About Distributed Social Networking
27 Jun 2010
So, Diaspora, DiSo, Appleseed, and a bunch of others. Despite the incredible attractiveness of this solution to the problem of Facebook/Twitter centralization, I find it hard to get excited about any of these projects. They are all doing it wrong, but not exactly for that reason.
I suspect this is both easier and harder than they think:
- Harder – design. People. Product. Design matters. At all levels. Details matter. At all levels.
- Easier – technology. Web pages, feed, pub-sub. Done.
- Harder – improvements, updates, protocol changes, specs, consensus.
- Easier – avoid specs and consensus; dictate that shit. Just leave room for add-ons.
- Harder – end-to-end model is broken. Network 10 considered harmful. Plus, end nodes (aka laptops) are not always connected.
If you have opinions on this, join one of these projects or, better, start your own.
Yeah, there are a bunch already out there, but they mostly suck, so you have a good chance of beating them all if yours can be excellent.