I am new to the GNU Social project, and I just thought that I'd add my two cents.
While it is certainly important for people to maintain their privacy, most people are unwilling to sacrifice convenience for privacy, something that is made evident by the success of centralized social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Most people aren't concerned about privacy, and most people aren't concerned about how free their software is. Of course, there are those who *do* care about these things, and this tool *would* certainly be attractive to them, but this tool will not be very successful both in the sense of popularity and in the sense of the protection of others' privacy if it is not also *better* than nonfree, privacy-threatening services like Facebook. In short, it isn't going to be successful if it is not also better, in addition to being free (as in speech) and private. It will be almost impossible for us to make this more convenient to set up than centralized alternatives (it's easier to just create an account on a web site than it is to setup a home social networking server) - that is something we will have to accept. The only way that we can bring high usership despite that drawback is if the product defeats centralized alternatives in most of the remaining categories (features, ease-of-use, etc.). While this may be something of a daunting task, I have no doubt that we are capable of overcoming it. That said, this project will not (regardless of design or intentions) be just an alternative to preexisting social networking sites - it will be a solid foundation for the decentralization of the internet as we know it. At it's inception, the internet was meant as nothing more than a way for a few key government facilities to quickly transmit large amounts of information between one another. Businesses soon got involved with the same intentions, and, finally, so did individuals. The internet was designed so that any "node" could interact with any other node, directly. For a time, many people with internet access would run their own servers, hosting web pages about themselves and things they were interested in. ISPs, however, soon learned that they could make more money by forcing people to *pay* to run their own web servers properly, and thus came this idea of dynamic IP addresses, which will be a serious but certainly solvable roadblock to any project (including this one) that seeks to move the internet towards decentralization. >From there, personal web servers died out, to the point where only commercial enterprises actually ran their own servers, which brings us to today. Now, we almost never directly connect from computer to computer. People now use social networking sites to communicate, multiplayer video games are hosted on remote servers, and email is entirely handled by massive datacenters in the middle of nowhere. The internet's capability for users to directly connect to one another is left underutilized. By utilizing a variety of decentralization peer discovery and authentication techniques, we can override any attempts by ISPs to prevent direct user-to-user communication, and allow any and all users to host their own data on their own servers. Another (perhaps underrepresented) advantage to the usage of such an open, decentralized system is the idea of data preservation. Websites come and go (both in the sense of losing popularity, and in the related sense of shutting down completely), often leaving users lacking all their old social interactions and personal data. I'm not talking about the related privacy concerns (though those are certainly relevant) but instead of the preservation and continuity of data. By standardizing a certain (open) format for private data of many types, we can ensure that the private data and, ultimately, the entirety of internet culture, is never lost to the changing of technology. A bit long winded, perhaps, but valid points, I think. Thoughts? Reactions? -- Henry L.
