On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak <rys...@fwioo.pl>wrote:
> Dnia poniedziałek, 14 maja 2012 o 12:08:16 Nikos Roussos napisał(a): > > I totally disagree with the central registry approach. Federation > > is always better for preserving freedom. > > Federation/decentralisation doesn't have to mean no registry. Look at > Diaspora - there are multiple pods, but I can search and connect to > users from any pod that is accessible. > > That is also a sort-of, kind-of central registry. Well, maybe not > "central", but "federated" - however, from the users' point of view, > it's simple to use and integrated with whatever pod they are using. > Yes, this is an important point, and a good reply to Nikos. (I agree with both of your sentiments.) > We need something like this for Free Somftware based services, as > currently we are all taking a beating due to network effect (look at > Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Dropbox - it's all network effect at work). > And we cannot tackle network effect if we do not build a vast network > of users. > Can you describe ways in which we might do this in more detail? Perhaps we can figure out a good solution here and then do it! Be concrete, perhaps using my "skype replacement" problem as a motivating example. Describe the world where I find out Skype is nonfree and then [go where] ([why there?]) and [do what] to get a free replacement, that anyone can easily do. > > > One word: email. > > I also love this example and I use it whenever I can. > > However, thing is: when e-mail was just picking up steam, it was de > facto the only service to connect users. Hence everybody happily set- > up their accounts and actually used it. > > Currently the users cannot be bothered with Yet Another Protocol or > Social Network, because they already use a multitude of those. > > That is one of the reasons why Diaspora, StatusNet, XMPP, SIP hasn't > picked up users as fast as we would like them to. And they won't as > long as using them is more cumbersome than proprietary, centralised > networks/protocols. > > I think we have the technology already; we need to focus on tackling > the network effect and on heavily usability. > Do we have the manpower to solve these problems? If so, where is it? > > -- > Pozdrawiam > Michał "rysiek" Woźniak > > Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania >
