Re:Help fund an open source Facebook alternative: Appleseed
by michaelchisari on Thursday October 14, 2010 @12:19AM
(#1789804)
They could turn evil some day and betray us all.
If an Appleseed node turns evil, they'll probably take the data of, maybe, 100,000 or a million users with them. When Facebook turns evil (some would say saying "when" isn't necessary), 500 million people's data goes down.
One of the things that's kept Facebook free of social pressure in terms of acting evil, is that the walled garden approach means that people can't leave without losing their social network. Appleseed (and distributed social networking) at least provides a certain competition, because if a node acts up, users can leave that node, go to another node, and reconnect with their friends. It won't be totally painless (at first anyways), but that's pressure that Facebook simply does not feel at this point, and that has a very negative effect on it's behavior.
The question is: how many people would prefer this more email-like system?
I'll be the first to admit that a centralized system holds advantages over a decentralized one (and vice versa). A lot of these issues, we may not even know the full extent of until we see heavy use. This is pretty new territory, and I'm open to any suggestions.
It's the big reason why I rewrote Appleseed to be extremely flexible, to use pervasive hooks and an MVC model, and to be protocol agnostic. Also, why Appleseed has one-click server upgrades and other ease-of-administration features.
There's some really solid work being done on protocol development, but I think we all need to be honest that the first steps out of the gate are gonna be rocky. Hopefully Appleseed can adapt quickly enough until distributed social networking matures.
If an Appleseed node turns evil, they'll probably take the data of, maybe, 100,000 or a million users with them. When Facebook turns evil (some would say saying "when" isn't necessary), 500 million people's data goes down.
One of the things that's kept Facebook free of social pressure in terms of acting evil, is that the walled garden approach means that people can't leave without losing their social network. Appleseed (and distributed social networking) at least provides a certain competition, because if a node acts up, users can leave that node, go to another node, and reconnect with their friends. It won't be totally painless (at first anyways), but that's pressure that Facebook simply does not feel at this point, and that has a very negative effect on it's behavior.
The question is: how many people would prefer this more email-like system?
I'll be the first to admit that a centralized system holds advantages over a decentralized one (and vice versa). A lot of these issues, we may not even know the full extent of until we see heavy use. This is pretty new territory, and I'm open to any suggestions.
It's the big reason why I rewrote Appleseed to be extremely flexible, to use pervasive hooks and an MVC model, and to be protocol agnostic. Also, why Appleseed has one-click server upgrades and other ease-of-administration features.
There's some really solid work being done on protocol development, but I think we all need to be honest that the first steps out of the gate are gonna be rocky. Hopefully Appleseed can adapt quickly enough until distributed social networking matures.