Re:Diaspora 0.5 released
by rglullis on Saturday May 09, 2015 @10:26AM
(#9516451)
Yeah, you really lost me on the point where you think that 1TB will last 3-6 years. You are basing your use case (text) and extrapolating to the average consumer. We already live in a world where 20-somethings post every damn meal they eat on Instagram. With friends making dubsmash duels with each other for weeks. With parents who make videos and pictures of every sneeze of their babies. And all of this, to the consumers, is worth saving. You can't just reason this out of the system.
To me it really seem like you are way off in the economical aspects of your proposition. Consider:
> As for why Facebook isn't tossing Raspberry Pis at everyone: that doesn't fit its business model (...)
There is nothing that would stop them to give these boxes in exchange of access to the data produced by the users. They would still have access to the data, and could still sell ads based on it. You fail to understand that they can find ways to increase their revenue per user (making ads more relevant or bringing some kind of value proposition where they can get users to volunteer more data), what they can't do is reduce their operational costs. They are doing it as much as they can - look at all the thing about Open Compute, which is nothing more than trying to find a way to reduce the costs of operating data centers - but building multi-million datacenters around the world is cheaper than giving away hardware with "irrelevant cost".
> An origin server seeds cache, but once you've put content on the caching tier (...)
Who is the caching tier? Your neighbor? Akamai? Amazon? Google? ISPs? Your church? What is the incentive for them to keep this data for you and others, and how will they finance the cost of storage, electricity, etc?
> Cost is a minor concern relative to control over data.
You want to make cost operational costs irrelevant, but it is wishful thinking. The whole reason I was asking OP how much he would be willing to pay for this service is precisely to know how much of "Cost is a minor concern relative to control over data."
> Getting the software up to snuff is the missing part.
This is backwards. Software doesn't write itself magically. There needs to have some kind of economical incentive for someone to go over there and develop this software, and people need to accept the costs of maintaining the system operational. Diaspora got started exactly because there was some demand around 2010, but it did not have enough momentum.
To me it really seem like you are way off in the economical aspects of your proposition. Consider:
> As for why Facebook isn't tossing Raspberry Pis at everyone: that doesn't fit its business model (...)
There is nothing that would stop them to give these boxes in exchange of access to the data produced by the users. They would still have access to the data, and could still sell ads based on it. You fail to understand that they can find ways to increase their revenue per user (making ads more relevant or bringing some kind of value proposition where they can get users to volunteer more data), what they can't do is reduce their operational costs. They are doing it as much as they can - look at all the thing about Open Compute, which is nothing more than trying to find a way to reduce the costs of operating data centers - but building multi-million datacenters around the world is cheaper than giving away hardware with "irrelevant cost".
> An origin server seeds cache, but once you've put content on the caching tier (...)
Who is the caching tier? Your neighbor? Akamai? Amazon? Google? ISPs? Your church? What is the incentive for them to keep this data for you and others, and how will they finance the cost of storage, electricity, etc?
> Cost is a minor concern relative to control over data.
You want to make cost operational costs irrelevant, but it is wishful thinking. The whole reason I was asking OP how much he would be willing to pay for this service is precisely to know how much of "Cost is a minor concern relative to control over data."
> Getting the software up to snuff is the missing part.
This is backwards. Software doesn't write itself magically. There needs to have some kind of economical incentive for someone to go over there and develop this software, and people need to accept the costs of maintaining the system operational. Diaspora got started exactly because there was some demand around 2010, but it did not have enough momentum.