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

[stephen white]

On 25/02/2011, at 10:21 PM, Matt Willsher wrote:
> 'Everyone' hasn't been using email for decades and the the email model
> has problems which centralised systems can solve

Centralised systems aren't required to solve many of the problems with email. The inertia of so many email installations is too much to overcome, but that merely means the new system needs to have those fixes not that the entire model needs to be changed.

> You mean it allows the reader to draw their own conclusions by
> presenting an unbiased view? Heaven forbid!

The problem with "fair and balanced" is when it has 50/50 weighting for issues that are really 90/10. Email has the weight of history and it is on the 90 side of the argument.

Facebook is the one proposing the centralised model, they're the ones with the privacy issues, and their design is the one that is questionable - and there's absolutely no problem whatsoever with pointing that out.

Anyway that was my comment on the comic, and there's room in the world for multiple presentations from multiple perspectives.

--
  steve at adam.com.au