. But what would be the advantage?

Also before twitter/facebook, we had email - a distributed social network. How is the "new" distributed social network going to be better than email?

Search engines and social networks are very different things. Build a better Google, and people will gradually switch. That's how Google got started. Build a better Facebook, and nobody cares because their friends aren't signed up.

Doesn't the same thing apply to Facebook when it started? Myspace, Friendster, and all other competitors had a ton more users and strong network effects back in 2004. Facebook offered a better experience though, and so users were willing to switch despite network effects (and even maintain multiple accounts for a period of time)

Not even remotely comparable. The vast majority of current Facebook users had no social networking accounts before they signed up for Facebook. Now, Facebook is entrenched.

That's not to say it was easy to make Facebook succeed, or that it would be impossible to make a service outcompete Facebook now. But it was certainly far easier to unseat the king back then than it is now.

> We could easily have a distributed web search engine to replace google.

"Easily?" Distributing things is hard. The claims of those who don't know this are to be treated with skepticism.

> It could run on everyones machine, and it'd be awesome.

Until we get something like "Trusted Computing," there will be a few people who will run servers that "cheat" somehow. This has been true for distributed systems over the Internet for over 3 decades now. (SMTP, Gnutella, Bittorrent, just to name a few.)

I'm sure its hard, but it exists already. http://www.yacy.net

> Also before twitter/facebook, we had email - a distributed > social network. How is the "new" distributed social network > going to be better than email?

Imagine you cannot use a word document created in windows cannot be used in linux or mac. Imagine YOU need to use windows just because other people use. Will this be good?

Choice of operating system is upto you and you must be able to exchange data across operating systems. That "interoperability" is needed for any good system. You don't need interoperability only if you want to monopolize the market.

>> We could easily have a distributed web search engine to replace google.

I'd like to hear more about that. An easy to build distributed system able to take the same computing/network load of google? Man, that would be awesome.

yacy.net

Hm, the page is not very clear about the scalability of this system. It only says the system performs 130k queries per day (~ 1.5 requests per second).

This page (http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebo...) claims that google search handles 34k requests per second.

I'm yet to see someone describing how you can easily create something completely descentralized that is able to achieve such a high performance.

And I'm talking only about speed. If you throw other issues like quality of results, privacy, dependability, how to get traction, and so on, the thing becomes insanely difficult.

If it was so easy to do this kind of stuff, someone would already have done it.

attach your images with your gf and send it to all you friends with email, and then everybody will post a comment, I mean email.

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