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How do you find people's email addresses?



I'm confused-- I thought all these HN posts about federation and distribution were appearing because Facebook looked like it could be crumbling.

Facebook got its start for one reason and one reason only-- you could use it to find Waldo.

Are you saying that global discoverability is not a valuable feature of a usable social network?


> Facebook got its start for one reason and one reason only-- you could use it to find Waldo.

I though vanity was the main driver for Facebook adoption?


In the beginning there was no news feed, so Facebook really got its start thanks to people wanting to get in touch with friends and family.

The news feed (and consequently vanity, people begging for attention etc) came much later.


That was later. The original driver was “hey all my family and friends I lost touch with are right here.”


Badly. Most non-techies I talk to would rather “find you on Facebook.”

This was largely behind the relative failure of RSS, in my opinion, even more than the Google Reader debacle. Various friends and family still ask me how I keep informed, I show them Reeder for iPad and they immediately want to get on board; then I explain how you go around to the news sources you like and gather feeds or use a bookmarklet and their eyes glaze over.

I hope this brainstorming on a distributed/federated social network goes somewhere, but if the creators don’t even bother considering why Facebook worked in the first place, their efforts are doomed.


Exactly. I think there are two types of social network users

1. People who want to consensually maintain two-way contact with people they talk to in normal life.

2. People who want to anonymously get life details of classmates they have a crush on, ex's, etc

Building a network to support #1 while maintaining true anonymity and privacy is much more doable. Not being in group #2, I don't worry about it.


3. People who want to share messages/data in groups (e.g. a local acting class)

4. People who want to follow events, share events, and follow which friends are going to what events.

Anyway, still horribly incomplete. Somebody should have put this list in the requirements, and put it up for discussion. System design starts with requirements!


Being in group #1 is great.

Denying that there is profound value in digital communication between two consenting adults who have never met in normal life is a Luddite position.


Nobody is saying that, you're making a straw-man argument.

People are just saying that they have no interest in being part of a network that tracks their videos, location, actual name, phone number, text messages, behavior across the whole internet, email address, and builds a psychological profile on them in exchange to look up college buddies (and therefore have deleted their accounts).

Many of us want a network that errs to the side of too private, and it's okay if not everybody is on that network. Many of us would rather have no network as compared to one that's too public.




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