I don't know why there isn't a groundswell in favor of a gnu facebook, democratically run, ssl enabled, with powerful opt out privileges... Maybe because I don't have time to start it...

Because open-source can only do some things. It took an Ubuntu to make Linux somewhat usable, and even then it is miles behind an OS X. Some endeavors can only be done when there is lots of money at stake, that's a reality of our world today.

I disagree -- it takes motivated, large scale cooperation of resources. Sometimes money can buy it, sometimes you don't need money to buy such.

PERHAPS you can argue given a boring problem (e.g. Linux usability for grandma) and getting people to work on it takes money. But that is contingent on the arrangement of society, it isn't a universal principle or anything.

As for Ubuntu -- um, as a newly converted FreeBSD user, I think there appeared a free usable system a long time ago...

there's no good open p2p stack that would be able to support it (eliminating the need for servers would be priority #1 for such project)

Seems to me that every node would have to be both server and client, since we need to connect a person's digital profile with their control of the server that handles their profile -- open source at a local machine. (Stallman said something like this in his article.)

Seems like everything hinges on caching and timestamping and digital signing (again, not my ideas). Such handwaving might help solve the scalability problem; how we solve privacy, I don't know -- seems like once a profile has been read, there is nothing to prevent that reader from caching and propagating it however they please. It could be unsigned, but I am sure a thief wouldn't wait to confirm that someone's account password was signed...

Anyway, this is cool, ... I hope someone works on it for me ;)