There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.
Sometimes it's not about Big Bad Censoring Governments.
Yes, it doesn't remove that data from the chain and a client could easily end up undoing deletes, but if you think that server based deletes actually remove the data, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise depending on the servers in question.
People redistribute snaps all the time even though they're supposed to "go away", yet people still use it.
Specifically, this solves the problem of data consistency across different node/peers without needing a central (ie, Facebook's servers) master.
The way it works, is like so: http://gun.js.org/distributed/matters.html
However, a blockchain is still actually useful for a P2P Facebook. A blockchain that uses a consensus algorithm (PoW, PoS, etc.) is not scalable enough, though. But that is okay, as we do not need to solve the Double Spending problem for tweets/photos (see the previous link as to why).
So what does a "blockchain" mean then? A blockchain is a cryptographically signed linked list, often a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph). But these graphs would more likely be social networking data, which is naturally a graph - and they would be signed with user's public/private key pair.
Solving for that is pretty easy, we already have it working:
http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wit...
And our goal is to build a social network that has distinctly different properties than Facebook, one that is based on psychological research and emotional intelligence:
https://hackernoon.com/a-new-kind-of-social-network-emotiona...
Finally, the hardest factor is to remove the complexity of cryptography. There turns out to be a good security standard that lets user emulate username/password combos (see the middle link for more details), in summary:
You use PBKDF2 to extend a user's password with a salt, this creates a Proof of Work which is used as an AES symmetric cypher key to decrypt their private key. Fully P2P, but with a traditional UI that users understand, yet PBKDF2 makes it impractical for a cracker to guess (or even a dictionary attack) against the user's account.
I would understand if you were pushing some alternative social network like Scuttlebutt/Patchwork but pushing database on every hacker news post with social media theme is strange.
Do you propose to replace facebook with gundb app that is possible to make in two minute tutorial: https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... since you share it everywhere?
Don't get me wrong. I think GunDB is wonderful project that i actually want to use for things but maybe this is not best way to get new users.
If i didn't know about GunDB and saw your frequent similar comments on Hacker news i would be pretty suspicious.
Ultimately, I have to choose one of two philosophies:
(A) Be ashamed of the free (MIT/ZLIB/Apache2 Open Source) code that I have spent tens of thousands of hours donating for others to use.
(B) Or strongly believe in why I've devoted so much of my life to, fixing these problems, and be proud to share and evangelize it with the world.
Obviously, I don't want to come off as a bot, but ever since the first day I started working on GUN I've gotten haters saying things. As a result, it forced me to grow a thick skin. Even if you try to do nice things, people try to hate you, be skeptical, or be suspicious (this is a natural human tendency).
So, do I be (A) fearful to not post or comment, simply because I know some will not like it or get tired of it? Honestly, the thought crosses my mind every time I basically do anything in life, but I've decided "No, that is an easy trap of depression and pessimism to get stuck in."
Instead, I've decided to be proactively do (B), that even if only 1 person gets value out of my post, and they discover "Aha! This is a free MIT/ZLIB/Apache2 system that does EXACTLY what I need!" then my belief is that the world is better off. Better off for them, better off for me, and hopefully better off for the users who use the app they create.
If I forced you to pay me $$$ to read my articles or $$$ to use my code, then there would be a strong argument that my behavior is unethical.
Or even if I tried to show you ads or mine your data, then that would be unethical.
The problem is, I'm building tools that fight that type of unethical behavior. But that immediately puts us at a disadvantage compared to those who do exploit/manipulate people/the-masses into doing things.
Now, what is the relevance of the week-long HackerNews-obsessed Facebook debacle?
Well, I hope my comments have pointed out clearly, that nobody would be in this situation if they used P2P/decentralized end-to-end encrypted systems. And that is exactly one of the reasons why I've built the tool, and donated it for anybody to use. However (perhaps this is my pessimism coming through), it seems like people get more glee complaining/griping about how evil Facebook is for hosting all their pet/child photos for free, while still playing the victim card, AND doing nothing to change their behavior or spend time/energy/work to build alternatives. (To clarify: We shouldn't pity Facebook, they profit a lot off of people, but building solutions is a better win for the world than complaining about it. Although I'm afraid comments like that will cue the haters.)
I do occasionally mention SSB, Mastodon, etc. but they also have their problems (Mastodon is federated, will lead to the same thing as with email, everybody will use gmail), SSB is way way way better.
So, there you go. Thoughts?
How do I delete data in this scheme? Maybe by signing each data "node" with a separate key, which can then be shredded if I want? Where would those keys be stored?
No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. The reason is that having multiple entities each pursuing their own agenda makes it less likely that everyone will collude and run off with the money. It doesn't especially matter who those entities are, as long as they're not closely affiliated with one another.
Similarly, for whatever problems democracies have, they tend to function at least marginally better than corporate-owned countries like Rhodesia, Batavia, etc. And economically, there is a reason why currencies tend to be a better store of value over time than in-app credits or company scrip.
Personally I think creating government privacy legislation would be a much better use of time than trying to build a social network on blockchain, but I understand the thought process.
I'm curious, is that a law? From which country?
I believe it's the Bank Holding Company Act:
For all intents and purposes, Facebook's database is closed source. The community doesn't know exactly what this private company does with this data. We have to trust them with it. A blockchain database is trustless.
You're not 'trusting' a single entity in that case because you're making literally all the information public for anyone to see, use, resell, etc.
That's like saying we shouldn't have to trust Equifax, let's just make everyone's name, address, SSN, and credit history public on the internet to begin with.
With Bitcoin, the people you're trusting are miners, and they are highly incentivized to preserve the correct functioning of the system because they get paid in bitcoin and they want it to stay valuable.
With a federated social network blockchain, there'd have to be an incentive to preserve privacy greater than the incentive to do any other bad thing like manipulating elections.
You'd set up another centralized honey pot that these psychopaths actively look for.
> How would a blockchain make it better?
Besides censorship protection, the platform could reward users to make itself better. Lots of things become possible when you have control over the reward system and don't just extract the value to the top.
> What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whomever would run the database?
This is the decentralized aspect. Whoever starts the project isn't necessarily more trustworthy. They might build that trust over time(or not). Either way the project doesn't live and die by them if successful.
I personally don't think that goes under "features" to be honest. Every uncensored social network is basically a cesspool.
The ability to do logical deletes that will be honored by the main consumer client isn't really sufficient to deal with the problem.
There are other choices besides authoritarian censorship, despite the popularity these days.
...and add their own content, which is only viewable from that site and not elsewhere on the network. And the most popular one of those will eventually just displace the decentralized network.
Sure a platform could add their own features off-chain. But the user would not be rewarded by the protocol for such divergences.
Whatever comes next needs to solve the problem to share the silly tidbits, without the greed to turn the users into a data farm.
Facebook invented photos tagged with social profiles. Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Since going public, Facebook's ad platform has remained at the forefront of useful and powerful online services. You can target users by interest, worldwide location, age, and more. It is an elegant platform that has been mishandled by aloof executies.
Did it? Seems a lot like a twitter feed one could build for oneself.
And I disagree that facebook won for being faster or more innovative. Most people I know switched because it was less obnoxious with glittery animations and autoplay audio. Also, the crowd, at least initially, was more attractive to young adults since it was exclusive to people with a university email address.
Arguably it took the lead, at least initially, by doing less.
Facebook in its first years did everything in its power to lower the number of page loads necessary to navigate the entire interface. So you're right, it was less obnoxious by being faster.
And I don't know if you realize how big a deal tagged photos and a nice UI for uploading and managing them was. MySpace had nothing like that.
"Twitter Feeds" and news feed launched at the same time in summer 2006. Facebook filed for a patent in August. https://mashable.com/2010/02/25/facebook-news-feed-patent/#c... Nobody used Twitter until the following year when it made a huge splash at SXSW and caused its first growth spike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Twitter
I don't think people actually want the Internet, they want a walled garden.
Facebook is the new Compuserve, or AOL.
I also like how Mastodons feed just shows everything posted by people you're following in chronological order. I don't need a custom algorithm to decide what shows up in my feed when unless it's an algorithm of my design.
Also facebook has broken a lot of its features on mobile browsers to try and force people into installing it's apps. I don't want facebooks crappy apps on my phone so I have to force the desktop page to load to view private messages, but that breaks the website completely so I have to reload the mobile version of the site m.facebook.com while forcing desktop mode to be able to read private messages from the phone.
I would say that during it's rise to market leader facebook was the most user friendly social networking site, but the whole thing rattles and the tires are getting bald now
The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.
You probably also need some groundbreaking shift in the medium to create an opportunity e.g. how shift from laptops to smaetphones made photos and videos more compelling than text for some use cases, leading to Instagram and Snapchat. And then Facebook bought Instagram and used it to make Snapchat redundant...
Being a monopoly isn't actionable.
> If AT&T exhibited destructive network effects, Facebook is them times ten.
No, it's not. AT&T was far worse than Facebook in the practical, and exercised, ability to deny choice in ancillary markets.
> “Market share” measured solely in purchasing consumers is no longer a good sole metric for monopolies.
It hasn't ever been the legal sole metric.
The engagement loops trigger behavioral patterns that are supposed to encourage healthy relationships, but in this case it pulls us into a low-fidelity world of screens that pulls us away from enjoying the moment together with people that actually chose to be there in real life with us.
The endless feeds are arguably even more destructive as it removes the natural stopping point and the small moments of boredom where our minds get a chance to be creative instead of just consuming.
Maybe real life has a moat that is stronger than Facebooks network? I believe all need people that are offended when we don't hang out often enough more than Facebook likes and pretty pictures, so if the choice is between the two ....
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-u...
> A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well.
It's not clear to me that the purpose of Facebook is to make people happy. Instead, I think it's purpose is to be an low friction way to keep connected to lots of people. It seems to fulfill that purpose quite well.
That people are uncomfortable with boredom is not an inditement of the balm with which they sooth themselves.
True. Correlation is not causation. However, my argument is that it doesn't seem to solve a problem I can think of well that leads to healthier real-life relationships and heavy use instead seem to correlate with the opposite. Can you think of any? I do think it solves image-sharing and life-updates with remote-family as well as remote-friends well.
> It's not clear to me that the purpose of Facebook is to make people happy.
I agree with you there. What problem Facebook cures is dependent on the person and situation. Things I can think of is; boredom, anxiety, loneliness, social recognition, etc
> That people are uncomfortable with boredom is not an inditement of the balm with which they sooth themselves.
Yes, that is the issue. Real life is hard and when attempting to connect we might receive the same rejections that we are afraid of. At least on facebook someone will like your post and comment on it, although maybe it doesn't strengthen a core group of friends like comments/likes in real life would.
Perhaps you're young and haven't known life without Facebook? It used to be that people just lost track of each other all the time.
Move for a school? Lose all your friends.
Move for a job? Lose all your friends.
That was normal.
Facebook (and other social networks) allow people to maintain orders of magnitude more weak links than before.
Sure, but now many seem to loose track of people they are sitting in the same room with and maybe even choose to not be in that room due to a social media addiction.
As creators we have a lot of power to design experiences that amplify behavioral patterns. Maybe we've gamed them too much in this case and need to more balance?
> Facebook (and other social networks) allow people to maintain orders of magnitude more weak links than before.
I am old enough to remember that. :) Most people would still at some point settle into a social circle and routine that build healthy relationships where they lived for a while. People move, but few people move so much that this is not possible.
I think weak links are a poor replacement for a person that sits in the same room as you in an engaged conversation.
Because of that, I think it’s likely that, if a company manages to dethrone Facebook, it will come from China, where the government is willing to act as a kind of incubator.
So, IMO, rather than seeing Facebook dethroned, the more likely outcome is a world with two (or maybe three? Europe seems not concerned about being part of the Facebook camp ?yet?, but it, Russia or Arab countries may at some time start helping a large local competitor emerge) giants that split the world geographically, and can’t merge because countries will forbid them from doing that.
It's attracting enough users to survive.
My blockchain/IoT startup[0] primarily uses the blockchain as just that, a backend for PKI.
[0]: https://ethyl.io/
GP said they had a hard time understanding what the use of a blockchain in social networks would be.
I was trying to get at the point that blockchain being ubiquitous leads to people having private keys which would enable an end to end encrypted social network.
Of course you can manage keys yourself, but it's a lot harder than if the user already has it set up.
For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users.
If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it simpler yet, and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it's strong incumbent advantage.
So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with "a world without Facebook".