The Unbundling of Social Networks | Hacker News Reader

The Unbundling of Social Networks

skepticgeek.com

21 pointssrikar10 comments

Actually the core will unbundle as soon as there is a platform that can decentralize the actual social networking. The accounts, connections, authentication, subscriptions and notifications, realtime group experience (like chat) etc etc.

Right now to see what your friends have posted on fb you have to be on fb and be in their friends' list. Which leads to a snowball network effect. Imagine if you had to do the same in order to receive your friend's email from down the hall!

Right now people in an african village have to be connected to the internet using baloons or drones in order to communicate WITH EACH OTHER and share videos and photos taken on their phone. Why does their signal have to travel halfway around the world to a fb datacwnter just so they can plan what's for dinner?

This centralization is actually perverse and a SYMPTOM of the lack of standard for decentralized social networking, and open social network implementations. Diaspora was one attempt, but what else is out there?

I think the limitation is more technical than you make it seem. Why is there no network-level decentralization for social networks? Because P2P connections have a habit of being unstable, unreliable and hard to initiate. What if your desired peer is offline at the moment? Would be very convenient to store the information somewhere. A server in the middle just works. The primary reason not to use a server is because there is an inherent disadvantage/distrust in a central authority (à la Bitcoin). Apparently for social networks this is not an issue for 99.9% of people.

But why do we HAVE to use the servers at facebook as the server in the middle

"pubsubhubbub" as a protocol would let you choose your "hub"

in general, any publisher of information could designate one or more computers to store the data redundantly, and even encrypt it so that only my friends with the key can decrypt it.

that's how the web works btw

Is there a way to just centralize friends only? And then other providers provide every other service?

GNU social is a decentralized social network - http://gnu.io/social/

GNU Mediagoblin is a decentralized media sharing network - http://mediagoblin.org/

Both are standards based.

> Diaspora was one attempt, but what else is out there?

I've only read up on it, but the indie web (http://indiewebcamp.com/why) fits some of the bill, at least for things you don't mind making public.

> The app ecosystem is like nature’s ecosystem – where innumerable species evolve and thrive, and that is the best that could happen for users. We need a rich ecosystem comprising of multiple species – read startups – that can lead to further evolution – read innovation – than just a few predatory monsters.

I wonder how much of wishful thinkin is in the article. The claimed fact that there is no dominant actor yet does not grant that this not going to happend, like "In the desktop world".

I remember reading the same kind of idealistic descriptions about the internet about 15 years ago, and now it is dominated by the giants.

Agreed, completely delusional wishful thinking. There is some innovation and "unbundling" at the edges, and then once those edges become reasonably well defined and there is a verifiable market there the majors will swoop in, build a couple of clones or additions to their platforms and hoover up a couple of the larger apps. And the cycle will continue. Every once in a while one of these major players at the edge will grow big at a fast enough rate that it will achieve orbital velocity and become a major in its own right by owning the new hotness for long enough to become a utility (cf. Netscape, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc.) but the idea that this there is any sort of major change in progress seems somewhat detached from the facts on the ground.

It's never been clear what FB will do with the integration of messenger in the browser. So much for unbundling that one.

I think messenger works very well on mobile, which somehow I see most people use for actual messaging.

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