Henry Litwhiler wrote: > what we would be doing, in effect, would be creating what is already there.
Well, the difference I am proposing is that the Users and the Owners are the *exact* same set. > The only difference would be the people running it By "running it" do you mean the Workers or the Owners? > so it would still come down to users having to > trust the server operators enough to surrender over their data. But what if groups of collective users were the actual Owners of those servers? They could hire skilled Workers if they like, but would not relinquish control except for the amount the must give-up to be able to share between themselves. The difference between this idea and the self-hosting idea is the ability to pool resources. After we discover how to do this, we can also tackle bigger problems all along the chain, such as becoming truly Free as in Freedom ISP and cell-phone services and even the most important production of all = agriculture. > We need to give users the tools to perform social networking functions - > not just supply them with another service. I'm talking about the Users supplying *themselves* with the service (with respect to Ownership). They could also choose to be the Workers as well, but more often would hire skilled workers to accomplish what they do not know how to do. Those hired Workers could not wrest control from the Users, since any attempt to do so would cause them to be fired.
