

Some Thoughts on the Federated Social Networks - Anon84
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2011/03/23/SomeThoughtsOnTheFederatedSocialNetworks.aspx.aspx

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michaelchisari
_yet hear virtually nothing about Diaspora or Status.Net being used in similar
ways to impact the lives of millions of people._

It's because all this software isn't done yet, is severely underfunded,
undermanned, outnumbered and outgunned by the proprietary systems.

That isn't stopping any of us from pushing forward, but when the runaway
success of our crowd (Diaspora) raised only $200k, to expect that we can
immediately compete with the likes of Facebook or Twitter is simply
unrealistic. I know we're all doing our best, most of us are volunteers with
little to no funding, and we're up against some of the top engineers in the
world with billions in venture capital.

But we're all still plugging away. Open source is nothing if not tenacious.

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petervandijck
Why were blogs replaced by Facebook and Twitter? Because you get more comments
on Facebook and Twitter. It has nothing to do with funding.

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michaelchisari
What evidence do you have that blogs were replaced by Facebook and Twitter
(and not simply augmented by them)?

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petervandijck
Lots of anecdotal evidence of people no longer posting things on their blog
but on these services instead. Been going on for years now.

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joebadmo
I think the author is missing a connection between the two arguments that he
talks about.

Open Source isn't just about self-hosting, but about being able to choose your
provider. And the ability to freely choose your provider is dependent on the
services on different providers being interoperable.

Also, without a strong Open Source movement, there's no incentive for the
closed platforms to interoperate. If anything, there's only disincentives.

As I see it, the only big player with the necessary clout/infrastructure and
Open Source credentials and incentives to make the necessary changes is
Google.

