
Why there is no Facebook killer: the death of the P2P dream (2014) - wheresvic1
http://www.disconnectionist.com/blog/why-no-fb-killer.html
======
onion2k
_This scarily accurate extraction of our personality and needs is advertising
gold, and advertisers will pay a lot more for it._

I once liked a dance company on Facebook because I know the person who made
their website. Now I see adverts for dance productions. That's not advertising
gold; that's a waste of advertising money.

I reckon most people's profiles are like this - a few likes or posts about
something that you'd never actually buy and all that ad money is just thrown
away. 90% of the adverts could be getting your profile wrong but simple
confirmation bias makes us notice that 10% far more than the useless, poorly
targeted adverts, so when advertisers survey people they get the impression
their profiling is working. Or worse, the ad networks know that the profiling
doesn't work but they carry on the myth in order to charge advertisers more.

I might well be wrong on this, but while I see adverts for things that have no
appeal to me I'll keep _suspecting_ profiling doesn't actually work.

~~~
zer0gravity
The reality is that not all progress can be brought by for profit
organizations. There simply are systemic improvements that can't be monetized.

These should have been the job of the governments, but unfortunatelly, those
too are the puppets of big corporations and private interests..

Some people should just break the cat and drive this type of change as an open
source movement. I for one am dedicated to try..

I don't think it's a coincidence that Linux, the SYSTEM of OPERATION that
actually runs the world is supported by an open source movement..

~~~
ArkyBeagle
But there's a pretty specific analysis tool for this distinction. Goods like
this are called "public goods" and they are both inherently non-rival and non-
excludable.

What you say is fine, so long as this tool is in used. But people don't tend
to do that.

Also, don't assume that the manner in which open source came to dominate
software was inevitable. Had AT&T and SCO been able to come to an
accommodation there's no telling what the world may have looked like. Plus,
Linux is exceptional because Linus was exceptional. He's a stubborn guy :)

~~~
zer0gravity
Actually on a second thought, I don't think that supporting data privacy is
the job or the interests of governments. In fact, they are usually the first
ones ready to sacrifice privacy in order to provider you with "security"
services.

I wouldn't even define data privacy as "public goods" because you now, it's
private, it's really a whole different thing than what governments are willing
to provide.

Profit making is again in conflict with data privacy, because there are much
more money to make by profiling the hell out of your customers then by selling
technology to aid real data privacy.

So there's this niche of progress that can't be pushed neither by governments
nor by businesses.

So in order for it to happen, there's the need for another force to drive it.
And in my oppinion that force is the open source / grass root movement .

And I don't agree that linux is special because Linus is special. We're
talking about a mindset here, and Linus is not the only one having it.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I use an adblocker. If your website doesn't like that, I'll stop using your
website. So far as I am concerned, how you make money is your problem, not
mine.

Data privacy isn't obviously a public good - it's both rival and excludable.
There's way to look at it as non-rival, but since much of it comes down to
trusted key authority I'd say that makes it rival.

I just recall the world of shareware before open source. It was certainly _a_
way and much was done in that way.

------
sergiosgc
I don't think Facebook will be dethroned by another Facebook. I also do not
think the differentiator for such a new king is technological (e.g. P2P). The
only kind of FB rival I can imagine succeeding is an open ecosystem one.

A second FB would have to overcome the network effects, and the only chance
for that to happen would be for FB's network effects to decrease.

While negative network effects do occur -- it's what killed Orkut, for
instance -- Facebook has learned that lesson well. FB's value for participants
has decreased, but is now stable and that network is still a huge barrier for
entry.

Technology is largely irrelevant. People do not care if it's P2P, runs on
functional code or if it is an engineering marvel. They care about the value
provided to them. The article posits that P2P adds negative value, and it is
probably right. The article infers from that to the impossibility of a FB
killer, which I think is wrong, because the scope of the analysis is wrong.

An open ecosystem social network:

1) Has the possibility of creating use cases that Facebook can't compete with;

2) May be extremely vibrant, if the ecosystem is large enough;

3) Can't be bought by Facebook, as it runs contrary to the main strategy of a
walled garden. (It may be bought in order to be killed, though);

4) Can live perfectly well, for an indeterminate amount of time, in second
place.

I can't see any other avenue for Facebook's demise.

Side note: Twitter nearly had these characteristics for a while. They
squandered the opportunity when they kicked it's developer ecosystem in the
nuts. Sad.

~~~
jpetso
It seems that the constraint "Can't be bought", or "Can't be bought to be shut
down", is an important one and fundamentally incompatible with the goals of a
VC-funded startup. That's also why Twitter failed in that respect.

Potentially workable governance models to prevent this kind of takeover: \-
Community-driven open source \- Bootstrapped company with limited profit
ambition (think GitHub or Basecamp) \- Non-profit/charity organization

If you're a startup millionaire and care about the real-world viability of
P2P, decentralization, etc., consider donating to / investing in one of these
vehicles instead of looking for the next big business model. Any startup ever
_will_ sell out to centralization and control eventually, unless they
specifically put themselves in a position where they don't control their own
ecosystem anymore (having open-sourced the software and gained a large enough
audience that can decide to fork if necessary).

------
falcolas
Dear <whomever wants to kill facebook> \- the answer is simple: Leverage
email.

Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed
into threaded comment strings in your client. Embed XMPP chat, and set up
enabled-by-default encryption around the whole thing. Leverage mailing lists
for your special interest groups and your public pages. Sell server time for
managing the mailing lists and image hosting, and for a web client.

The infrastructure is there, just forgotten.

This has been banging around in my head for a few years now, but I'll never
have the time to do it myself. If you can poke holes in the core concept -
please do. It needs to be fleshed out.

~~~
mschuster91
> Send marked up messages that look good in both HTML and can be transformed
> into threaded comment strings in your client.

Sadly, that is impossible. The only mail client that does real HTML is
Thunderbird (because under the hood it uses the fully featured Firefox
engine).

Outlook even in modern versions still uses the horrifically broken Word HTML
engine. Lotus Notes uses, depending on client configuration, either a OS-
provided web view or its own stripped-down, worse-than-Word engine.

The webmailer options are even worse. Lotus Notes webmail passes most, though
by far not all, HTML tags over to the client, which is pretty cool but you
can't do anything with mediaqueries etc. as <style> tags get removed. GMail
strips next to everything except images. GMX / Web.de are similar.

And mail support on mobile... don't get me started on this one. Android
default mail does stuff differently than the Google Mail app; on iOS Mail at
least responsiveness sorta works. Android Lotus Notes Mail is a mixture of
"works" and "works not", probably decided by the current position of the moon
or whatever.

And Javascript: doesn't work everywhere I tested except on Thunderbird, but
there it invokes a prompt...

~~~
Kadin
> The only mail client that does real HTML is Thunderbird (because under the
> hood it uses the fully featured Firefox engine).

And this is widely considered to be a bug and a source of insecurities, not a
feature. The few remaining people I know who use Thunderbird use it in text-
only mode in order to control its HTML-rendering tendencies.

Most people don't want a full-fledged browser in their email; it opens up too
much attack surface, opportunities for "read receipts" and tracking cookies,
etc.

That said, I think email is a good and underutilized tool, and it's
unfortunate that more MUAs don't support features like digest handling
properly. I think there's a pendulum that's going to swing away from public
services like Facebook and back to direct-communication services (Snapchat
might already be arguably a part of that) and email is already well-positioned
there.

But forklifting the web and HTML into email clients is probably never going to
happen.

~~~
ultramancool
Thunderbird by default doesn't load external web content, you have to
explicitly allow it.

------
cheriot
P2P Facebook needs a killer function to overcome the network effect. If
Facebook can compete by throwing money and engineers at it, you loose.

Here's a terrible idea.

Build a desktop app that stores all it's data locally (and is easy to
configure with Dropbox et al). The extremely popular social networking
activity of sharing photos is indistinguishable from sharing all other kinds
of files. Now everyone has a more convenient way to loan movies and books
that's difficult for the RIAA to snoop on.

Like I said, terrible idea. What's something legal that Facebook can't just
outspend a P2P app on? Other than privacy.

~~~
mountaineer22
What is a "desktop"?

Is that where I place my phone to charge?

~~~
cheriot
Ha, way to make me feel old. A mobile app with one of the cloud storage
providers can also work without killing your battery and data plan.

~~~
throwanem
I think you've just poked the point the article author misses.

I'm not sure I see a technical reason why my nexus of identity has to be
physically colocated with my person, and there are a lot of good reasons for
it not to be. The important point is that, be it wherever it is, my nexus of
identity is not Facebook's or anyone else's but _mine_.

~~~
mountaineer22
Also, why should a nexus be a 1:1 relationship with your person?

Should a person be allowed multiple nexi?

~~~
matt4077
That's actually pretty close to what Google+ tried with "Circles" when it
launched: the idea that people exist in several distinct yet fluid social
universes and that there should be a way to apply fine-grained yet intuitive
rules to your sharing behavior.

Turns out most people exist in one social universe, namely Facebook.

~~~
bbctol
I'd say it more turned out that Circles were decidedly unintuitive, and far
more of a pain to use than Facebook's single list (which can still be heavily
customized, most people just don't bother.)

~~~
pantalaimon
I think the circles were fine, the problem g+ had was that it lacked plenty
reasonable features (events, anyone? never understood this when google
calendar integration would have been a killer feature).

That's facebooks main use case for a lot of people and it's absence made g+
pretty useless.

------
pipio21
This is a bad excuse.

Today you can do a Facebook that lives in your own server. Your server living
in your house and being a simple box that you can buy like a TV or car and is
super easy to configure.

I already have something like this, but it is complex to configure as it is
not mass manufactured but custom made for me and a small environment of
people.

Everything else, an excuse for not working on finding solutions for the
problems that you have to face, like with any engineering problem.

Of course you can't replicate the work of more than 500 programmers(facebook)
with just one person, but you can go far reusing open source components and
coordinating the work of other people.

Instead of trying to replicate facebook(a clone), focus on making something
useful for the people getting advantage of distributed computers. Facebook did
not try to replicate myspace.

For example, focus on networks that PAY real money for having a social media
they can control(companies).

~~~
walterbell
_> For example, focus on networks that PAY real money for having a social
media they can control(companies)_

What are some examples of companies or vertical markets that would pay for
control that is missing at FB? Publishers seem to be looking for new revenue
sources, not control. Are you thinking of advertisers?

There aren't many proprietary content distribution networks. Bloomberg is one
example. Note that P2P may conflict with a "control" objective.

Synology NAS has valiantly built a standalone networked home server, complete
with NAT hole punching (they run a central broker) and usable "sharing" and
"consumption" mobile apps that connect to your home NAS. They earn revenue on
hardware sales, similar to iX Systems and FreeNAS. Synology has an OSS pseudo-
clone called XPnology, which is apparently compatible with Synology's free
mobile apps.

Tanium has a billion-dollar valuation for endpoint management and
surveillance, allegedly with P2P techniques:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/04/15/meet-
tan...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/04/15/meet-tanium-the-
secret-cybersecurity-weapon-of-target-visa-and-amazon/) &
[https://kb.tanium.com/Unmanaged_Assets](https://kb.tanium.com/Unmanaged_Assets)

------
SCdF
I don't think decentralised P2P is really the answer anyway: the answer is
separating the content from the convenience.

Facebook killed blogs because when I want to find my friend I just searched
for their name, and if I was their friend their content made it to my wall.

Because of Facebook's convenience my friends use it, and because it's a walled
garden I am compelled to use it to.

My dream for this kind of thing would be something akin to DNS but for
identity (pseudo or not), and an open API for content.

So, Adam knows nothing about computers and creates an account on Facebook,
which creates an IdentityDNS entry for him on his behalf.

Belinda is also not that techy, but likes G+'s layout more, and so has an
account on there instead. She also has Twitter.

Zer0cool is a massive nerd, and has their own domain and hand-written blog
software. They went to some website somewhere and created their IdentityDNS
entry, and has hooked up and validated their blog on their domain as their
content.

Adam can search for Belinda and Zer0cool in Facebook, which in turn searches
IdentityDNS. He can add them to his Facebook wall, and their posts will show
up in some fashion (maybe Facebook shows its own posts normally and only shows
titles of external blog posts, FB can do what it wants). Belinda can do much
the same with G+.

Zer0cool has also added Adam and Belinda, and reads their posts through
muttdentity, a mutt clone but for identity stuff.

OR something. I don't know. Effectively something that means that I can choose
FB because I like how it displays photos, or because it has the best mobile
app, or because it has lots of storage. Or I can run my own blog because I
want that control. ETC.

I shouldn't have to use Facebook just because that's all my Dad can work out
how to use.

~~~
madshiva
Hum, For my point of view Facebook didn't killed blog. Blog is used not only
to show pictures of yourself, but writing. Nobody write on Facebook, they only
share things. It's totally different, but hey anyway you can make your blog
what you when that they are. Multiple account kill the service. You have at
less 5 social media on every newspaper website. I don't use anymore twitter
and I hope people will do it too. It's really a waste of time using 10 social
media. I even don't use Facebook too.

~~~
sjg007
You can write or blog on Facebook but few people choose too. Techies seems to
flock to medium nowadays... So there is some kind of theming around hosts that
decides where you publish. I can see why, in many cases Facebook can be too
private to share in the professional world.

------
slavoingilizov
The P2P network doesn't exist, because it doesn't solve a problem. Facebook
solves the problem of "I want to keep in touch with people in my life
digitally" and has built a sustainable (to say the least) business model
around it.

Being P2P by itself is not a reason to create a social network, unless it
brings benefits for users that simply don't exist in FB. What are those?
Privacy? Security? Only a small number of people care about those.

Products are not created because they are technically possible - they are
created to solve problems. This reasoning is flawed because it starts from the
solution, not the problem.

~~~
hodgesrm
Following your line of reasoning it's worth asking what would have to change
to make Facebook's business model vulnerable.

When Facebook IPO'ed the biggest technology threat on the horizon was mobile
apps [1]. However, the FB folks negotiated that one pretty successfully. Since
then they have been very paranoid about new types of chat applications, in
short anything that could move communications onto a platform they don't
control.

I'm just speculating but the biggest threat to Facebook would be if people
started to look for something that Facebook has a hard time delivering. For
instance, what if users decided that getting real news from reliable sources
was high value? (Something like a return to properly curated journalism rather
than entertainment--this is of course just wild speculation.) In this case,
it's something that puts a premium on quality of the content, not the size of
the network.

Another obvious threat would be new ad delivery technology, which attacks the
"buy" side of the network. No doubt FB watches that area _very_ carefully.

[1] [http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/facebooks-mobile-
transi...](http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/facebooks-mobile-transition-
on-track-user-base-continues-to-grow-361670)

------
45h34jh53k4j
Fundamental problem with article -- says that Skype changed from p2p to
centralized because it was a better experience for mobile. It was political,
not technological.

I believe it had more to do with 'Project Chess' which was LE/IC access to the
Skype calls: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/20/skype-
nsa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/20/skype-nsa-access-
user-data)

Facetime, which is a similar thing to Skype for the Apple platform used to be
p2p in ios4. Patent troll VirnetX sued and won for 600 million dollars to get
them to stop being p2p. Facetime has never worked as well since, and VirnetX
are still trying to get iMessage and Facetime blocked.

No, p2p works fine. Better than centralized. There are forces that don't wish
this.

------
CM30
Well yeah, that's one technical reason. But I suspect we would have found a
work around if these systems had caught on to begin with. If a site or service
is popular, then that can influence what technology is adopted and how we use
it.

No, I think the real major reasons are marketing related. For example,
Facebook's network effect is very strong, even compared to sites like Twitter
and Instagram. The service is only replaceable by one that grows extremely
quickly, to the point things don't settle down enough for the site to feel
like a ghost town.

And it ties into the real reason said effect is so strong.

These P2P and decentralised networks are only appealing to a certain minority
of users.

They're basically marketed as 'censorship resistant' or 'free speech focuses'.
And while these are nice things to be, they're not a selling point for 90% of
the social media userbase. The vast majority of people either don't feel
they're being censored or don't really care about anything controversial.

As a result, the only people using these services are niche groups using
subject specific networks and activists banned or unwelcome from the major
ones. It's like why Voat failed to unseat Reddit; because the only people who
joined were those interested in discussing controversial issues and hence the
site wasn't useful for people wanting to discuss more mundane things.

It's the social and marketing factors that really sunk any P2P attempts at a
Facebook clone (or any other decentralised social networks). They just don't
have value for people wanting to discuss non controversial things.

~~~
pjc50
"Censorship resistant" also means, in practice, that a large amount of your
content is awful. Whereas the average person wants something with the sharp
edges removed. Facebook's moderators, inconsistent as they are, are genuinely
adding value.

~~~
guard-of-terra
I don't see why do you think such system will force you to experience content
you don't want.

It's just when your tastes diverge from what's forced on us as acceptable, you
shouldn't let in the dark.

~~~
pjc50
There's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking at
it. At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me.

There are entire subcultures of people who make a game of trying to get people
to see images they don't want to see. This has been happening since slashdot
and goatse.

~~~
guard-of-terra
> There's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking
> at it

This is plain false. HN does it, for example.

> At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me

It's an algorithm, not a moderator. Moderators are currently employed for two
things: a) censorship, b) influencing opinions. Everything else algorithms do
just fine.

~~~
pjc50
HN is also a moderated system, there's this guy called dang you may have heard
of.

~~~
guard-of-terra
But he's not going around curating your reading lists, does he? That's the
point.

In your own P2P Facebook, you'll be your own dang.

~~~
fdgdasfadsf
HN's algorithm for deciding what gets on the first page is not totally
trivial. Is it published anywhere?

~~~
cryptarch
I think it's tweaked periodically, and unpublished to make manipulation
harder.

------
ciex
Isn't it also the case that web usage is much more wide-spread now than it was
when Facebook became popular? It just feels off to cram all of your contacts
into one platform (the dreaded will my granny see this post effect).

I think end-to-end encrypted social platforms could have a future if they are
oriented towards a niche that sees advantages from the encryption and offers
federated access for mobile devices in addition to full p2p connectivity.

------
kowdermeister
If you want to build a Facebook killer, then answer this question first
without coding a single line:

How do you plan to sign up non techie females? Do you have anything to offer
to them?

~~~
pjc50
More importantly, if you want women to use your service, how are you going to
handle the inevitable abuse problems?

------
katpas
I think if users paid to use social networks then those networks wouldn't have
to sell ad data to make revenue.

It makes sense that when Facebook, LinkedIn et. al were set up social networks
were something new so people wouldn't understand the benefits enough to pay.

Right now, we've seen what social looks like when you don't pay for it. You
become the product.

I would have happily paid for WhatsApp instead of letting them give all my
numbers to fb.

~~~
glogla
> I think if users paid to use social networks then those networks wouldn't
> have to sell ad data to make revenue.

But the networks would still do it, even if they didn't have to. Look at
Microsoft - you paid hard cash for you copy of Windows, and they still vacuum
all your data and behave as if they were scummy cloud company.

Even if you pay, there's no reason for companies not to do this. Neither users
nor regulators don't punish companies that spy on their customers and sell
their data, so for the companies, it's free money. Why wouldn't take free
money?

Sure, they could not be evil, but not being evil doesn't take you far in the
business world - see every big company ever.

~~~
katpas
I would love to be able to name a company that's done well without the being
evil component.

------
jamespitts
He omits a huge source of emerging P2P potential: cloud instances run by power
users and businesses. These are currently powering the various blockchain
communities and represent the next stage of P2P. Due to the security and
accountability advantages of blockchains, these networks could lead to a
large-scale "redecentralizion".

~~~
Joeboy
What blockchain communities represent the next stage of P2P? Twister is the
only thing I can think of that vaguely meets that description, and as far as I
know it's not particularly thriving.

------
dade_
From my understanding of what he said, he thinks that distributed social media
would mean that the hosting would happen from our mobile devices as a P2P
network. So yeah, he did completely miss something, that would be a terrible
architecture that would not only be completely unreliable, it would offer no
scalability, except for really awesome cat videos. Distributed social, such as
diaspora allows anyone to host their own social media platform, but also
provided a federation interface to other nodes. The problem with diaspora is
that it offers a small subset of features compared to Facebook, and the
problems they needed to solve, especially with federation and content control,
are really difficult. Further, the branding will confuse almost everyone as
most people can't be bothered to understand the difference between a site,
application, and protocol.

------
legulere
One model that could work I thought of works like this:

A packet based P2P network, where peers can also act as buffers to relay the
packets. So basically the same as servers in the traditional sever client
model. However your account isn't bound to a server like with email or
diaspora. So the networks of computers of your friends can act as servers
serving your smartphone. Or the developer of the app you use can provide a
server that can also send you push notifications.

The real problem for decentral messaging/social networks is discovering your
friends. Friends of friends being suggested to you certainly is a good step
forward but it's not enough. It doesn't work when creating a new account and
when adding people outside of your friend's circle.

------
Karunamon
I think what always gets ignored in these "Facebook sucks, we should use/build
X instead" arguments is the grandparents factor.

My gran cannot be expected to learn server administration and security just to
have an inferior* version of what she has right now with Facebook. For that
matter, that's not a tradeoff you can expect almost any non-tech (or most tech
- we have other things to be doing) people to make.

(Inferior, meaning the supposed benefits to her are completely philosophical
and theoretical, rather than practical. She doesn't give a tuppeny crap what
advertisers are doing with her likes.)

Unless she can right now click on an icon that brings her to something that
looks like Facebook and has her family on it and is easy to use, all the
alternatives in the world don't matter. And I get the sneaking suspicion she's
not in the minority here!

Everyone always starts looking at this from the tech side, as if having the
system be P2P should be its primary selling point. No! In the real world, that
isn't a selling point any more than something being Free Software is a selling
point to anyone who doesn't read Stallman. The "threat" from advertisers,
corporations, and governments accessing your Facebook data is going to have to
get a lot more practical and a lot less theoretical (the NSA _might_ do X Y
and Z!) before that even winds up in the same universe where it can appear on
a normal person's radar.

------
codingmyway
The costs of running even a p2p system need to come from somewhere and you
need to attract the right people (hubs in the social graph lingo). The trick
is incentivizing them. There are going to be adverts somewhere but the people
and content producers could get a cut. Synereo has a better chance of
succeeding than a wishful thinking p2p open source project because there is a
source or funds that can power the network. It still has to come from ads
though, unless people pay for it.

------
sparkzilla
You can complain about Facebook's appetite for data all you like, but reason
Facebook is successful is that most of the users of the site are willing to
trade their data for utility. To beat Facebook you need to create a new
product based on something that people actually care about, by providing
either a better social network, a better news distribution system, or a better
way to share photos and memories (to name a few possibilities).

------
zer0gravity
> It's very difficult, inefficient, and unreliable for your phone to serve out
> data to all-comers: it's a one-way street.

But your phone can talk with your server and anybody who wants to access what
you allow them to, can simply talk with your server. It is perfectly possible
to host your own server nowadays.

> Imagine if the messages and photos you shared with your friends only lived
> on their phones or computers, and not in some server being scrutinised by
> security agencies, used for targeting ads, or at risk of being hacked.

Yes, it is possbile by implementing the idea described above where everyone
hosts its own data.

Actually I'm working on something like this. Currently I have developed some
minimal applications that allow you to share your status and chat. It still
uses a single server for now to relay events between the clients, but I am
working on making it P2P.

You can check them if you want :

[https://fruit-fly.herokuapp.com/client/statusapp.html](https://fruit-
fly.herokuapp.com/client/statusapp.html) [https://fruit-
fly.herokuapp.com/client/chat.html](https://fruit-
fly.herokuapp.com/client/chat.html)

------
mozey
"Your 3G connection isn't like your home ADSL or cable internet connection -
it is designed for browsing web pages and downloading data off big servers,
not serving up content to the whole world, like a mini version of a Facebook
or Instagram server."

If you had a container running somewhere in the cloud talking to containers
owned by other users then the mobile device doesn't have to be a server?

~~~
fulafel
You have to sign up for a new paid service for that. Significant barrier vs
doing something off your existing wired home connection for free and having
the easy to understand mental model of "stuff running on my PC there in the
corner".

Heroku/Lambda/App engine help with that a little but they aren't newbie
friendly and there aren't many existing server apps for those that you can
just install. Sandstorm has the right idea.

------
_nalply
Technology advances occur because something is provided what people want.
Advertisement is not what people want. At least not too much of it. If
something better comes up Google and Facebook will die.

As with each technology advance it's impossible to know beforehand what will
be a hit. Nobody knew that smartphones will be a hit before the first iPhone
came out.

However we all know that advertisement is something companies force down the
throat of people. This won't be sustainable in the long term. We will
experience the Facebook and Google killer.

Perhaps it's neural networks people can train themselves and providing a layer
above all communication technology. Perhaps with these neural networks we will
recognize that email is truly all we need for asynchronously communicating
with each other.

We will see.

~~~
intended
Well, tech firms and tech creators want money....so?

unless the incentives for technology creators change this problem is going to
remain as old as time.

And we are doing a pretty terrible job of setting incentives which are _not_
monetarily oriented.

~~~
_nalply
Yes that's why the people will perhaps run their neural networks themselves.
Because nobody will do that for them for free.

------
nxzero
Issue isn't tech, it's that the average person doesn't see any value in what
P2P offers.

~~~
omginternets
Not to mention the average developer. I just spent the past few days wrangling
NAT-punching issues for a small p2p project of mine. To say "the first rule of
p2p is don't do p2p" is an understatement.

The (very unfortunate) truth is that p2p is just more difficult than
client/server.

~~~
hvidgaard
That problem is partially solved by using a supernode overlay structure. It
isn't particular elegant, and it relies on certain nodes being willing to work
more for the network - but it can enable nodes behind a NAT to parcitipate
relatively easily.

~~~
omginternets
Sure, sure (and the tip is much appreciated), but this just goes to show that
P2P is more difficult than client/server.

The point is that one has to have a very good reason to use a P2P
architecture, as it tends to _create_ problems.

~~~
nxzero
Maybe it's me, but I'd assume the many-to-many is more complex that one-to-
many, especially when laid on top of systems designed for one-to-many.

~~~
omginternets
Good point. I was thinking of issues like peer discovery and NAT punching, but
it's true that traffic topology changes as well.

------
pif
TLDR: someone has to pay the bill. If users don't, advertisers will.

~~~
Joeboy
Not a problem for email, which is P2P.

~~~
sanswork
Most peoples personal email these days is paid for by advertising.

~~~
Joeboy
Sure, but it's not something that makes the P2P not work.

The "problem" is that users have to either administer a server, pay for a
service or accept ads, and they mostly choose the latter. I'm not crazy about
the fact they make that choice, but the fact the choice exists is not really a
problem with the protocol.

------
Joeboy
At the moment the best plan for that seems to be, make sure that if Facebook
somehow kills itself the best alternative is a P2P alternative.

Excessive advertising or conspicuous, harmful info sharing seem like the most
likely ways Facebook might drive people away. Obviously the network effect
means they're going to have to fuck up quite badly to drive people to a
competitor.

------
amelius
The reason why there is no Facebook killer yet is that the telecommunications
act, [1], does not extend yet to mass communication in the form of social
networks.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996)

~~~
walterbell
Care to expand? There was a brief period of telco (CLEC) competition, followed
by a series of mergers which returned the landscape to almost the same as the
one preceding the Act. If such an Act applied to social networks, how would
you envision the effects?

~~~
amelius
Well, take this quote:

> Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive
> externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not
> interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers.

Since social media are communications services, and also strongly exhibit
network effects, the act could not only lower the barrier to entry, but
actually create the possibility of entry (which is now virtually nonexistent
for any newcomer, even if you have the money of Google).

~~~
walterbell
Good point. In practice, ILECs did everything possible to delay the
provisioning of interconnects, until most CLECs failed. But it was a good
objective, albeit difficult to enforce. Without a physical layer monopoly
(social networks), there would be less plausibility for broken
interconnections.

------
xbmcuser
Their has been no Facebook killer because Zuckerburg has bought anything that
he felt will supplant Facebook or at least take away users from them. He
bought Instagram and WhatsApp was after Snapchat as well but Snapchat founder
didn't want to sell.

~~~
tim333
Zuckerberg is a smart competitor. If only he'd sell the site to Yahoo or
Murdoch it would be much easier to compete.

------
NoOn3
Maybe we need something in the middle of p2p and centralized. Main big server
by company works like current facebook and the ability to create your page on
your p2p node if needed. And you will can choose between a general server or
host p2p node...

------
trestles
Very few people care about the issues raised by the author. From a practical
pov, I think the best way to create something like this would be from some
prebuild community that might care like Burning Man or something.

------
luke-stanley
Some Retroshare developers are working on an mobile app for Android and like
Bittorrent it won't need a server farm. Peers can carry their own weight using
home servers that can talk to phones etc.

------
panic
I think a P2P social network that positioned itself as a counter-cultural
movement could do pretty well. People are willing to put up with a lot to be
part of something cool.

~~~
ThatGeoGuy
> People are willing to put up with a lot to be part of something cool.

Funny enough, this is exactly how Facebook first marketed itself: only for
students of Harvard, and then only for college students.

Once it had enough on-board members, it pivoted and started allowing the
general public, until today where even your grandmother uses it.

------
Kazamai
If P2P is dead, does that mean that 99% of cryptocurrency traffic go through
server farms?

------
imaginenore
You are solving the wrong problem. The reason there's no FB killer is the
network effect. You can create the best alternative in the world, but to
actually populate it with users is the task that nobody knows how to solve.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _You can create the best alternative in the world, but to actually populate
> it with users is the task that nobody knows how to solve_

Nobody except Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, _et cetera_

~~~
imaginenore
Instagram = photo sharing app

Snapchat = chat app

Pinterest = photo sharing app

They are not social networks. They have social elements, but that's not their
core design. And none of them are FB killers.

Google+ and Diaspora are examples of social networks, but they couldn't solve
the network effect problem.

~~~
sjg007
Umm Facebook lets me chat and share photos with family..?

~~~
imaginenore
Yes, so? These are secondary functions.

------
soufron
There is no Facebook killer because of the lack of interest of EU
industralists for the Internet. They dont care because they dont see it as an
infrastructure. They think it's a gadget. De minimis non curat praetor.

------
simbalion
The article is very ignorant. The internet remains primarily a P2P technology,
and will probably continue to be that way forever. The amount of valuable
resources on the internet which are utilizing P2P methods are 10000000 to 1
compared to the number of Facebooks.

Also consider that Facebook's #1 product, social blogging, is not profitable,
and can never ever be profitable. 100% of their profits are made in other
businesses which they've connected to their brand name, which is the only
reason for their success. For example, microtransaction-scam "video games".

This is a typical article by someone who does not really understand the
internet and has not been using it for very long.

------
qeternity
There is no Facebook killer because the average user doesn't care about
privacy. It's the same misunderstanding about Apple. Sure, techies of the
world might rather have a rooted droid, but the vast majority of the world
just wants something that works. They don't really care about ideals.

