This article is a joke, it's something I would expect to find on some tech/news gossip website. Is this what FSF has become?
> so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers.
I would think just about any popular web site would be a gold mine for such information. It has nothing to do with Facebook. Doesn't this sentence hold true if we replace Facebook with Google? This seems like a tinfoil/scare everyone into believing Facebook is evil and out to get you.
> and then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him. In some cases he does not — witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss.
Comeon, examples/proof please. Is Facebook blocking URLs to competition or child porn sites? There is a pretty big difference here.
I would think that the FSF should be on Facebook, trying to spread their message, gaining support, and discovering new users. They have an interesting problem, a lot of support, and some very big challenges ahead of them... and yet they spend time publishing articles like this and making fancy dislike buttons. FSF you should be ashamed.
What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like.
They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods.
In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator.
Imagine:
Mom: How come I'm not receiving updates from your aunt anymore?
You: Well, you have to wait for $INSERT_TECHNICAL_TERM to propagate or something.
Mom: Do I have to enter her hash-thing again?
or worse:
Mom: I'm getting a lot of spam
You: You have to install morton anti-spam social-edition
Mom: It won't install.
You: sigh here I come.
It's like email, but much worse because it has way more features, and more ways for things to go wrong.
Plus, I think Mark Zuckerberg actually donated money to the Diaspora project.
Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser, what do yours use?
Is your point that only companies worth $50bn can build usable web apps, or that anyone that doesn't want to sell your data can't do UX?
That's from 2008 announcing Pirate Bay had hit 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker. That's not total users, that's total online. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to 10 to estimate total users, double it to account for the rest of the global trackers (low?) and increase it by some percentage to account for 3 years of growth and you're in the hundreds of millions of users range, possibly as high as 300M or more.
I'm not a crazy bittorrent fanboy, in fact I'm quite the opposite, but I think it's clear that the number of users of a decentralized system can far exceed any "rounding errors" of facebook's numbers.
By having 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker, aren't they pretty much de facto centralized even if the protocol is theoretically decentralized?
If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the technology being used under the hood.
The pirate bay hasn't actually run a tracker for a year now or so. BT uses a system called DHT (and maybe something else) that lets the peers handle the tracking themselves. The peers do need to boot strap off of something, but it's very minimal afaik.
Even when they did use a tracker it's probably more reasonable to think of it as a directory server more like LDAP or such. At their base even classic decentralized protocols like SMTP rely on DNS as a directory, IP on routing tables etc.
While DHT is indeed decentralized, a central tracker is still preferred since it can quickly give an authoritative list of peers (rather than a probabilistic one).
Private sites tend to disable DHT anyways, since it's much harder to detect cheating without central trackers.
The important thing is that trackers are easily decentralized, since they're a per-torrent URL.
I think you are massively over-inflating your 300M estimate. The typical usage of bit torrent is to leave it running 24-7 to download the 300 torrents you've got queued. I would bet it is is far lower than 5-10 times and I really doubt it has tripled since 2008.
If so, so many people don't know what a browser is, you can only image how smooth a distributed social network would have to be to work.
Bit torrent works because it's three steps: 1. Download a bit torrent client, 2. Search Pirate Bay, 3. Click on the torrent. Occasionally, you hear the failure mode: why won't this stupid thing download? The only people who say things like "More people need to seed this" are tech literate.
Bittorrent is different. You don't care who the other nodes are, all you care about is you're connected to some nodes, and the client takes care of that for you.
Like others said, the only way a decentralized facebook would work is when everyone uses one (or two) central nodes (site) which will most likely be run by something like Google or Microsoft, and the end result will be the same: big company has access to all your data.
The "Like" button probably wouldn't work though. If you're some external website, which "like" button will you embed? Google's like button? or Microsoft's?
As a developer of a decentralized social networking project (Appleseed), I think you have a misconception of how these projects work. Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org.
If there's an issue with communication between them, the administrators of respective sites will deal with them. Your mom won't notice it anymore than when she notices Facebook's internal servers are experiencing a glitch.
And honestly, people don't "want" centralization of social networking any more than they "wanted" the centralization that AOL featured over the decentralization of the web.
Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org.
As I said when Diaspora first started making headlines, this is incorrect. Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes.
Because, really, the only way decentralized social networking will work is if everybody ends up centralized again on one node, run for free (most likely) or very cheap (not as likely) by some big company they trust. AKA, Google, who'd certainly love to have access to all the types of data Facebook currently has.
Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes.
Or Microsoft's node, or Yahoo's node, or Amazon's node or anyone else with the infrastructure to run a huge scale social site.
But all that aside, you don't consider this a better situation than now, where all data is walled off and silo'd and the biggest player is an effective monopoly with much, much less interest in privacy and data security than Google? And geeks have no option whatsoever to operate a social network independently?
If not, what do you propose, other than acquiescence?
You are assuming that a usable FreedomBox¹ cannot exist. I don't believe that. Debian, Ubuntu, Firefox… demonstrate this is feasible. And there's even less of a UI problem: it'll all go through HTTP.
Imagine a plug&play thingy, which you configure by subscribing to one and only one online-looking service. One subscription for e-mail, instant messaging, Blog, "social" thing, and more. No ads, private infos at home, encryption everywhere, no need to trust any big corporation, reliable automatic backup…
The thing about the FSF is that they have been tremendously influential. Facebook runs on quite a number of technologies released under ... the FSF's GPL.
By setting an extremely high bar, they've managed to get a lot of people to move towards that bar. Not as close as they'd like, I'm sure but much closer than they'd otherwise have moved.
The FSF has made a priceless contribution whether or not we're going to see a world that conforms to their vision.
In fact it's very much like email. You're just sending messages back and forth between people. Really, that's all it is. Most people won't leave Facebook - even if you delivered an electric shock every time they hit the FB website. It's where their friends are.
But there is room in the world for a decentralised and distributed social net. I wrote one (called Friendika). There are people who have a need for a social service of their own. There are online communities which still exist and where people send messages to each other and interact.
It is not whether or not they will replace Facebook. It is simply that Facebook doesn't cater to every social need of every organisation on the planet. Other services need to fill the gaps. One day some will realise that they are spending more time on network 'x' than on Facebook. In fact many of us are doing this today. At that point Facebook becomes irrelevant and loses its grip. Most people don't care who runs the servers. They also don't care if it is centralised or not. All they care about is communicating with people who matter. I would like to point out that girls who rejected you in high school that are now on your Facebook friend list - don't matter. If your mom is on Facebook - chances are that it is reluctantly and she'd much rather you just called her on the phone.
There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place.
Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.
Email is just as much a strawman. Compare how simple email is to all of the features Facebook provides (and don't forget your ability to click on your cows in Farmville).
You say there are no technical reasons why it can't work. That is very akin to the "You can do anything, it's just a simple matter of coding." The reality is that some problems become intractable due to their complexity. Distributed social network may not be intractable (Diaspora will probably figure that out), but it's a hell of a lot harder than email.
Just to clarify, when I said 'technical reason' I meant from the perspective of a user being able to setup/configure their social network settings. Not from the perspective of the internal implementation of the server components
Most people do. Not all.
The point being that you could choose to roll your own if you wanted to.
I bet many people on HN have their own domain and their own mail server. Hell, for a few dollars a month you can get a web hosting company to set it up for you.
For those who care about those things, they can do that and still be able to communicate with people who use gmail or yahoo mail.
And it wasn't that hard to find those examples, was it?
The problem with the statement in the original article is that it's not clear if they're referring to blocking torrent sites, or links to Diaspora. In the age of hypertext, it's just polite to link to examples inline, rather than making people hunt down what you're talking about.
To be fair, there are so many examples that it's not unreasonable to expect that people reading the FSF's pages would be familiar with them. I don't think I listed all or even half of the relevant examples.
Even so, you are correct in saying that it would make the piece stronger.
Facebook could (and probably does) collect the data necessary to track people around the web, whether or not they click on 'like buttons'.
Whether other sites, like Google, can do this too, is immaterial. When people are logged into Facebook, an ever increasing slice of their browsing history can be logged and tied to their real identity. Almost none of the people I know who aren't hackers have any awareness of this.
> Whether other sites, like Google, can do this too, is immaterial.
It's material if the FSF isn't putting up a "Google is evil" page on their website and handing out "Don't google me, bro" buttons, like they are doing with Facebook.
The FSF seems to think it's better to attack Facebook with ideological ad corporatio arguments, rather than concentrate their resources on educating people about how to their services intelligently. Facebook isn't sharing anything about me that I don't want them to know. And I understand that if I'm not paying for it, I'm the product. So I don't give them my address or my phone number or my cat's nickname. And that's what I tell every friend and family member on Facebook. I don't tell them that Zuckerberg is "evil". The FSF has tried that before with other companies and you'd think they would have figured out by now that it simply doesn't work.
Google isn't trying to grab all that data. And Google has worked with them to protect private data, including measures like shortening the time it takes them to anonymize the data they've collected.
Facebook, meanwhile, is working to sell your entire social graph to advertisers for profit. If they're being singled out, it's because they're the worst of the lot.
They maintain a very comprehensive and useful listing[1] of 3rd party licenses which goes over their histories, tradeoffs, and whether they're compatible with the GPL.
And that compatibility is treated independently of whether they consider those licenses to be 'Free'.
Of course they'd prefer use of their own licenses, but this self-interest takes a back seat to helping the overall ecosystem.
They've encouraged developers to use GPL, but they've never said it was bad to use BSD/Apache-licensed software. Their website uses the BSD-licensed nginx.
No (said Google). That's what I mean - you really don't understand. You see, I don't care if people come and look at these hen scratches or not. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. As long as I can sell a few advertisements on that page of my guidebook I really don't care. After all, what better praise for a Guidebook than to help people find out what's wrong with it? Just leave your manuscript with me. I'll look after it.
He held out his hand, imperious now. I felt disheveled after my long night. My brain was spinning. I could see no alternative. In a vain attempt to maintain some self-respect I drew myself up to my full height and pulled back my shoulders, adopting a bearing appropriate for my class. "All right Google. Here you go. Don't lose it now."
"Thank you sir. You can be sure I won't lose it. I never do lose anything you know."
I turned away from him and stumbled down the stairs. I had ended up giving him an order, and he had accepted it. Yet I could not shake the impression, even as he brought me a glass of sherry that evening in my sitting room, placing the silver tray beside me with deference, that Mr. Google - far from being a butler and travel guide - was more a master than a servant.
> so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers.
I would think just about any popular web site would be a gold mine for such information. It has nothing to do with Facebook. Doesn't this sentence hold true if we replace Facebook with Google? This seems like a tinfoil/scare everyone into believing Facebook is evil and out to get you.
> and then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him. In some cases he does not — witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss.
Comeon, examples/proof please. Is Facebook blocking URLs to competition or child porn sites? There is a pretty big difference here.
I would think that the FSF should be on Facebook, trying to spread their message, gaining support, and discovering new users. They have an interesting problem, a lot of support, and some very big challenges ahead of them... and yet they spend time publishing articles like this and making fancy dislike buttons. FSF you should be ashamed.