
Is social graph portability workable? - avyfain
http://www.digitopoly.org/2017/07/03/is-social-graph-portability-workable/
======
ucaetano
This highlights a recent episode I went through.

I decided to delete everything on my FB account. I didn't want to close, just
delete years of photos, posts, likes, comments, etc. Everything. Then these
two surprising things happened:

Having used Google Takeout many times, with great results, I decided to do the
same with FB. For years I used FB as my primary way of storing and sharing
photos from my phone (vs my desktop for a DSLR), so there were a lot of photos
there that I didn't have anywhere else (pre-Google Photos times).

When I downloaded, I was surprised: Facebook downsized all my photos to
90's-era 800x600 pixels, and stripped ALL metadata from it (date, hour,
location, camera, etc.). This pissed me off so much. FB wasn't just "not doing
a good job", they were purposefully sending me a big "fuck you" letter as I
removed my content. FB still had all my images in the original size, and with
the metadata, but they chose to give me a shitty version of them.

This isn't laziness or incompetence, it's just plain evil.

My second surprise was how hard it is to delete content on FB. There's no
"delete all", or even a "select and delete". You need to manually click 2-4
times for every single comment, post, picture, etc on a laggy user interface.
It almost looks purposefully designed to prevent you from doing so.

There are some Chrome extensions that try to automate that, making deleting
1000's of items faster, but FB is constantly trying to break them.

So the message is clear: FB doesn't give a fuck about you, and will try its
best to fuck you if you want to delete content or even get it back. Don't use
FB as content storage, don't expect to have your FB content back.

PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite.

~~~
EGreg
Why not use a Facebook App to extract all your photos and videos?

You can have a desktop app get an api key and grant it photo permissions etc.
and go to town.

Full resolution everything.

Also you can remove all your posts and comments this way.

Perhaps such an app already exists. But if not, do you think FB would revoke
keys of such an app?

FOUND THEM:

Odrive

Fotobounce

~~~
rosser
The existence of workarounds for this behavior on Facebook's part makes it
zero less shitty of them. Those images are _mine_ (the general me); Zuck, _et
al_ , do _not_ get to leave me a down-rezzed, EXIF-stripped version as a
parting gift, in the event I choose not to play in their sandbox any more.

Except, of course, that they do. Because we let them.

~~~
mulmen
But they aren't exclusively your images, you gave them to Facebook when you
uploaded them. Facebook is not a free image hosting or backup tool. You should
never have had an expectation you could get back anything that you put in.

~~~
rosser
That argument would be far more (read: "at all") compelling if they _weren 't_
keeping the full-rez, EXIF'ed images. At that point, they're _de facto_ acting
as a backup service, and obscuring my access to _my_ content [0] in the form
in which it was originally submitted.

Your argument is the very thing I was referring to with the last sentence in
my previous post. "They can do what they want with it, and you're wrong for
thinking otherwise" is, besides being factually void, the kind of
rationalization that lets FB jerk its users around like this.

[0] Yes, in fact, it _is_ my content; I granted them a specifically
constrained license, allowing them to _use_ that content, in order to serve my
and others' use of it. That's all. There is nothing whatsoever about not
having to give back exactly what I uploaded, under any circumstance.

From the Fine ToS [1]:

> _2\. Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can
control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In
addition:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and
videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission,
subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-
exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to
use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP
License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account
unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted
it._

Nothing in that snippet, or anything else in the ToS grants them the right
only to give back "lesser" versions of the content I uploaded. To suggest
otherwise is tantamount to saying that, should I use the tool they provide to
download all of my content, I have to suck it up that it will have all vowels
elided.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms](https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms)

~~~
mulmen
You own the content, not the files, there is a difference. Nothing in that
snippet says they have to give you back _anything_.

~~~
ucaetano
Actually, Zuckerberg said:

“People own and have control over all info they put into Facebook and
“Download Your Information” enables people to take stuff with them,”

“At a high level we’ve built two different things, Facebook Connect — which is
our real effort to bring our sites to other sites, and “Download Your
Information” where you can download your information and upload it to another
site. Stuff that you put into the site, you should be able to take out.”

As usual, it looks like this was just PR.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
What is sad, is how similar the ideal portable social graph looks to email
with your own domain name. You own the identifier, and you can select which
provider hosts your email. In addition, you can send an email to somebody
which will just work no matter what host they are on. You have the option of
having a local copy of everything.

When we look back, I think we will see that in abandoning email as the medium
of social interaction, we basically gave up on the open internet.

~~~
subway
I think it's more the abandonment of federated protocols in favor of
centralized services, than the abandonment of a specific protocol.

An only tangentially related anecdote: SMTP and later XMPP offered beautifully
portable social graphs. In fact, in 2012, I found it so portable that I
decided to migrate off the self-hosted postfix/dovecot/ejabberd install I'd
run on my own domain for years to GApps. Cue the replacement of GTalk with
Hangouts, and now I really don't have much of a choice but to pay Google each
month, or discard/re-establish the social connections I've built over the last
decade and a half.

~~~
Xeoncross
Email is the only truly successful decentralized protocol which is why the
OP's statement mentions it.

A) Wide global adoption

B) Decades of use

~~~
jimktrains2
> Email is the only truly successful decentralized protocol

HTTP?

~~~
radarsat1
HTTP is a transfer protocol, not a semantic protocol. Email at least lets you
identify the sender/receiver and other metadata and separate them from the
message, HTTP is just "this is the filename, this is the data.." It's not much
more than a TCP stream really.

~~~
jimktrains2
> Email at least lets you identify the sender/receiver

I'm not sure of your point. Http also allows you to identify the server.
Forwarding mail servers are analogous to caching and forwarding proxies.

> other metadata and separate them from the message

Just like http.

> HTTP is just "this is the filename, this is the data.." It's not much more
> than a TCP stream really

No, it isn't. No more than SMTP, IMAP, and pop3 are.

~~~
radarsat1
By "sender" and "receiver" I mean _person_ , not _server_. I truly don't
understand why you're on about servers and transport protocols when this
thread is about social networks.

~~~
jimktrains2
> By "sender" and "receiver" I mean person, not server.

What's the difference? An email address isn't a person, nor does it represent
one.

> I truly don't understand why you're on about servers and transport protocols
> when this thread is about social networks.

Because it was mentioned that SMTP is the only decentralized protocol, and I
disagreed.

------
wmf
The social graph is only a small part of it. To make this work would require
full federation so that, for example, someone on Facebook could friend someone
on G+ and posts would flow in both directions so the timeline would work as
normal. Like Ma Bell before them, Facebook will fight this to the death.

~~~
jerf
And it isn't even remotely clear how this would work. Like all "let's just
semantic web all the things!" projects it all makes sense at a super-ultra-
high level, but when you try to manifest this in the real world there's an
immense explosion of tricky details, by the literal thousands.

Making social networks speak together is probably a good order of magnitude
harder than unifying the IM networks, and even after a decade+ of effort and
tons and tons of work, the multiprotocol IM clients are still generally
quirky, involve losing useful features from any given specific network, and
face constant issues where the semantics of the networks differ. (Especially
around conferencing.)

Shared social graphs is a nice idea, but it would take enormous effort backed
by legal force to happen, at a minimum.

~~~
EGreg
Not necessarily. Linux arose despite Windows' monopoly. Wikipedia arose
despite Britannica et al.

~~~
ucaetano
Linux didn't arise where Windows had a monopoly.

Wikipedia didn't arise where Britannica had a monopoly.

The industry changed, and the segment where Windows had a monopoly became less
relevant, the same with Britannica.

Windows still retains 90%+ market share on desktops.

~~~
EGreg
The same can happen with Facebook.

By the way - I am surprised Windows is used so much on laptops because I see
mostly Macs since 2008!

~~~
ucaetano
Yes, it can! And that's why it bought WhatsApp, Instagram and tried to buy
Snapchat. Defensive moves all the way.

------
EGreg
_It gets even more complex when we think about people’s private and public
identities. Some of my Facebook posts are public and I read many public posts
from the media, fan groups and companies. That is all part of my social graph
but how would we work all of that? That said, there may be solutions there.
The larger issue is how these links work is constantly evolving yet having a
consumer controlled social graph may make it difficult to be responsive. After
all, think about how you manage the social graph that is your pre-programmed
fast dial numbers on a phone (if you even do those things). They quickly go
out of date and you can’t be bothered updating them._

This is a hard problem to solve. We solved it at Qbix. We're still working on
releasing our Platform to everyone, but for now it's already open source and
we are dogfooding it in all our own apps.

[https://github.com/Qbix/Platform](https://github.com/Qbix/Platform)

We are also working on an interoperable auth protocol where you _do_ control
your identity and keep your contacts private, but discover them across
communities (venues and interests).

[https://github.com/Qbix/auth](https://github.com/Qbix/auth)

------
dreamfactor
A lot of work has been done on this at -
[https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SW...](https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SWAT0)
and
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtXMsLaocacrdDAwTzd...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtXMsLaocacrdDAwTzdPeGdPNlhZSHFMelg0MnQ2N2c)

------
Nomentatus
Interoperability is already settled law (railroad gauges, telephone networks.)
We just don't care to apply the law 'cause democracy is remarkably corrupt in
our time.

------
marcusestes
Different social networking applications imply different social contexts. I
may follow you back on Twitter, but that doesn't mean that I want to be your
friend on Facebook.

~~~
ge0rg
You could still have multiple different social networks per social context,
which would compete on features, as opposed to lock-in and network effects.

