

Ask HN: Will distributed social network work? Are they late? - sundar22in

Diaspora and tent.io try to create a distributed social network. Are they late in the game? Will they gain momentum?<p>I see a huge potential here. For e.g. XMPP is a successful protocol (atleast google adopted). I don't like monopoly, i don't want facebook the only option which everyone <i>must</i> choose (Because its centralized).<p>Whats your opinion?
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chinaunix
XMPP is not usually peer-to-peer. At least where I've seen it used there is a
third party middle man (centralization). Fire up an AWS instance, put your own
XMPP server on it, and start your own network with your friends. Just keep
polishing it and making it more user friendly. Keep it very simple. Give it
some functionality, something simple which everyone wants, that Facebook _does
not have_. Facebook won't disappear overnight, but people do want to try
alternatives. People are curious. If you make something really easy to use
that offers some useful functionality (think of how simple Instagram is), you
will get users who will want to at least try it. You can coexist with
Facebook. Facebook will not remain popular forever.

Do this project because you want it for yourself. Because you want
decentralization. Scratch your itch. Then share your creation with users.

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aleprok
We are not late with distributed social networks, because the normal user does
not care how the system works, just that it works and is easy to use. If you
want to beat Facebook you need to beat the user experience of Facebook instead
of thinking how to make the internals of social network better. Distributed
social network does offer good privacy, but privacy is not enough to compete
with Facebook and you can have good privacy settings with centralized social
network.

Personally I recently decided to delete my Facebook account because everything
was getting annoying to use in Facebook like messages not getting sent, five
clicks to remove a friend and other annoying stuff. The Facebook security
policy or the ads were not the reason why I left Facebook, but the bad user
experience. I felt that I had to do too much stuff to do some simple task like
sending a message to a friend.

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keiferski
The problem is that users don't care whether a social network is distributed
or not. The overwhelming majority of users don't know what XMPP is, or why
they should care.

Also, the lack of a choice is sometimes a good thing. Personally, I don't want
my friends to be on 10 different social networks. Facebook isn't perfect, but
I like the fact that it is uniform.

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sundar22in
It's like email. It should not matter in which social network our friends are,
we should be able to communicate with each other.

Imagine that today you can only send email from gmail to gmail account. If
that is the state today, won't we think of decentralizing email now?

Having a choice is a good thing, and one size would not fit all.

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dotborg
Spreading your personal data across many vendors is bad idea and average user
is aware of this problem. How hard it is to remove data from centralized
facebook? It will be a nightmare in case of decentralised networks.

