
Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great. Too Bad They’ll Never Work - artsandsci
https://www.wired.com/story/decentralized-social-networks-sound-great-too-bad-theyll-never-work
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remline
Interesting article, but I don't really agree with their conclusions. I think
social networks are legacy from first engaging people on the real web and have
a fate similar to AOL.

Experiments in decentralized social are more of a test run of components for
"subversive" networks that will eventually engage the global youth politically
on tor rather than compete with fb for grandparents sharing photos and recipes
or Myspace as a MP3 storage space for forty somethings with bands.

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nanomonkey
I, and my friends, have been using secure scuttlebutt and we couldn't be
happier. I personally enjoy it because the content isn't curated, and the fact
that my data resides on my computer and those in my gossip network. Beyond
building your network there isn't much of a hurdle as the software takes care
of all of the sharing of data.

[https://www.scuttlebutt.nz](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz)

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equalunique
Thanks for sharing scuttlebutt! At first glance, it looks similar to projects
made using Dat. I wonder how it's inner workings compare.

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thomastjeffery
Facebook started as a clean alternative to MySpace. Facebook has now become
_even more_ bloated and painful to use than MySpace was.

One hypothesis for why Google+ and others did not "catch on" is because
Facebook has orders of magnitude more users, and therefore has reached a
"critical mass", meaning no significant amount of users will ever use an
alternative.

My hypothesis is that there simply hasn't been a significantly superior
alternative yet.

New alternatives can also use Facebook as an advantage by creating a
compatible API. Facebook, of course, will "fight back" by making itself
incompatible, but the only way it can do that is by making its own platform
_less_ usable.

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WorldMaker
Facebook didn't start out as an alternative to MySpace, it began as an
alternative to hand-curated year book websites (and hard-bound paper year
books). That it was cleaner to MySpace at the time was an accident.

My hypothesis is that you aren't going to make the next Facebook by trying to
replace Facebook or make some idea of "the next Facebook". You are going to
make the next Facebook by doing something new that isn't very Facebook-like at
all.

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thomastjeffery
It's true that Facebook didn't _intend_ to be an alternative to MySpace, but
myself and _everyone I know_ who used MySpace certainly saw it that way.

