Meh, don't need another box, just keep the family desktop on. But even without that, there is still value. The ISP tracking isn't much of an issue using an existing network like Tor. Software starts up, reads the locally encrypted Sqlite DB for your list of "friends'" onion IDs and connects to your friends gRPC services they are hosting on their machines as onion services. Maintains that stream, begin receiving fed data from these other servers (locally caching as you receive which is more ideal in an ephemeral world than live retrieval, but can be a mix of both depending on settings). All without the ISP knowing a thing except that you are connected to Tor.
> Which brings me to the big problem with solutions like these, ie - inevitable recentralization.
Yup. Can't get easily get around this. People are going to gravitate towards what's easier and what they want on the outside ignoring what's on the inside. It happens to most continually adopted standards, even if it's just a more trusted server w/ more uptime. And that's ok, I don't want to win some ideological battle at the cost of user happiness. I completely agree the software must be so easy you can't tell what's under it, but I don't think it requires that radical/creative thinking. Just user-oriented effort instead of the constant barrage of difficult-to-setup tech demos.
Doesn't exist anymore (often enough).
> Just user-oriented effort instead of the constant barrage of difficult-to-setup tech demos.
Things like identity management and data storage make these barriers pretty deep. “I can delete my post and it basically won't be accessible anymore” (there can be physical exceptions so long as they're legibly exceptions to the social reality), “I don't have to think about how big my images are and can just post as much as I want”, “I can lose any of my own hardware and everything will still be there because it's in the cloud”, and “I can tell who my friends are based on common knowledge within my circles of their unique name which is easy to remember and meaningful” are all things that heavily constrain what you can do “on the inside”.
Mastodon has meanwhile managed to either do something right or get lucky wrt the path dependency of building structures where prosocial hosting behavior is convenient: a whole bunch of mostly-volunteer instances have sprung up, adopters have managed to make instance choice part of identity so that the domain-part isn't just a “meaningless extra thing to remember”, and federation remains reasonably strong; meanwhile, financial support for server costs has mostly leant toward the Patreon model, allowing a fraction of generous users to help support a bunch of free riders while not having to directly participate in administration. At the same time, despite Mastodon having almost exactly copied Twitter's model in terms of available user interactions, the zeitgeist has repeatedly suggested that users getting on board for the first time often had no idea what instances even could be, and had to have the very concept explained several different ways before it got real traction. Random instance death is also a problem that's tempering the mood nowadays, because keeping the server up requires enough motivation which sometimes runs out, and some instances have started having problems with media storage requirements, which, see above (though I'm told the internal architecture could use some optimization too).
There's something deeper in here surrounding the thorough conflation of type with instance in the popular side of the digital world; I feel as though something critical to the more literate concept of this didn't make it into the default folk model, such that only centralized services are legible. I have some hope that Mastodon and related ActivityPub-based federated services absorbing waves of people fleeing the abusive behavior of major social media (such as the recent Tumblr exodus) will make a dent in this and cause the appropriate concepts to reach critical cultural density.
It seems to me that Mastodon gained traction in a way that wasn't much different from email. In both cases there was a communication network which anyone could add a node to pretty easily. Your node could have local moderation policies and you wouldn't have too many issues with getting blocked as long as you acted nice. For both email and Mastodon this enabled a few motivated administrators with some influence to onboard thousands of users quickly, and benefit from a network effect bigger than just their node.
The similarities to email end when you consider _why_ people migrated to the network in question. With Mastodon the waves have been culturally/politically motivated people running away from something (ex-Twitter users fleeing abuse, Japanese loli enthusiasts trying to avoid embarrassment, sex workers seeking an alternative to SESTA/FOSTA regulatory deplatforming). Whereas with email people were running _to_ something - the first free, global communications network of its kind.
It's also interesting to note that email nowadays has lost these advantages (running a server is much tougher now and you can't really pull it off without blessings from Google and others). Sure enough email is now on the decline.
Then “free email” providers on the early consumer Internet were able to compete on things like storage, because that was something it was still acceptable to expect people to pay attention to. One of GMail's original big draws was “lots and lots of storage”.
Email being in decline for social purposes feels partly related to changing feedback expectations and UI inertia, but I'd guess also some relation to a “mental association with uncool things” including both spam and stressful/boring transactional email; it's become more of a business thing. The spam side of that is related to the gradual federation lockdown, and something similar could happen to Mastodon, but at least there's some discussion about it happening in advance now.
I'm not sure what this all adds up to.
Only true if you care about Gmail (a centralized service) getting your e-mail and delivering it to its users. You could just not care about Gmail and still interoperate with lots of mail servers - even lots of servers that do have Google's blessing.
I literally do not know anyone who owns a desktop computer any more.
> This year the event will take place from 3rd to 9th August 2015 in Maribor, Slovenia
2015 ??
Putting an automatically configured VPN on such a box would be extremely easy, no?
Your ISP will still know what you are doing, and will have the ability to block you from doing it should the need arise.
I also feel like people are proposing solutions based on technologies as they stand today. Chosen solutions to the decentralization issue need to consider realistic future cases. Just as a quick thought experiment, what happens in the near future, say, 3 to 5 years out, when a huge chunk of people are using 5g technologies as their primary connections? AT&T, or sprint, or verizon, or what have you will still get all of your traffic information in this, very plausible, future case. "It's encrypted." or "It's going through a relay." Is just not a sufficient response to privacy if you wish to have privacy from AT&T. I mean, think about it, chances are, the relay will be using AT&T too.
Which brings me to the big problem with solutions like these, ie - inevitable recentralization. Google, or Facebook, (and now because of how this new decentralization idea works, even AT&T), are in an almost unassailable position to act as the "switchboard" for all of this non-indexed data. Need to know where your aunt, who just moved, is on this new decentralized network? Are you going to ask google? or "WeAreDecentralizationIdealists.com"? Oh, you're going to ask your own node? Sorry, her new information has not propagated to your node yet. Check back tomorrow. Oh forget it, just call your aunt and ask her to give you the new information so you can input it manually.
No, she will need to be registered somewhere to seamlessly communicate changes to her node's connection information. And that "somewhere" will likely be a BigCo.
If we want to replace the behemoths, we need to come up with solutions that are just as easy to use, (easier actually), and avoid any possible blocking or tracking. That requires some very creative people to think radically. Easily blockable in home network nodes I think, are not only not really solving the problems, but are also doomed to failure usability-wise when compared with google or facebook.