On 03/22/2010 05:04 PM, Henry Litwhiler wrote:
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.
with regards to the dynamic IP thing, that's pretty easy to get around.
My servers have dynamic IPs and I was able to find even free (gratis)
services that will do DNS for me, it just requires me running an extra
daemon on my box (which is free (libre)) to notify the DNS of any
changes in IP.
I think technical knowledge is actually a big reason why people don't
generally run their own website on their own boxes. Even if installing
GNU social comes down to extracting an archive, going to a web page that
corresponds to part of that extracted archive, and doing as much work on
that site as one does for Wordpress (which is very little,) setting up
Apache for example, can be more difficult. That's not going to change
easily.
However, there are web apps that given an existing GLAMP server, are
very easy to install, such as the aformentioned Wordpress, and I fully
believe GNU social can be one of them. So even if a user isn't
tech-savvy enough to set up their own web server, they can still get a
pretty cheap web host, extract an archive, copy it onto their provider's
server, click next a few times, and be ready to roll. This is why we've
chosen PHP as the implementation language - it's available virtually
everywhere, and there have been a number of successful free web
applications written in it.
I think it would be nice to someday have a way that the average user can
safely and easily set up their own web server, but that seems slightly
outside of our scope, for now at least.
You're definitely right about the data preservation piece, and we need
to build into GNU social a way to hang onto your data. You should be
able to have a local copy, but I'd also really like to see a system
where I can move my data, without losing all my connections.
We did come up with some concrete ideas at Libreplanet, and I'll get
around to writing those up on the ideas wiki page soon.
-Ian
