[Freedombox-discuss] Friendica Red

[Russell Edwards]

On 19/09/12 01:09, Nick Daly wrote:
> http://friendica.com/node/51
>
> "My name is Mike Macgirvin. I am a software developer.
>
> I'll get to the point.  Help us save the web."
>
> I like his attitude. :)
>

I like his attitude, too, but I'm not convinced Friendica will have that 
outcome.

It still encourages people to store all their stuff on someone else's 
server, and to send copies of it the servers of Facebook and others. In 
fact, in amongst all the sweeping design improvements listed for Red, is 
the plan to "provide incentives for organisations to provide servers for 
people."

Remember FeedomBox is meant to be about "you keep the logs", which is 
the complete opposite of organisations providing servers for people. 
Even having individuals run nodes for trusted friends, as is recommended 
for the current version of Friendica, is also completely opposite to 
"you keep the logs" if it's done on shared hosting (as suggested) and is 
also of dubious security run on VPS or even dedicated servers. In any 
case, Red explicitly wants to move away from this and toward further 
centralisation; "organisations to provide servers for people."

I don't really think it should be on FreedomBox for this reason.

When I first heard Eben Moglen's 2010 ISOC-NY speech a few weeks ago, it 
was like a belated awakening for me to face what I'd known deep down for 
years. Coming at it nearly 2 years after the fact, I thought, great, 
surely "we" have just fixed it by now.  I went and deleted my Facebook 
account. No freedombox yet? No worries, I set up a home server, got mail 
going and started searching for the killer distributed social networking 
software to use... but I am yet to find any!

I'm just a newbie when it comes to this stuff. Maybe I'm missing some 
key point.

You keep the logs.

I would rather see FreedomBox come out with no social networking than an 
imperfect solution. In fact that goes for everything. Even just a box 
that does nothing but serve email with "you keep the logs" would be a 
brilliant start and would solve about half of Joe Average's privacy 
problems in one quick and easy step.

Russell