[Freedombox-discuss] "What's a Distributed Social Network?" -- the comic

[Robinson Tryon]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 5:37 AM, stephen white <steve at adam.com.au> wrote:
> I commented on the comic via the buddycloud developer area, and Jonas suggested that I repost here. I apologise for my first post being a criticism:
>
> That comic makes it a lot harder than it needs to be. If I was explaining this to my grandma, I would say "everyone's been using email for decades. It works and it's proven...

Good point.

> Now Google and Facebook want your information so they want you to use their website, and now we have all of these privacy problems you keep reading about in the news. Buddycloud does the same as Facebook but like email, so there are no privacy problems because it's being done the way email worked for decades"
>

I'd avoid strong language like "no privacy problems," as that might
convey that whatever the FreedomBox provides will be flawless and
without design issues that could present some privacy concerns.

Just to use email as an example, there are concerns that even involve
the human factor, such as that amusing (but perhaps apocryphal) story
of the email mistakenly sent out to all employees of a company that
began "My dearest, I am so happy that we have now found a private
method of communication..."

> That version of the explanation points out the established solid history, then says it's continuing that history. The problem with the comic is that it argues the merits of both cases, making people need to consider one or the other as though they're on an equal basis. They're not. The centralised Facebook approach is the design that doesn't have the history, hasn't proven itself, and has the privacy issues. This is a substantial advantage that shouldn't be wasted by "fair and balanced" arguments.
>

Facebook was started in 2004 and currently has over 600 million users,
according to Wikipedia. Facebook has had incredible growth over this
time, and has managed its infrastructure successfully, scaling to
handle a population twice that of the United States. Given those
numbers, it may be considered disingenuous by some for us to make
claims that Facebook has no history in this field nor has it proven
itself over the course of several years.

I realize that for the FreedomBox project to become wildly successful
it will need to have a PR team that promotes a positive, powerful
image of the product and that downplays any successes of "the other
guys". The thing is that most of us are used to hacking on technology
in a world in which things generally don't grow much larger than "Geek
Famous," because we usually wouldn't bother to put in the time; we'd
much rather work on another cool new project.

As the FreedomBox project starts to pick up some speed and makes it
possible for armchair geeks to actually run their own servers, I think
one of the best things the project can do is to be very honest and
open about the services that our project provides as compared to
Facebook, Twitter, GMail, LinkedIn, AIM, and the rest. We need to
provide positive talking points (and hopefully some very nice looking
charts and other graphics) that show exactly how easy it will be for
people to run these servers and how much more powerful the FreedomBox
will be than the services they're using today.

Maybe some services like Facebook have a multi-year track record,
while many FOSS distributed social networks are rather young (to say
the least). Let's focus our efforts on the powerful talking points --
like privacy problems with Facebook -- and use those carrots to get
people interested in the project and get them excited about purchasing
and using the hardware. If we can create a powerful and simple-to-use
product, all we need to do is get them to take that first "nibble" and
they'll be hooked.

--R