
Why decentralized social networking never makes it - rchaudhary
https://upon2020.com/blog/2018/08/why-decentralized-social-networking-never-makes-it-ever-heard-of-crossing-the-chasm/
======
cjslep
> Trending cannot be implemented at all … I don’t mean to pick on Mastodon
> specifically, but it’s the latest whose growth is disappointing.

Actually, trending _was_ implemented by Gargron, but user outcry against it
basically caused him to scrap that feature.

Edit:
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7702](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7702)

Here's a major user feature for why people switch to Mastodon and Pleroma:
better tools for users and admins to manage spam and stop harassment at an
individual and community level.

Edit2: It's pretty funny that "Trending" and "Mastodon" got mentioned here, as
I forgot that in the outcry this was one of the pieces of feedback:

> [...] maybe you should not be defining the roadmap based on Hacker News
> thinkpieces.

~~~
swiley
That issue thread is pretty unpleasant to read. Good on Gargron for that
incredible amount of patience.

------
quotemstr
Honestly? Because decentralized social networks are usually implemented by
people who have an inaccurate mental model of what the population at large
wants in a social network. There's a lot of noise online about how this
feature or that feature is addictive tracking-based anti-civilization
satancode or something, but outside a loud and hardcore fringe, users actually
want this stuff. Good feed ranking depends, for example, on building accurate
models of user preferences.

If you listen to the loud fringe, you'll end up with a product only the fringe
wants to use.

~~~
danShumway
> you'll end up with a product only the fringe wants to use.

Is that a problem? I mean, my first thought when I hear this is, "yeah, broad
adoption is totally necessary." But, then I think about it more.

\- Is it a problem for indie developers to build games that appeal to niche
audiences?

\- Is it a problem for software developers to build CLI tools or advanced
software that solves very specific problems at the expense of user
friendliness?

\- Is it a problem for communities to be built around specific problems and
for them to adopt very specific, focused codes of conduct or moderation?

Maybe it's OK to have a bunch of small, separate decentralized networks
instead of one big decentralized one? With something like Facebook, sure, the
point is to have everyone in one place. But one of the big points of systems
like Mastodon is that small communities are better than big ones. Small
communities are easier to moderate, more flexible to adapt to novel
situations, and faster to pivot when things go wrong. Having niche adoption in
that scenario could be kind of a feature, in the same way that having niche
adoption for a game probably means you're getting something more focused and
custom tailored to the people who want it.

It might be that not every social network needs to appeal to the overwhelming
public at large. It mind end up being completely acceptable to have a social
network that's very specific to one or two communities.

In that scenario, the death of Facebook might not be, "here's a replacement,
everyone get off." It might be death from a thousand cuts; "here's a dozen
replacements, there's probably at least one you like more."

~~~
joe_the_user
Unless Facebook is replaced by one other thing, network effect will keep
people on Facebook as well as one whatever else might suit a culture they're
in.

Edit: that said, there's no reason that an obscure subculture adopting a
different social networking technology couldn't lead to that tech becoming
universal. Facebook rose through a certain high-prestige subculture adopting
it but with the Internet tending to creating different association patterns,
high-prestige/"early adopter" may not, in fact, be the leaders of adoption in
the future.

~~~
danShumway
Well, but that's the thing. Do you have only one network, and does everyone
belong to the same network?

I was on Facebook for the network effect - then I got into indie game
development, and all of the other game developers and gaming press are on
Twitter. So I dropped off of Facebook and moved to Twitter. I still pull up
Facebook occasionally to cross-post something to friends, but it's a different
tool for a different purpose.

In theory, nobody wants to join multiple social networks. In practice, I don't
see people actually all that worked up about logging into multiple sites. My
siblings jumped to Snapchat with no problem even when they were still using
Facebook. When I started moving away from Facebook I told them to start
emailing me - also wasn't a problem, they handled it fine. I run a small
Discord server specifically for people who want to talk to me about the stuff
I build. It's a really tiny community, but it's still a useful enough tool
that I'll probably never build a Facebook page for anything I release.

So those are maybe 3 or 4 tools that have successfully migrated communities
off of Facebook. There are maybe 1 or 2 communities left that I have to take
care of, and then I could just flat out delete my account. Certainly I'm only
checking Facebook maybe 2 or 3 times a week now because of a few stubborn
holdouts I haven't convinced to move off yet.

Network effect is definitely a thing - but it's probably not all or nothing.
It might be fine to replace Facebook for only for one or two communities. It
might be fine to say, "Okay, all of my college friends are on X, but all of my
professional contacts are on Y, and my hobby model train community is on Z."
And multiple small, federated social networks are likely to be better at
serving small communities than something like Twitter or Facebook is.

How necessary is it to you that there be one service that you use to contact
literally everyone? I was on the side of "pretty necessary," but the more that
I think about it, the more I realize that distributing my contacts across
multiple services is not actually all that much of a problem for me. In fact,
it's often quite helpful, since it allows me to tailor content more.

~~~
joe_the_user
" _I was on Facebook for the network effect - then I got into indie game
development, and all of the other game developers and gaming press are on
Twitter._ "

Sure, if one has one reason to be on a network, getting off it is fairly easy.
But if one has IRL professional-collegues, friends, family, and multiple
special interests with friends, then it's hard for all those to switch.

" _How necessary is it to you that there be one service that you use to
contact literally everyone?_ "

Well, you want to be able to be-contacted-by a variety of people. Facebook can
wind-up indeed just one of several of the networks the average person is on
but that doesn't it won't remain the largest and quite possibly not much
smaller than today.

~~~
danShumway
The point wasn't that some people have only one reason to be on Facebook, so
they can switch off for one alternative - quite the opposite. It's that you
have multiple reasons to be on Facebook, and they can be eliminated
individually rather than in one fell swoop.

Most people are probably part of several communities on Facebook. There's
probably not one completely homogeneous demographic. If your IRL professional
colleagues are on it, maybe someday they switch to something that's really
good at work communication and that doesn't have stupid app spam because it's
built specifically for professionals. Maybe your friends and family switch to
something that does closed circles and off-the-cuff communication better like
Snapchat.

They can go to separate platforms, and you'll just sign up for two services.
Those communities (usually) don't need to overlap. So what people call the
network effect of Facebook may really be many different, small, isolated
network effects, each of which can be individually attacked by separate
services.

If that's the case, you don't need a Facebook killer. It's fine to have six or
seven completely different Facebook killers that each eat just a few limbs off
of it and then go off and do their own things.

------
hliyan
_" In summary: we have plenty (too many, in fact) protocols suitable for
decentralized social networking, so just pick something"_

I pick email: [https://hackernoon.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-
network-...](https://hackernoon.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-
network-c33b175f3a9e)

~~~
joe_the_user
This seems like a great idea (one I've picked-over in my mind). Has anyone
done more than the outline in this page?

~~~
matlin
I've actually been working on this exact idea combined with a few other
features. The main finding so far is that adding a simple contact list to your
email that blocks all messages from senders not in your contacts has some far
reaching potential. The biggest one is how it can drastically reduce spam: not
worrying about whether some website is going to abuse or share your email is a
big advantage. The other big win, is that you don't have to be as secretive of
your email address if you don't have to worry about being plagued with spam
for life. I plan on making this a public service in the next few weeks.

~~~
joe_the_user
Well, white lists are great until someone useful wants to find you out of the
blue or until companies require email verification for something then wind-up
spamming you.

The ideal would be a "feed" as well as an ordinary list of messages.

Also, it would be nice to have this sort of thing run either on a server or a
client.

------
EGreg
Because it’s very hard to build something with all the features that people
expect in 2018. It takes a serious amount of time and money.

Our company (qbix.com) made $1MM selling apps for iOS and Mac, and reinvested
most our profits over 7 years into building just such an open source
decentralized social network. Here is a video about it:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

You can find the entire general purpose platform here:
[https://github.com/Qbix/Platform](https://github.com/Qbix/Platform)

And even though we had done all this, we have not yet started to popularize
it. We wanted to get the kinks out first.

Examples of stuff you should have at a minimum: user accounts, onboarding,
pub-sub, transactional emails and sms, notifications on all platforms
including web push, real time updates via web sockets, privacy and access
control to content, multi user collaboration, one click invitations, easy
installer and updater scripts, caching resources locally, indexing and
relationships across domains, authentication across domains
(github.com/Qbix/auth) with seamless experience across domains and more.

And then you should probably also integrate with local address books, support
uploading and sync from gmail and other sources, support payments on all
platforms eg applepay and androidpay, and so on.

I have met teams working on other projects including MaidSAFE and Solid by Tim
Berners-Lee. The missing piece is all the user-friendly apps and components.
It’s a bit like when the Mac and Windows came out, personal computers finally
got much more massive adoption. Or like when the Web became good enough to
compete with AOL. It takes time for open source to catch up to proprietary
software, but once it does, it is a force to be reckoned with.

PS: If anyone wants to join our project to either contribute (design,
development in PHP or JS, or grow the community) get in touch by emailing
greg+hn @at@ qbix.com

------
CM30
Well, I'd say marketing issues have an effect here too. Lots of 'alternatives'
don't really understand that average Joe doesn't specifically care about
decentralisation (or privacy/censorship resistance/whatever else they're
marketing the product on).

They don't hate said things, they just don't care about them as much as
finding interesting people to follow/groups to be a part of, joining in an
active community, finding information about things they're having trouble
with, being entertained, etc.

But most decentralised systems seem to be marketed on the assumption the
decentralisation side (and the philosophical aims of the service) are the only
important thing, and hence don't really appeal to those outside of the tech
crowd and those with a desparate need for avoiding censorship.

Secondly, the UI is often worse than the centralised or commercial
alternatives, with very few systems (Mastodon arguably being of the
exceptions) looking or feeling as modern or responsive.

Finally, plain old network effects have an effect too. The more people who use
your service, the more popular it'll become, since more people they know will
be encouraged to join in.

But to achieve that, you usually need to put time and money into marketing
your product and attracting as many early users as you can. That's hard work,
and it's not fun for a developer.

What is fun for a developer is to play around with programming languages and
data structures and protocols and frameworks and all the new shiny stuff they
saw on Hacker News. So all the effort goes towards making a technically fancy
system, whereas none of it goes towards actually getting people to use said
system, or getting the word out in general. Get away from the code editor and
get into community building.

(Though to be fair, that last one is also a problem with most new social
networking sites in general, decentralised or not. Every modern Reddit or
Twitter alternative feels like a programmer's fun pet project rather than a
service they're marketing to people)

Either way, I think that covers it. The lack of certain features like trending
content doesn't matter as much as how these systems don't market themselves
correctly and put little work into the things people actually care about.

~~~
swiley
>They don't hate said things, they just don't care about them as much as
finding interesting people to follow/groups to be a part of, joining in an
active community, finding information about things they're having trouble
with, being entertained, etc.

>But most decentralized systems seem to be marketed on the assumption the
decentralisation side (and the philosophical aims of the service) are the only
important thing, and hence don't really appeal to those outside of the tech
crowd and those with a desparate need for avoiding censorship.

I think it used to be that way but (at least from what I've been hearing) a
lot of non-tech "normal" people are starting to realize the problem with
censorship. They might not see that it's a symptom of centralization yet but
they definitely are starting to care.

------
malvosenior
Because social networking isn't a new idea and people don't care about it
enough to switch to a new network anymore.

Once upon a time there was Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, Facebook... Digitizing
your connections and friends was a new and exciting concept. Now everyone has
been connected and we've seen it's not always a great thing. I don't think
it's interesting enough of an experience to replicate rebuilding a network
elsewhere at this point.

------
yusee
New social networks are a huge opportunity. Decentralization is just an
architectural consideration, not significant to users. A novel user experience
is needed to disrupt the market leaders. Clones of existing interfaces with
"decentralized" ideology are not appealing products to most humans.

~~~
sshine
Except for the fact that a decentralized service can split. This will affect
users.

------
Fnoord
The main reason they don't make it is simple: network effect [1].

However,

"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your
fingers"

Ie. the more oppressive and tyrannical Facebook (and Twitter, and the US
government) becomes, the better the alternatives become. There's a reason the
shit Snowden uncovered was meant to be kept secret. It wakes people up.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect)

------
jancsika
The problem is that a technical means-- decentralization-- quickly becomes an
ethical stance. Then that ethical stance outweighs every other concern in
irrational ways, including growing the network.

~~~
untangle
> ...a technical means -- decentralization -- quickly becomes an ethical
> stance...

As in blockchain?

~~~
jancsika
Blockchain isn't an ethical stance as much as a mad scramble to cash in on
something.

What I'm talking about is something like what happened with Retroshare. They
created a friend-to-friend social graph that could facilitate file-sharing,
chat, etc. Then the users quickly figured out that bootstrapping an F2F
network is extremely difficult unless you are in the same physical proximity
as your peers (e.g., a college dorm). Otherwise there is no easy way to do key
exchange.

So the idea was introduced that you could have these bootstrap servers (not
sure what they called them) so that all the new users who couldn't download
anything could use them to do a key exchange with at least one other random
peer, thus entering the network that way.

But such a user is no longer building an F2F network. Instead it is some kind
of friend roulette network where you trust random nodes only because the
software would be unusable otherwise. Worse-- at the time Retroshare data
wasn't onion-routed so the user was shuttling data unencrypted data among
untrustworthy nodes, and encouraged by other users to shuttle share data for
friends-of-friends because that would presumably improve your connectivity.

At that point everyone except little LAN F2F islands would have only been
slightly worse off with a Facebook-style app where Retroshare devs surveilled
the network and spent all their time denying access to whatever they
considered bad actors.

It goes without saying that FLOSS devs would never build a Facebook-style app.
But there is at least one other piece decentralized app I know that did
essentially the same bootstrap roulette as Retroshare.

The only way that can happen is if users and devs _feel_ like they are doing
something righteous by using such a piece of software, rather than just
leveraging a tool to do a job.

------
kristiandupont
This is only slightly on topic, but I think that "problems solved" is an
extraordinarily good way to look at B2B companies, but a suboptimal one for
_most_ B2C companies. With exceptions; consumers have problems too. Many
Europeans are currently dealing with wasps in great numbers because of the
heat wave. Solving that is a potential business. But even though you _can_
formulate what, say, Snapchat does as the solution to a problem I just don't
think that's a very useful way to look at it. It has more to do with
entertainment value and trends. Those are things that are much harder to
quantify.

~~~
dgerges
Need for entertainment and trends can be user problems. I would argue that
Snapchat and the likes solve a user problem : boredom and need ton express
without leaving trails...

------
ohiovr
"To use a specific example, here’s a problem worth solving with decentralized
social networking-style technology that occurred to me last night. It is a
real problem with real time savings and other important benefits attached.
(Note: you could actually get people to pay for social networking! What an
idea!)

Imagine you are the “resposible adult” who takes care of an elderly relative,
or a child, with a complex, chronic disease. You are probably middle-aged,
female, family-minded, and have your hands full. Other than juggling your
family and your job, you also need to find the right specialists for young
Bob, organize rides to and from treatment, get second options, research
conditions, get prescriptions filled, supervise that Bob actually takes them
on time, keep all the other relatives updated, draft them for particular task
(“can you take him to the physical therapist on Tuesday”), listen in to some
on-line self-help groups, being a Mom of course etc. etc."

I was just in this situation taking care of my mom after her stroke and I
don't think this kind of service is very compelling. Most of mom's friends
don't know much about computers in general. Some don't even own a computer.
taking some time to make phone calls, text messages, email, and letters is
well worth it. It absolutely has to be done personally (well I think so at
least).

------
silur
"Why would you eat an orange when you could drink a coffee instead?"

Yes there are heavy mathematics behind the structure of both types of network,
and it's true that without centralization the network itself can't reach a
certain limit. But this is a double-edged sword, this is only true to the
whole system's perspective and it's completely different on the node (user)
level graph-theoritically. Also, the article forces certain needs on the
users. There are lots of us who DON'T want to magically find anyone or be
found magically with a keyword, nor interested in "trends" \- this is heavily
misleading for we still don't have proper metrics for it and won't have one
for a while because the problem implies building fault-tolerant reputation
networks (that are decentralized by the way)

------
starbugs
Is the Cambridge Analytica scandal a valid problem?

~~~
api
What would stop a group like CA from setting up Mastodon nodes and passively
sucking down all that data? What would stop them from sock puppeting?

~~~
fenwick67
Two things on the CA part:

1\. Mastodon is closer to Twitter than FB. Things are public by default. Users
even have an RSS feed.

2\. Get off targeted-ad-driven platforms and the Cambridge Analytica business
model goes away and this stops being an issue.

I don't know if sock puppets can be eliminated on any large platform.

~~~
WJW
It would seem that point 1 makes it even easier for companies to slurp
everything about a person.

Point 2 is only true if the data has no other use. Political parties might
find a lot of value in discovering Mastodon users whose posting habits
indicate that they are currently voting one way but are disatisfied with that
party. Insurance companies might also be interested about users being part of
groups for people with certain mental or genetic diseases. I can imagine a
sort of "reverse glassdoor" site where employers can pay to get a complete
profile of everything an applicant has ever done or said online. The CA
business model works very seamlessly with ad targeting, but that is by far not
the only use for such data.

------
nanomonkey
The problem that scuttlebutt solves for me is that it works offline first. I
can post and read past posts from my friends, or friends of friends, quite
easily while on a plane, or at a cafe that doesn't supply internet. I can also
block users that I don't like, or create entirely new networks for a specific
problem such as the author suggested.

------
shion
When ipv6 is popular, it is the time of centralization and death.

~~~
mmirate
In what way does IPv6 condone centralization more than IPv4?

(My prior assumption was that IPv6's lack of strict need for NATs means that
in an all-IPv6 world it is easier for anyone to run a server, versus today.
But I don't specialize in networking, so I'm all ears for other takes on
this.)

------
ummonk
The vertical he gave seems to do just fine with centralization. Asana and
Trello are very popular for the work-tracking use-case.

------
alexandernst
Because the vast majority of the target market of social networks doesn’t care
(or even know) if it’s decentralized.

Next question.

------
izacus
Hmm, wouldn't forums, community sites and places like HackerNews count as
"decentralized social networking"?

~~~
gremlinsinc
So a company doesn't own hackernews? If the hn servers just go down,
everything stays up because it's all distributed across a network?

~~~
mattlondon
decentralised != distributed.

People could argue that Facebook effectively has a monopoly on social media so
that is a "centralised" source since you have to go to Facebook to access it.

Yet pockets exist (e.g. HN) outside of Facebook, ergo decentralised.

I do agree though, it is not distributed which has a different meaning.

Checkout dat project, ipfs et al for that.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Hn is still centralized... It's a garden of its own... Just as Twitter and
Reddit are all centralized. All forums are also centralized. All centralized
means is one organization controls all the data/rules for that service. If
they shut down or go out of business you lose all the data unless you backed
out up somehow. Moderators on forums, Reddit hn, etc all have final say on
what stays and goes... Though that could overlap a little in decentralized
networks where the node owner has some control.

------
geggam
Because people who run the social networks run into the capitalists who
explain to them how much money they can make.

Centralizing that network is how you profit.

Humans are greedy.

~~~
orev
Or, humans require basic resources to survive, like food and shelter, and our
society currently requires you to have money in order to obtain those things.

~~~
goliatone
I don’t think is fair to characterize Facebook as something that originated
from the founder’s urge to cover basic needs such as food or shelter- their
own or anyone else’s for that matter. In fact startup mode pretty much demands
you forget as much as possible about those basic needs by putting the startup
at the center of everything you do.

~~~
orev
The tone of the comment was that people who write software are greedy and just
want to cash out. The point is that people can’t eat or pay rent with
principles or “likes”, so at some point they need to try to make money to
survive, and that does not make one “greedy”.

------
jhabdas
What do you call the Web?

~~~
__s
Some people call it Facebook

~~~
okket
That's too narrow. There is also this search box in the middle, where you can
type and get to Facebook.

------
golangnews
Decentralised social networks, like decentralised currencies, are solving the
wrong problems.

------
zimbatm
I already have a decentralized social network and it works great, it's called
brain. If my brain is not capable of remembering people then are the
connections really meaningful? I don't mind using email, forums, IRC and
various chat apps. And even better meeting people in the real world. It's
great that everything is not unified, it would become too boring.

I am sure some other technologies will come up but most of those solutions are
trying too hard to be the next thing that replaces all the previous
technologies.

~~~
mmirate
That works well if your brain is specialized correctly to actually keep track
of all this. During my undergraduate, I personally was semi-regularly accosted
by strangers who knew me and, only after at least half a minute's
conversation, I finally recognized as not-strangers. I don't handle people
well (but computers are far easier to debug), so the more of it I can offload
externally so that I can focus my brain on what really matters, the better.
Comparative advantage.

------
grosjona
The real reason why centralized networks currently cannot be replaced by
decentralized alternatives is that being centralized allows a company to do
secret, evil-but-lucrative deals under the table without having to reach any
sort of social consensus.

Centralized solutions are not impeded by moral factors; they can optimize for
user acquisition and profitability instead - They can corrupt the government
such that new regulations work to their advantage. They can promise key
external decision makers lucrative future contracts or positions in exchange
for favors (e.g. onboarding lucrative customers)...

------
marknadal
What are they kidding?

\- Decentralized YouTube ([https://d.tube/](https://d.tube/)) is almost in the
Top 10K most popular sites in the USA
([https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/d.tube](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/d.tube)).

\- Decentralized Reddit ([https://notabug.io/](https://notabug.io/) ,
[https://blubit.space/](https://blubit.space/) , etc.) has ~1K daily uniques.

Both sites are built using our
[https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) ! Soon they'll
even integrate same private/public keys so you can reuse your same account
across many different dApps.

This will only strengthen the network effect, and make decentralized apps take
off even more.

Also note, Mastodon is federated, you still "belong" to a server.

~~~
nl
_has ~1K daily uniques_

I'm not sure that makes the point I assume you are trying to make.

