Companies have an {obligation, fiduciary duty} to maximize value for shareholders, therefore they have no choice but to do horrible things to {users, customers, the environment, civic institutions}
Presumably, decentralization, federation and open source will eliminate the profit-maximizing corporation, thereby stopping all the horrible things.
The problem with this reasoning is that it only addresses one side of a two-sided transaction. The corporation doesn't transact with itself. The other side of the transaction is the user.
What if every user was willing to pay $5 per month for a "clean Facebook" without ads, without surveillance, without psychological profiling, without selling private data to malevolent third parties?
If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook could continue their current business with the best computer science talent and a global network of data centers.
If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook's shareholders would do fabulously well.
But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service.
Since a social network only has value to a user when all the user's friends and family are also on the network, a Facebook that only has a few people willing to pay won't be very useful.
Advocates of decentralized social networks need to explain (1) who will pay, and (2) how to get enough users to make the network valuable to a typical user.
Until we figure that out, we're stuck with social networks that are free for users, monetized with advertising, and regulated by the state.
We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. They worked great in 1998. Why can't they work great in 2018?
There are now phone plans that are paid for by selling your data and sending you spam SMS. There are e-mail providers that operate similarly, and most e-mail addresses are registered with one of them. Those things don't really work for snail mail, but few people use it anymore, because sending a letter costs more and they have come to expect communication not to cost money.
The formerly decentralized services are no longer so decentralized since "free of charge, paid for by data and ads" has shown itself to be a viable business model that users love. (Until they understand what's happening, at least.)
Your point is valid, but we still live in a world where we can call Verizon phones with AT&T phones; send e-mails to Gmail users with Yahoo; and send mail with UPS instead of USPS. With those means of communication, we still have control over our providers.
There is no control within Facebook's ecosystem. Similar with AOL, if you don't use Facebook, you're necessarily out of the loop, and I don't feel comfortable with that.
Not to detract from your point, just thought you might be interested to know that USPS actually has a legally-protected partial monopoly on the right to carry letters (18 U.S. Code § 1696).
An exemption was added in 1979 allowing private carriers to deliver "extremely urgent" mail. This is why UPS and FedEx express mail envelopes bear that text on their front.
Apart from this exemption, USPS, FedEx and the like are only allowed to deliver 'parcels', not 'letters', though I'm not sure where the distinction is legally defined.
While true, I think it is important to emphasize the difference between 4 platforms and 4 carriers. With both postal mail and email, its not just that there are alternative systems, but rather that you as the sender can choose any of the offerings to reach anyone, even if they use a different carrier for their own needs, so there is a lot more competitive pressure on those 4 carriers than with 4 platforms where network effects keep people locked in.
>The formerly decentralized services are no longer so decentralized
People keep saying this but to my knowledge email still isn't centralized. While there are a lot of gmail users in the US but that's not the case in many other countries, many people also have a .edu email and a few years ago I ran my email server myself (I even handled signing papers when I switched jobs over it.) Google even contributed to and pushed for dkim and spf which solved a huge spam problem that threatened their ability to forward mail from smaller outside domains to their users. A lot of people might use one of the big services but as long as you don't have to in order to interact with them it's not "centralized."
The world was better when people paid for communications. It's why the internet was better in 1995. Most of the people who had access needed to afford a landline and likely had to own a home or rent an apartment. The only way kids got online is if a guardian had access.
Nowadays, any kid can get online. The range of intelligence and character has expanded dramatically.
> We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail.
I disagree that we currently do. And only agree for email in 1998 when its decentralized nature costed more to the users than the benefit of being decentralized, hence the transition.
E-mail is largely centralized now. There's a handful of major companies who are able to run an e-mail service and communicate with the hordes of GMail's users who are living behind GMail's spam filters. (Spam filters, it should be noted, that make the service usable for most people.) So what happened is that decentralization worked for a moment in time, but as the Internet grew it worked less well, and we reinvented the pre-Internet solutions (BBSes/Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve) on top of the open Internet.
It is unfortunately true that e-mail is mostly centralized (as in even if I don't want to use GMail & Co., I will mostly communicate with people on those bign centralized platforms, thus giving them again my data).
But it is absolutely federated - I have the choice of running my own server and can communicate with every other e-mail address on this planet.
Unfortunately, it isn't easy to setup - average Joe has no chance to get his own server. On the other hand, for IT people it isn't extremely hard either. Once setup, it is nearly maintenance free...
I'm running my (and a company) e-mail server since 2001 and I don't want to miss it. I only once had a problem with being blocked by big sites, after moving to a new server where the IP range has gotten on some blacklists, because of the previous owner. Also never a problem with spam filters.
I hope e-mail will never be replaced - or at least there's some new way of communicating federated where every internet user is reachable.
They can work but people have largely moved from them because mobile/Internet based platforms are more convenient. Just as people can travel by horse and carriage but most prefer the convenience of car.
This is what happens as technology progresses. I don't think the solution here is to abandon imperfect technology in favor of old, but to improve upon it.
I hear what you're saying, but the analogy doesn't hold because we no longer need horses. In order to use Facebook, you have to sign up with an e-mail and typically a phone number (and in many cases, a photo ID, birth certificate, etc.)
If we need e-mails and phone numbers to sign up for social media, then we don't actually need the social media. We can go back to simply using the numbers and e-mails.
Of course we don't need it, but the fact that millions use it is the proof that people prefer it....for some reason or another. Added value of some kind.
Better to extract the value of Facebook and move forward by eliminating the negative, than revert to something many people find less convenient.
A sharing model where the content you create allows you to access content is viable (see Bittorrent ratios). Facebook created a side market where they made markets to trade user data and targeted ads. That should have never been part of the bargain. It's like getting an ad toolbar from installing Java.
WhatsApp without any server-side storage nor content discovery? These are primary requirements towards a social network and they'll cost more than another dollar to fulfil.
You can rent a dedicated server for less than $10/month that has enough resources for an estimated 100+ users.
Heavy users that upload a large amount of data (videos, pictures) may be willing to pay more than casual users.
What if every user was willing to pay $5 per month for a "clean Facebook"...
The problem is that, to a sufficient degree, they're not. Likely because the value proposition (or its assurance) is a hard sell. And that hard sell limits network scale (and hence, value).
Mind, even free alternatives have exceptional difficulty in competing with scale. Viz, G+.
Decentralization is mostly about power distribution, it doesn't imply privacy. There are a couple of decentralized projects that are worse for privacy (for the sake of decentralization) and ended up being used for OSINT.
Do people who run the centralised, private Signal app have more power over the user than people who run decentralised, non-private Mastodon instances?
Or do Mastodon people say it's strictly for broadcasting and encourage people to use proper end-to-end encrypted messaging apps for private communication?
Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated.
There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means.
Even if it were true, couldn’t a company argue that they want to put users before shareholders to prevent a public fallout like we are seeing with Facebook? Which could be seen as risk management.
If it were true, then there would have to exist at least some framework to judge what counts as maximizing profits. Maximizing the profit this quarter may require a vastly different course of actions than maximizing the profit over the next ten years. So depending on exactly what would fall under maximizing profits, this may or may not be a valid argument
But fortunately we don't have to worry about that, the people writing laws are not all idiots and it would be a pretty stupid idea to put requirements into laws that are essentially impossible to fulfill due to a lack of psychic powers and time machines.
>Why does it need to be signed and encrypted? We have PGP, Signal and Co. for that
Note it IS signed. It's just not encrypted. It needs to be encrypted, too, because it's the reasonable expectation when private messages and followers-only messages exist.
Additionally... should I be some location and post something, I'd be broadcasting my location, even if that isn't intended. All because it's not encrypted, where it should be.
>Mastodon is as trustworthy as your instance administrator, so you'll have to find a place where you can trust your admin.
That'd be true if it was peer-to-peer encrypted. But it is not; all messages are plaintext on the wire.
>should I be some location and post something, I'd be broadcasting my location, even if that isn't intended
Can you tell me how and where you would broadcast your location via Mastodon? There are no geolocation features in Mastodon.
>It needs to be encrypted, too, because it's the reasonable expectation when private messages and followers-only messages exist.
Has anyone attempted to encrypt a message to 64,000 recipients yet? I don't think restricting a message to followers is an applicable model for e2ee. Direct messages yes, I can see the point in that.
TLS is required in Mastodon for all transport. And of course your IP address is not included in any payloads leaving your server.
>The average joe expects direct messages to really be private. If they're not, that's bad.
They're not "really private" in Twitter DMs and Facebook Messenger and PMs on phpBB and Discourse forums, they were not "really private" in ICQ, AIM and XMPP (unless you installed the OTR plugin on the last one). E2EE is cool but most private messages on the internet do not use it and they are still called things like "private" and "direct".
>should I be some location and post something, I'd be broadcasting my location, even if that isn't intended.
you broadcast it to your mastodon instance. In P2P you would actually be broadcasting your position to any network observer. In Federation only your instance knows.
Out of curiosity, if the messages themselves were encrypted externally, would this solve most people's concerns? Or is the metadata that is leaked (I assume to/from, timestamp, size) also unacceptable? Also curious for those that have this beef with Mastodon, would transit anonymity help alleviate some of the concerns w/ data transparency?
If a message is sent through an unencrypted connection, anybody sniffing the network gets:
- Your message
- Your account name
- Your ip address (thus location)
- The time at which this happens
If the message is sent through an encrypted connection, but the federation connection between the servers is unencrypted, a powerful enough observer could still deduce the above.
A powerful enough observer will be able to observe two of the three properties no matter if TLS is used or not.
Most Mastodon servers have TLS, exceptions usually included instances deployed to localhost.
Mastodon doesn't technically require it but all clients I've seen do and the web interface relies on some features that are only available in a trusted context (HTTPS and localhost)
I don't really see the problem though, which instance you sign up to is up to you. You can sign up to a HTTP-only instance if you want.
The privacy of your data is in the hands of your local administrator more than any powerful observer (and servers you send messages too, like with email, for which all your complains are valid too since it functions similarly).
There is no downgrade. Mastodon will in it's default configuration not allow non-HTTPS connections. The protocol doesn't require it, so Mastodon technically doesn't. With a few code changes you can do that.
So yes, Mastodon did know better but it's not an inherent property of ActivityPub to use HTTPS.
All of the messages I post on Mastodon and twitter are intended to be public, just like the things I write on my website. End to end encryption would only make things harder without actually protecting anyone's privacy.
Development resources are pretty limited, for now it seems fine to use the right tool for the right job; there are plenty of E2EE chat services that can be used, and if there’s significant interest, a norm for favoring one will likely develop (like with imgur and Reddit, for example).
Lots of people are working on this problem. I too am even trying to spin up something simple on top of Tor v3 hidden services.
I think too many implementations are focused on the wrong things. Too many implementations are hung up on the distributed storage part. These can be plugged into abstractions as new ones come about. In the meantime, just because it says "decentralized" doesn't mean that pieces can't be centralized on some people's computers. I think when most people say that they mean off the cloud and into the home. Also, too few implementations care enough about anonymity.
There are also projects like https://yunohost.org/ and https://cloudron.io/ which aim to lower the technical requirements to get started with selfhosting as well as lower the ongoing maintenance burden.
>> Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data
So here's the rub: 1) you post stupid stuff, but by the time you realize this, you've already forgotten your password and the account recovery doesn't work, 2) someone gets hold of your account, posts stupid stuff, and 'throws away any means to recover the account', 3) someone posts stupid stuff that is determined to violate law, how do you take that down?
It's decentralized so the only person who should be accountable is the poster. if they mess up that's on them and no one else. Who would the state prosecute if not the poster?
I don't think anyone is saying the alternative should operate as a business competitor to facebook. I think the idea would be for the service to be fully decentralized, where no one has the power to remove anything
The advantage of Mastodon is that people do have the power to moderate and take things down.
But only on instances they are administrators off.
So while I can take down illegal content on my instance I can't go to the japanese instance and ask them to stop posting all those anime girls. They follow their own rules and if I don't like them I can just not allow their content on my server.
If you want to follow both my server and the japanese server you'll have to find an instance that doesn't ban either of us or run your own.
(Though I trust that there are a good number of lightly administrated instances that it'll be easy to find one before you're forced to run your own)
For federated services that is a problem of each individual administration team.
Instances may decide they'll ignore the DMCA or allow japenese content that would be illegal as CP elsewhere or don't give a damn about hackers compromising you.
> Ownership -> All self-owned data can be removed from everywhere
> Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data
How do you expect to be able to do that? Decentralization implies your are passing data to peers you do not control. They'll only remove data you ask them to if they are well behaved, but there is no guarantee of that.
It's like wanting to be able to delete emails that have already be sent,
Isn't this what torrents and blockchain already do?
You have chards of data on more than one endpoint that sync between eachother - to forcefully remove it you would need to remove it from all of those hosts manually.
But with, let's say, an access/crypto key - you can do it on all of them. Systems like Storj already do this i believe?
> Ownership -> All self-owned data can be removed from everywhere
I HEAVILY disagree with this. Content generated by people obtains, at one point, historical value. Self-owning should end with personal details, anything involving someone else has to be kept because I think social media has no point if someone else can just now delete basically what are part of my memories. I know Facebook doesn't do this well either, but they aren't making it easy to scrub everything clean either.
But private for whom? I mean, if someone who posted a group picture wants to delete it, it's private for that group, how should those cases be handled properly, without disrupting the UX for others.
Great list. I would add financially sustainable, by which I mean there is some way to pay for expenses like bandwidth and paying people like professional content producers.
The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.”
As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
The argument in the OP article stands without this — it is nearly as bad that companies have incentives to misbehave, as if they were legally obligated to — but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied.
It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al. Their business is the elimination of privacy and selling off the data and attention of their users. It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise.
Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire business model is based on squeezing as much value as possible out of the limited attention span of consumers.
Obviously only my personal intuition but I'd wager there's not much of a business in a pay-to-play social network. My FB account is practically on hiatus already and I'd not pay for it. If there would be so much value in a privacy conscious, paid social network that is mass-consumer facing we'd probably have seen it by now.
According to Wikipedia [1] Facebook has a revenue of $40 billion with 2.2 billion monthly active users which translates to pretty much exactly $1.50 per month and user. I would be happy to pay this amount of money if it would ensure that Facebook would not try to do an nasty things with my data.
But I also think that Facebook is already on its way down, people seem to have moved on. At least according to their numbers they still seem to grow or at least remain stable but I would guess that this is mostly due to expansion into new markets and if people there go through a similar trajectory it is only a question of time until the last new market starts and eventually stops using Facebook.
Here in Germany MeinVZ [2] was the dominant social network until people started moving to Facebook and now MeinVZ is just a ghost town. And it pretty much feels the same with Facebook now, actually already for the last five or so years, people come back and engage more and more infrequently until they eventually disappear. It is much slower as compared to MeinVZ but I am pretty sure it is essentially the same thing.
I am not sure where they are all going, maybe Instagram for the younger generation, maybe just WhatsApp for friends in my age, so Facebook the company might just be fine for some more time even if Facebook the network dies. But things have certainly changed from this madness of, I don't know, somewhere between five and ten years ago, when Facebook became inevitable, when it was constantly in thew news, when every ad poster featured a Facebook link.
I would neither be surprised if it turned out that Facebook was an essentially quite short-lived onetime phenomenon and people were not that interested in a global community as the social media proponents would want you to believe, nor would I be surprised if every generation had its own Facebook even if just to set themselves apart from the older generation. Why would we even assume that social media is more than a fluke and does not die away just like many things before?
> I would be happy to pay this amount of money if it would ensure that Facebook would not try to do an nasty things with my data.
Only if enough of your friends were on it to make it worthwhile, the danger is that many of your contacts would disappear, which would lessen the value of facebook for even more people, leading to a vicious cycle. And even if it didn't happen to your social circle it would stem the inflow of young people even more than is already the case).
>Obviously only my personal intuition but I'd wager there's not much of a business in a pay-to-play social network.
Then it's not much of a business, period.
In my ideal world, we'd only have businesses where the costs are open and direct (e.g. no "user is the product" or selling of personal data, or even "ad-based").
If they can't make it in this way, then, sorry, they don't have a business model.
A company gets to decide what business it's in (Facebook and Google have each explored several), what its ethics are, and how these ethics apply. For example, Google is in a substantially similar business, but it is interesting to contrast Facebook's pattern of behavior with Google's.
Google isn't a paragon, and it's alarming (to me) that Google is building a universal panopticon too. But these two companies, despite the similarity in their business models, appear very different with respect not just to how they collect data, what they collect, how much they sell, and what breaches or not-breach breaches have occurred, but also how forthcoming they are about all this, and whether they act like they've got something to hide. Facebook used tricks[1] to run their iPhone app in the background when requested not to, and only backed this out when the new iOS “battery shaming” feature outed them; they uploaded Android call history with text that mislead the user into thinking they were just uploading contacts. Google has made mis-steps and knows a scary amount about us, but I don't recall this kind of systematic boundary-pushing and post-discovery obfuscation and denial.
Or contrast Lyft and Uber.
These differences in behavior aren't from a difference in business models. They are from differences in “corporate DNA”, or culture. Zuckerberg was a teen when he wrote these messages[2], but most people I know don't speak or act like that even at that age. Some people advance to a different moral stage even at the end of, or after, their teen years; it looks from a longer pattern of evidence, only some of it recent, like Zuckerberg and his company may not have done so. Yes, business incentives are a factor, but explanations don't begin and end with “money made me do it”.
That sounds to me like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Corporate culture is the direct result of the business model of the company. You won't see facebook promote decentralised privacy, it's not going to happen just like you won't find anti-oil protests within the management of Exxon-Mobile, or a push for rail based public transport within the headquarters of Uber.
Corporate culture is a structure build on-top of their business, nobody has ever changed their business to adapt to their culture, they just get a rebranding and hire a PR team if the two happen to run into conflict.
>A company gets to decide what business it's in (Facebook and Google have each explored several), what its ethics are, and how these ethics apply.
Companies aren't individuals. They are aggregates, and
(absence some major force, e.g. like Gates in MS or Jobs in Apple, or some important founding principles) aggregates tend to go to some mean, which in the case of companies includes profits above all.
There seems to be far less thought and nuance placed in your comment than the one you're responding to. I would try to reconsider the points mentioned.
> It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al
There's a difference between "we did it because we were legally obligated" and "we did it because Zuckerberg wanted to". The myth of profit maximisation being an absolute legal duty is much too kind to Facebook here; they're not just a victim of our late capitalist system.
> It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise.
Right. Which is why their largest shareholder and CEO is going to ensure they do it, not because he's being forced by the spectre of shareholder lawsuits.
> Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to.
Certainly not if we continue to give them a pass when they fail to do so.
the company does whatever those that control the majority of the shares want it to do. Absolutely no one else, unless the company engages in illegal activity has any say. Corporations are democracies with the rules of majority that are spelled out in their documents.
This line of reasoning seems to forget that the ultimate control belongs to the customer. Thus we see Facebook taking a big hit for collecting personal information people assumed was private.
The trouble being that customer is 1) an aggregate (there likely is no the customer, just some customers, maybe a lot of them), 2) fuzzy (Facebook's real customers are advertisers, they pay the bills). How do non-ad-buying users matter as customers to Facebook? Only so far as they are aggregate eyeballs to feed to the real customers, advertisers?
The sad specter of case law dating at least as far back to Dodge v Ford [1], is that legally the only relationship that has to matter to a (US) business is its relationship with its shareholders. Consumer protections have only ever barely been carved out with regulatory action.
Yes, but see point 1. Facebook only has eyeballs in aggregate, as statistics (to show/hide from advertisers as Facebook sees fit). What does one snowflake matter to the mountain? When is an avalanche visible to Facebook? When is that avalanche visible to its customers, the advertisers? (Directly: When it tells them, presumably. If it tells them. Indirectly: Through slow user studies, and Big Data analysis, presumably.)
Snowflakes don't matter, if only one Facebook user cares about their privacy, then Facebook shouldn't care. Is it a perfect system? No. But it is democratic.
Correct. The customer has no control what so ever until the company runs out of money operating at a loss ( no customers ) that it has and is unable to find a way to raise money from the existing shareholder or new shareholders. When that event happens, the company shareholder either change the company to get the customers or the company goes out of business and shareholders get wiped out.
Its not about law, its about investors. Big investors have outsize control of the boards of most companies, and they pretty much only care about profits. The public doesn't blame them either because we don't talk about how decisions made by those on the board shape the entire company. Investors have little to fear from unethical decisions, so they make them.
The article actually contains a good point regarding investors and external influence:
> Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. Nowhere in the equation does it say that they’re obligated to do anything for you - the only role you serve is to be a vehicle for exploitation.
But I see an exception to this rule: Self-financed companies where the founders are still the shareholders and where the founders are in the company for the long run, and where the company is financed by the users.
If your company is financed by the users, then in order to make the business sustainable you need to optimize for the users. If the users demand privacy, then you optimize for privacy.
I'm aware that slow, sustainable growth is not popular in silicon valley, but that's probably a question of culture (in many european countries a lot of startups still follow this path).
>The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.”
That's only a myth in that it's not mandated. But it's still very much what almost every company will do, so it's a de facto (if not de jure) thing.
> But it's still very much what almost every company will do
But it didn't used to be like that – not even that long ago, either. In 1970 Friedman released his essay "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits". Look at the corporate behavior he was criticizing:
> The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers.
In other words, companies at that time WERE concerned about social responsibility, and not purely focused on profit. Friedman didn't like this; he called it "pure and unadulterated socialism".
Since that time this parasitic mentality was spread to and propagated by top schools like Harvard, dominating the world view of that next generation of businessmen/women. But it was never "a defacto" thing, and many are starting to catch on to the damage it has caused.
Hobby Lobby is a private company, and this was critical to the ruling. The fiduciary duty myth is about public companies, so Hobby Lobby does not work as a counter-example.
The same fiduciary duty legal precedents still matter to private companies. Even private companies have shareholders (we don't have a model for companies that do not have shareholders), and the fiduciary duty of a private company is absolutely a factor in any "corporate breakup" when Founders come to disagreements, dissolve companies, et cetera.
I agree with your implication in using the word "myth" that fiduciary duty as a concern is overblown in the collective world of public corporations (the decision in Dodge v Ford was hugely problematic and its shadow haunts us all), but it's not a myth in that it doesn't exist.
Yeah, I was referring specifically to the myth quoted by the parent, "There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice." I don't think that people believe this about private companies.
> 1. General: A party that receives or consumes products (goods or services) and has the ability to choose between different products and suppliers. See also buyer.
> In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration
I think to me the customer is the one receiving the product, whether or not they have actually spent money.
Also for consideration, "paying customer" and "non-paying customer" are common(?) phrases.
>but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied.
But will they change? Zuckerberg, as far as I can tell, started Facebook because he wanted to be master of the (internet) universe. And then he hired a lot of really smart people with the same motives.
Are you hoping that at some point in time he is going to have a great moral conversion and decide to forego power and wealth and become a sort of saint who will give it all away?
Seems to me far more likely Zuckerberg will pretend to reform, but keep pursuing the same goals.
What you are saying seems to be that we should not push decentralization and instead just wait around for something good to happen. Which in turn makes me wonder about your motivations.
Let me say some more. Maybe you are not trying to undermine decentralization, but if so I am still angry at you. Let me explain why.
The article is about why we need to decentralize. This is an important issue, and so we need to have a discussion to decide whether or not this is the right course of action. And we have this great resource, an internet comment section, in which to discuss it. And you are a netizen, so you should think about it and add in any useful comments you might have.
Instead you made a comment that derails the conversation off onto a track that it seems to me isn't useful. I see this happen a lot here at HN. There is a lot of useful discussion, but so often there are also people who make comments that derail the discussion, provoke an argument that isn't really relevant. I wish every commenter would first think out what is the basic issue at stake, and avoid making comments that lead to disputes that are off track from what needs to be discussed and decided.
More exclusive moderation is required to have constructve conversations. With constructive i mean ones that construct things. HN might not be the place. (Its not for me to decide.)
Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG. I don’t mean someone who cares about privacy, because I think we all care about privacy. There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers.
Weird... I always thought Google was inescapable, but I cannot get a single data point to display on that tracking map. I should note I am currently (and frequently) signed into Google and Google maps normally seems to know where home is.
This article like so many others perpetuates this idea that Facebook and others are selling your data. You can more or less disprove they are doing this with a little critical thought.
Facebook has a disincentive to sell data: if they sold user data, they no longer have exclusive control over it and somebody else can profit off their efforts in its collection. The value of Facebook is they have lots of eyeballs and they have lots of data on what those eyeballs like to see. If they simply sold this to an advertiser, why would the advertiser want to come back and pay them in the future? What they actually do is let advertisers target on this data, but the advertisers never actually have direct access - they can only assume that the users they target are ones that have the attributes they requested.
So what is Facebook selling? The same thing any other media platform, from newspapers to TV, is selling: your attention. Are you the product? Kind of. But just like any other marketplace, Facebook knows that if their platform doesn't provide value you're not going to come back and then neither will the advertisers.
Personally I think Google has played this balance far worse, by comparison: their interaction time with their users is so small that they have gotten more and more spammy to wedge into the little bit of your attention they get. Facebook gets a lot of user time and thus can be far more judicious on when and how they show you advertisements.
Except you're exactly wrong in that Facebook has been directly selling data while Google has not. Cambridge Analytica was crunching specific user data, not just buying aggregate targeted ads.
That's what this whole uproar is about: they're allowing wholesale data access, not aggregated targets through their API.
Google, whom you criticize, is the one actually only selling aggregates.
First, people gave away their own data and their friends data to apps. Facebook does not just give this data away to whomever can make an API request. It is also against Facebook’s terms of service to sell or misuse that data, and it is now obvious how naive Facebook was in thinking that this would be enough to contain apps from doing so. Nevertheless, I think Facebook’s intentions were in good faith in that they were hoping other apps and their users could benefit (in a non-monetary way) from having limited access to user data.
Second, Google grants just as much access to your data via API, if not more, than Facebook. Using Google’s APIs, you can grant full access and control to your email, calendar, contacts, etc. If you think companies aren’t currently abusing that in ways that make Cambridge Analytica look like children, you would be mistaken.
>So what is Facebook selling? The same thing any other media platform, from newspapers to TV, is selling: your attention.
But as the article points out, in order to get people's attention it does things like allow fake news to be posted, and allow apps to collect your personal data.
Matrix still has too many problems. Synapse takes a buttload of memory to run (there is even warning in the README.md), all the clients are a joke and E2E encryption isn't part of the protocol, worse, it's an optional setting, not even default for private chats. Last I checked E2E isn't even available for group chats.
Plus, the author talks about Mastodon, which solves an entirely different problem than matrix to begin with.
Matrix doesn't even support ActivityPub, which is basically the W3C approved standard for federated social activity, it should be easy for Matrix to integrate into the fediverse.
Until then I won't consider matrix as a serious solution to anything.
To be fair, matrix's synapse server was always only supposed to be the reference server...reference servers aren't always built for top-notch performance, just for admins/implementors to get understanding of protocol, etc. To address performance, the team is busy building a matrix server in Go; see https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite
I do agree that mastodon and matrix - of which I'm a fan of both - solve for different scenarios. Mastodon replaces twitter; sort of short social media bursts/broadcasts. While matrix replaces slack (and other chat platforms like xmpp). I've always seen matrix as a modern-day irc; also allowing expansion and enhancement via plugins, and programmability like good ol' irc is/was.
ActivityPub was only recently approved, so can't expect every project to instantly support it; though to be fair it has been on many projects' radar well before its approval by w3c. I truthfully haven't followed the latest matrix news, so not sure if support for activitypub is coming soon. I do feel that supporting activityPub really make it that much more powerful of a protocol AND platform...but i'm sure that's not a trivial matter.
If you haven't played around with clients for matrix (such as the Riot clients), i suggest you give it a try. Riot keeps getting better and better with each new release.
Facebook should split into Facebook the aggregator and Facebook the content hoster. You could talk about a third piece that is Facebook the content provider, which is for providing things like gifs, templates, memes, emoji, games, and other stuff like that. Because Facebook hasn't completely broken from open web standards those types of content providers already exist today.
Aggregators would be where you go to set up your friend list and see your feed. It could look and feel like Facebook does now. It would have an open standard protocol that content hosters would use if they wanted to be aggregated. This could still be an add driven business, but subscription, self hosted, and DIY solutions could exist too.
Content hosters could either charge a monthly hosting fee, or they could serve up their own adds. Self hosted and DIY solutions could also exist.
The big benefit to this would of course be the competition. Since it's an open standard anyone could be a content host, and anyone could be an aggregator.
To make extra sure there is competition, and this could come in a phase two after the initial splitting up of Facebook, there should be open standards for exporting and importing friends, follows, likes, etc. to and from aggregators, and open standards for importing and exporting content from the hosters.
Speaking of follows and likes, there could also be aggregator aggregators (AAs). People could opt in to publicly and anonymously share their likes and follows and the AAs would consume those and report on trends that cross aggregator boundaries. Anonymity could be much more protected this way while still giving us that interesting information about what is trending.
One tricky part of this is how do I as a content author only allow my friends to see certain posts of mine? It would have to be with encryption. My content provider could keep public keys of my friends and only my friends (well, their aggregators) would be able to decrypt my posts using my friends' private keys. I can see some challenges and holes in this, but it doesn't seem any worse overall than how Facebook protects privacy now. Open implementations and peer review could get us to better-than-Facebook privacy quickly.
Tangential, but what is it with people using German words, randomly? "Achtung" here, I saw some (US, afaict) people on Twitter try to establish "#forwärts" yesterday..
Is there a connection between any recent event and German(y) that I missed?
Some words, phrases and symbols from foreign languages can become internationally-famous so almost everybody can understand them and also gain meme-like semantic self-emphasize.
¡No pasarán!
ॐ
PS: I have also heard it's quite popular among French metal bands to use German in their names to sound scarier (e.g. Blut Aus Nord).
I would like to decentralize, but projects like Masterdon are not the way forward.
If you want to decentralize the servers then you MUST also decouple user accounts from the server they signed up with. Today, if you switch to Masterdon (or perhaps someone you know is running a diaspora node), everything appears to go well until a year from now when the volunteer who was providing the server loses interest or moves on, and your account/photos/journal/social network vanishes. So you start over by creating a new account with another server... tick tick tick, gone. Rinse repeat.
Centralized services don't have this problem - even myspace is still up today, meaning this killer problem isn't on our radar when we evaluate things like Masterdon, or promote it. We don't realize this is a temporary arrangement with a clock ticking down to complete account destruction.
Hubzilla is the only decentralized social media project I've encountered that tackled this problem and sort of solved it (they call it "nomadic identity"). I hear that needing an architecture able to solve this problem was why when Friendica was gaining popularity, the guy behind it realized the whole concept was a lost cause and subsequently started again with what would later be called Hubzilla.
Regardless of whether Hubzilla itself is your cup of tea, separating user accounts from volunteer run servers is necessary before centralized social networks can be challenged, otherwise you just inoculate people against ever leaving the central networks again.
(not to suggest this is the only necessary thing, or only hard nut to crack)
Actually, what you're describing is a problem of federated services.
True decentralization has no servers, and thus none of those problems.
Take twister for example [1]:
* Identity management via blockchain (one of the use cases where IMHO this is a good, or at least defensible choice).
I'm now aware of two social media alternatives that aren't dead accounts walking. Twister is in beta, but that looks interesting enough to play with and keep an eye on.
I got excited about Scuttlebutt but was troubled by my inability to remove old content. It created a chilling effect. I hope I just misunderstood that.
It is just the reality of the situation, when you publish something on the internet and then delete it, even if it is an entry in your private blog that runs on a Raspberry Pi on your desk if you had at least one visitor you can't guarantee they didn't save a copy and that hey won't distribute it again later.
as cornered_user also stated, that's just a reflection of what "publish" means.
You could also see it as the other side of "censorship resilience".
On twister, you could regularly see people having their "oh shit" moment when they published a post with a typo or such for the first time.
You get used to it.
Yeah, I'm the first to acknowledge that most p2p social $things are doomed from the start and of the rest, only very few stand an actual chance. Twister has been in beta since it featured here on HN in december 2015 (?) but it has been usable the entire time, actually.
I chose twister as an example because its decentralization contrasts nicely/clearly with the federation being discussed in the parent.
I think it shouldn't be that only people can take their data, I think the main value in social media is keeping a history about the user's actions, where one has been and so on. I think using decentralized servers like that will cost us a lot of data that later would have become to have historical value. We can see this loss of data well with old image hosts and forums, so much has been lost...
I see no problem in someone writing an archival activitypub implementation; a crawler that attempts to save and index the fediverse into a permanent record.
Of course, you'll need permission (though sometimes asking for forgiveness can be good enough)
web.archive.org has been archiving webpages for decades and I don't see anybody making a fuss about it since they are primarly archival. If you are a website owner you can easily opt out or have your data deleted.
Facebook's MO is "store all the shit and never delete it", an archival project should have an MO of "archive everything we can get and delete it when somebody complains".
Otherwise you'll never be able to archive any significant portion of the internet or fediverse.
> If you want to decentralize the servers then you MUST also decouple user accounts from the server they signed up with.
I somewhat disagree. Email is a decentralized service that works well and its accounts are coupled to the server you signed up with. It merely requires you to do some research when picking a node² or running your own.
Ideally there would be some provision in the protocol that allows you to transfer your content and notify your friends whenever there is an address change. You could do this with a digital signature. You could also bolt on a decentralized identity that's on the blockchain, e.g. register a domain with namecoin (which is completely decentralized) and point it to your current social identity. Problem solved¹.
--
¹ to be fair, registering a domain with namecoin is not trivial at the moment.
² perhaps pick one that requires payment, that creates an obligation to provide the service
I didn't do much research when picking a node and now I'm locked in to Gmail way more than I am to Facebook. If I stop using Facebook, I lose access to a few people I'm not actually talking to anyway. If I stop using Gmail, not only do people lose the ability to contact me, it also breaks my account on most other services I use online.
There's less friction in moving to a new email provider. You sign up, you blast your contacts "Hey folks, got a new email address", and you're off to the races. Social networks have circles, permissions, and all sorts of other clinginess.
Additionally, there are features in email that you won't expect from these nodes like a useful (to muggles) data export. I can pull down my email with IMAP or POP, close that account, and still have access to all of my old email. Hell, I could _reply_ to one of those old conversations using my new account/provider and keep right on trucking.
Only your server needs to know your friends list. Unless you decide to publish this information to your friends.
You are right that you are putting a certain amount of trust your friends' server choices.
That's why having several trusted, non-commercial entities that run these nodes is important.
Or just build a dapp on eos and solve all the issues at once : decentralize, data ownership, users can make money by choosing what they want to share with advertisers, everyone is essentially an owner.
Let users generate tokens based on how much data they choose to share. Advertisers purchase tokens and proceeds are split between token holders based on their share of total tokens. Everyone wins - users are in full control, advertisers reach an audience, everyone gets paid.
This is nice, but also naive. The current battle against data grabs is not about getting rid of data grabs, it's about giving the government control over data grabs, so they can compete with China and Russia when it comes to knowing their citizen. Facebooks problem is that they don't want to give the government this kind of access. So now they get negative PR, regulatory probes, etc.
Yes, decentralization would be the right solution. But this will always be discouraged by governments and corps alike, basically by everybody who has already lots of power and wants to have more power over your life.
As always you as a single person can choose to either be part of the ant swarm, giving someone else all power over you, but by that sharing in the ant swarms gains and luxuries as long as you are loyal, or by being self reliable but therefore also really be required to build everything by yourself that you really need and want to have.
If you decide for the first part there is really no reason not to give the person who has power over you also access to all your data. It's part of how a group works. And if the people at the top don't like you anymore then they will find ways to kick you out no matter what you do or keep secret. On the other hand its also part of the deal that the people above you don't use their power to peek into your life as long as you stay loyal and support their goals.
So FB either needs to accept to only live on the fringe instead of being the market dominator, or they need to accept that the government has bigger power and yield to them.
The only thing I feel one needs to be wary about is parasites who wants to keep the whole cake without sharing even a little bit with people below them. Trump is one such example. With these people you can't do either of the two paths, there's only the battle for who's stronger. And if you are like most people you don't really enjoy being in a constant struggle for survival.
It might very well be that Zuck is fighting against Trump here, and then that's the parasite situation and all Zuck could do is move out of the US, give up that market until Trump is gone again.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] threadCompanies have an {obligation, fiduciary duty} to maximize value for shareholders, therefore they have no choice but to do horrible things to {users, customers, the environment, civic institutions}
Presumably, decentralization, federation and open source will eliminate the profit-maximizing corporation, thereby stopping all the horrible things.
The problem with this reasoning is that it only addresses one side of a two-sided transaction. The corporation doesn't transact with itself. The other side of the transaction is the user.
What if every user was willing to pay $5 per month for a "clean Facebook" without ads, without surveillance, without psychological profiling, without selling private data to malevolent third parties?
If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook could continue their current business with the best computer science talent and a global network of data centers.
If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook's shareholders would do fabulously well.
But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service.
Since a social network only has value to a user when all the user's friends and family are also on the network, a Facebook that only has a few people willing to pay won't be very useful.
Advocates of decentralized social networks need to explain (1) who will pay, and (2) how to get enough users to make the network valuable to a typical user.
Until we figure that out, we're stuck with social networks that are free for users, monetized with advertising, and regulated by the state.
The formerly decentralized services are no longer so decentralized since "free of charge, paid for by data and ads" has shown itself to be a viable business model that users love. (Until they understand what's happening, at least.)
There is no control within Facebook's ecosystem. Similar with AOL, if you don't use Facebook, you're necessarily out of the loop, and I don't feel comfortable with that.
Not to detract from your point, just thought you might be interested to know that USPS actually has a legally-protected partial monopoly on the right to carry letters (18 U.S. Code § 1696).
An exemption was added in 1979 allowing private carriers to deliver "extremely urgent" mail. This is why UPS and FedEx express mail envelopes bear that text on their front.
Apart from this exemption, USPS, FedEx and the like are only allowed to deliver 'parcels', not 'letters', though I'm not sure where the distinction is legally defined.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes
People keep saying this but to my knowledge email still isn't centralized. While there are a lot of gmail users in the US but that's not the case in many other countries, many people also have a .edu email and a few years ago I ran my email server myself (I even handled signing papers when I switched jobs over it.) Google even contributed to and pushed for dkim and spf which solved a huge spam problem that threatened their ability to forward mail from smaller outside domains to their users. A lot of people might use one of the big services but as long as you don't have to in order to interact with them it's not "centralized."
Nowadays, any kid can get online. The range of intelligence and character has expanded dramatically.
I disagree that we currently do. And only agree for email in 1998 when its decentralized nature costed more to the users than the benefit of being decentralized, hence the transition.
But it is absolutely federated - I have the choice of running my own server and can communicate with every other e-mail address on this planet.
Unfortunately, it isn't easy to setup - average Joe has no chance to get his own server. On the other hand, for IT people it isn't extremely hard either. Once setup, it is nearly maintenance free...
I'm running my (and a company) e-mail server since 2001 and I don't want to miss it. I only once had a problem with being blocked by big sites, after moving to a new server where the IP range has gotten on some blacklists, because of the previous owner. Also never a problem with spam filters.
I hope e-mail will never be replaced - or at least there's some new way of communicating federated where every internet user is reachable.
This is what happens as technology progresses. I don't think the solution here is to abandon imperfect technology in favor of old, but to improve upon it.
If we need e-mails and phone numbers to sign up for social media, then we don't actually need the social media. We can go back to simply using the numbers and e-mails.
Better to extract the value of Facebook and move forward by eliminating the negative, than revert to something many people find less convenient.
> But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service.
Well, at least some tens of millions of users seemed to be happy about the idea to pay USD 1 a year for WhatsApp.
They were running this operation with something like 50 engineers so it should have been really profitable.
Then came Facebook...
All chats I've been in on Telegram and Whatsapp over the last few years could be stored in a few gigabytes of disk space.
How would I know? I've had a look at what Telegram and WhatsApp stores on my phone.
The problem is that, to a sufficient degree, they're not. Likely because the value proposition (or its assurance) is a hard sell. And that hard sell limits network scale (and hence, value).
Mind, even free alternatives have exceptional difficulty in competing with scale. Viz, G+.
Or do Mastodon people say it's strictly for broadcasting and encourage people to use proper end-to-end encrypted messaging apps for private communication?
There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means.
Not true. [1]
[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
But fortunately we don't have to worry about that, the people writing laws are not all idiots and it would be a pretty stupid idea to put requirements into laws that are essentially impossible to fulfill due to a lack of psychic powers and time machines.
I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.
Mastodon is a microblogging service, it's perfectly fine to not sign all messages (though ActivityPub does support signing)
Mastodon is as trustworthy as your instance administrator, so you'll have to find a place where you can trust your admin.
Note it IS signed. It's just not encrypted. It needs to be encrypted, too, because it's the reasonable expectation when private messages and followers-only messages exist.
Additionally... should I be some location and post something, I'd be broadcasting my location, even if that isn't intended. All because it's not encrypted, where it should be.
>Mastodon is as trustworthy as your instance administrator, so you'll have to find a place where you can trust your admin.
That'd be true if it was peer-to-peer encrypted. But it is not; all messages are plaintext on the wire.
Can you tell me how and where you would broadcast your location via Mastodon? There are no geolocation features in Mastodon.
>It needs to be encrypted, too, because it's the reasonable expectation when private messages and followers-only messages exist.
Has anyone attempted to encrypt a message to 64,000 recipients yet? I don't think restricting a message to followers is an applicable model for e2ee. Direct messages yes, I can see the point in that.
For a network observer, your IP address, associated with your account name.
>I don't think restricting a message to followers is an applicable model for e2ee
But requiring TLS between clients and servers, and between servers (for the federation), is applicable.
>Direct messages yes, I can see the point in that.
The average joe expects direct messages to really be private. If they're not, that's bad.
>The average joe expects direct messages to really be private. If they're not, that's bad.
They're not "really private" in Twitter DMs and Facebook Messenger and PMs on phpBB and Discourse forums, they were not "really private" in ICQ, AIM and XMPP (unless you installed the OTR plugin on the last one). E2EE is cool but most private messages on the internet do not use it and they are still called things like "private" and "direct".
Citation needed. I was told it's optional in a recent thread.
>They're not "really private" in...
Doesn't address the argument you quoted:
>The average joe expects direct messages to really be private. If they're not, that's bad.
If you use TLS they aren't.
>should I be some location and post something, I'd be broadcasting my location, even if that isn't intended.
you broadcast it to your mastodon instance. In P2P you would actually be broadcasting your position to any network observer. In Federation only your instance knows.
Connect to post something without encryption means your location is revealed to anybody observing the network.
This is indeed dangerous.
Where are you taking this from? You think connecting to your Mastodon server you have an account on somehow broadcasts to the whole network?
- Your message
- Your account name
- Your ip address (thus location)
- The time at which this happens
If the message is sent through an encrypted connection, but the federation connection between the servers is unencrypted, a powerful enough observer could still deduce the above.
Most Mastodon servers have TLS, exceptions usually included instances deployed to localhost.
Mastodon doesn't technically require it but all clients I've seen do and the web interface relies on some features that are only available in a trusted context (HTTPS and localhost)
I don't really see the problem though, which instance you sign up to is up to you. You can sign up to a HTTP-only instance if you want.
The privacy of your data is in the hands of your local administrator more than any powerful observer (and servers you send messages too, like with email, for which all your complains are valid too since it functions similarly).
That's a serious issue. If plaintext is allowed, then expect getting people to downgrade to plaintext will be trivial, because "it just works".
It's a serious mistake, but a well understood one by today. Mastodon is relatively new, and they should have known better than to do this.
So yes, Mastodon did know better but it's not an inherent property of ActivityPub to use HTTPS.
Also, lack of encryption allows for selective censorship on the fly.
Either offer it properly or do not offer it at all. It's irresponsible otherwise.
Twitter by default broadcasts everything you write to the entire world!
Why should open source solutions be held to a higher standard?
To be fair, at least your connection to twitter is encrypted. This means that an observer can't tell it's your IP that's posting on twitter as you.
That is, your location.
Thus twitter is actually better. A court order would be needed for them to disclose IP addreses, at least.
What!? Are you talking about TLS? Because this is true for Mastodon as well then.
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/928
Instead, we should make the developer tools EASY to create P2P (not federated) decentralized apps. This is what we are working on:
http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wit...
Also, d.tube is a pretty good decentralized YouTube clone, worth a mention.
I think too many implementations are focused on the wrong things. Too many implementations are hung up on the distributed storage part. These can be plugged into abstractions as new ones come about. In the meantime, just because it says "decentralized" doesn't mean that pieces can't be centralized on some people's computers. I think when most people say that they mean off the cloud and into the home. Also, too few implementations care enough about anonymity.
Simple -> Start the app and commicate (on all devices)
Minimum features -> Feed, Chat, Groups, Events, Friends
Fast -> No one will use a slow App
Ownership -> All self-owned data can be removed from everywhere
Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data
Privacy -> With simple sharing control
So far, I've not seen anything that has all of these.
So here's the rub: 1) you post stupid stuff, but by the time you realize this, you've already forgotten your password and the account recovery doesn't work, 2) someone gets hold of your account, posts stupid stuff, and 'throws away any means to recover the account', 3) someone posts stupid stuff that is determined to violate law, how do you take that down?
- Handle DMCA notices and law enforcement requests for taking down illegal content.
- Hackers compromising accounts.
- Private data being compromised because of Wordpress like security bugs.
- Spam / Bots spreading junk and fake news.
- Permanently deleting content.
- Concerns around terrorism, grooming, child pornography etc
These problems will become major headaches at scale.
But only on instances they are administrators off.
So while I can take down illegal content on my instance I can't go to the japanese instance and ask them to stop posting all those anime girls. They follow their own rules and if I don't like them I can just not allow their content on my server.
If you want to follow both my server and the japanese server you'll have to find an instance that doesn't ban either of us or run your own.
(Though I trust that there are a good number of lightly administrated instances that it'll be easy to find one before you're forced to run your own)
Instances may decide they'll ignore the DMCA or allow japenese content that would be illegal as CP elsewhere or don't give a damn about hackers compromising you.
This is where Google+ and all the others failed.
> Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data
How do you expect to be able to do that? Decentralization implies your are passing data to peers you do not control. They'll only remove data you ask them to if they are well behaved, but there is no guarantee of that.
It's like wanting to be able to delete emails that have already be sent,
You have chards of data on more than one endpoint that sync between eachother - to forcefully remove it you would need to remove it from all of those hosts manually.
But with, let's say, an access/crypto key - you can do it on all of them. Systems like Storj already do this i believe?
I HEAVILY disagree with this. Content generated by people obtains, at one point, historical value. Self-owning should end with personal details, anything involving someone else has to be kept because I think social media has no point if someone else can just now delete basically what are part of my memories. I know Facebook doesn't do this well either, but they aren't making it easy to scrub everything clean either.
I think a line has to be drawn on the part of private ownership when it comes to privately created content.
Person A: "I have a problem X that I need help with"
[deleted]: [deleted]
Person A: "Thanks that worked!
As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
The argument in the OP article stands without this — it is nearly as bad that companies have incentives to misbehave, as if they were legally obligated to — but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
[2] https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&v...
Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire business model is based on squeezing as much value as possible out of the limited attention span of consumers.
But I also think that Facebook is already on its way down, people seem to have moved on. At least according to their numbers they still seem to grow or at least remain stable but I would guess that this is mostly due to expansion into new markets and if people there go through a similar trajectory it is only a question of time until the last new market starts and eventually stops using Facebook.
Here in Germany MeinVZ [2] was the dominant social network until people started moving to Facebook and now MeinVZ is just a ghost town. And it pretty much feels the same with Facebook now, actually already for the last five or so years, people come back and engage more and more infrequently until they eventually disappear. It is much slower as compared to MeinVZ but I am pretty sure it is essentially the same thing.
I am not sure where they are all going, maybe Instagram for the younger generation, maybe just WhatsApp for friends in my age, so Facebook the company might just be fine for some more time even if Facebook the network dies. But things have certainly changed from this madness of, I don't know, somewhere between five and ten years ago, when Facebook became inevitable, when it was constantly in thew news, when every ad poster featured a Facebook link.
I would neither be surprised if it turned out that Facebook was an essentially quite short-lived onetime phenomenon and people were not that interested in a global community as the social media proponents would want you to believe, nor would I be surprised if every generation had its own Facebook even if just to set themselves apart from the older generation. Why would we even assume that social media is more than a fluke and does not die away just like many things before?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeinVZ
Only if enough of your friends were on it to make it worthwhile, the danger is that many of your contacts would disappear, which would lessen the value of facebook for even more people, leading to a vicious cycle. And even if it didn't happen to your social circle it would stem the inflow of young people even more than is already the case).
Then it's not much of a business, period.
In my ideal world, we'd only have businesses where the costs are open and direct (e.g. no "user is the product" or selling of personal data, or even "ad-based").
If they can't make it in this way, then, sorry, they don't have a business model.
Well, if there are no buyers, then why have a product?
Google isn't a paragon, and it's alarming (to me) that Google is building a universal panopticon too. But these two companies, despite the similarity in their business models, appear very different with respect not just to how they collect data, what they collect, how much they sell, and what breaches or not-breach breaches have occurred, but also how forthcoming they are about all this, and whether they act like they've got something to hide. Facebook used tricks[1] to run their iPhone app in the background when requested not to, and only backed this out when the new iOS “battery shaming” feature outed them; they uploaded Android call history with text that mislead the user into thinking they were just uploading contacts. Google has made mis-steps and knows a scary amount about us, but I don't recall this kind of systematic boundary-pushing and post-discovery obfuscation and denial.
Or contrast Lyft and Uber.
These differences in behavior aren't from a difference in business models. They are from differences in “corporate DNA”, or culture. Zuckerberg was a teen when he wrote these messages[2], but most people I know don't speak or act like that even at that age. Some people advance to a different moral stage even at the end of, or after, their teen years; it looks from a longer pattern of evidence, only some of it recent, like Zuckerberg and his company may not have done so. Yes, business incentives are a factor, but explanations don't begin and end with “money made me do it”.
[1] http://pxlnv.com/linklog/facebook-background-data/
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-mark-zuckerbergs-se...
Corporate culture is a structure build on-top of their business, nobody has ever changed their business to adapt to their culture, they just get a rebranding and hire a PR team if the two happen to run into conflict.
That's clearly incorrect. Both Walmart and Costco are in the same retail business, but their corporate cultures are quite distinct.
Companies aren't individuals. They are aggregates, and (absence some major force, e.g. like Gates in MS or Jobs in Apple, or some important founding principles) aggregates tend to go to some mean, which in the case of companies includes profits above all.
There's a difference between "we did it because we were legally obligated" and "we did it because Zuckerberg wanted to". The myth of profit maximisation being an absolute legal duty is much too kind to Facebook here; they're not just a victim of our late capitalist system.
> It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise.
Right. Which is why their largest shareholder and CEO is going to ensure they do it, not because he's being forced by the spectre of shareholder lawsuits.
> Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to.
Certainly not if we continue to give them a pass when they fail to do so.
the company does whatever those that control the majority of the shares want it to do. Absolutely no one else, unless the company engages in illegal activity has any say. Corporations are democracies with the rules of majority that are spelled out in their documents.
The sad specter of case law dating at least as far back to Dodge v Ford [1], is that legally the only relationship that has to matter to a (US) business is its relationship with its shareholders. Consumer protections have only ever barely been carved out with regulatory action.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
> How do non-ad-buying users matter as customers to Facebook
They are literally all Facebook has, eyeballs.
Snowflakes don't matter, if only one Facebook user cares about their privacy, then Facebook shouldn't care. Is it a perfect system? No. But it is democratic.
> Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. Nowhere in the equation does it say that they’re obligated to do anything for you - the only role you serve is to be a vehicle for exploitation.
But I see an exception to this rule: Self-financed companies where the founders are still the shareholders and where the founders are in the company for the long run, and where the company is financed by the users.
If your company is financed by the users, then in order to make the business sustainable you need to optimize for the users. If the users demand privacy, then you optimize for privacy.
I'm aware that slow, sustainable growth is not popular in silicon valley, but that's probably a question of culture (in many european countries a lot of startups still follow this path).
That's only a myth in that it's not mandated. But it's still very much what almost every company will do, so it's a de facto (if not de jure) thing.
But it didn't used to be like that – not even that long ago, either. In 1970 Friedman released his essay "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits". Look at the corporate behavior he was criticizing:
> The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers.
In other words, companies at that time WERE concerned about social responsibility, and not purely focused on profit. Friedman didn't like this; he called it "pure and unadulterated socialism".
Since that time this parasitic mentality was spread to and propagated by top schools like Harvard, dominating the world view of that next generation of businessmen/women. But it was never "a defacto" thing, and many are starting to catch on to the damage it has caused.
I agree with your implication in using the word "myth" that fiduciary duty as a concern is overblown in the collective world of public corporations (the decision in Dodge v Ford was hugely problematic and its shadow haunts us all), but it's not a myth in that it doesn't exist.
Also, while I do like the expression "if you're not a customer, you're a product", it does not change the actual definition of the word customer.
> a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business
You may be confusing the word "customer" with the word "user"?
> 1. General: A party that receives or consumes products (goods or services) and has the ability to choose between different products and suppliers. See also buyer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer
> In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration
I think to me the customer is the one receiving the product, whether or not they have actually spent money.
Also for consideration, "paying customer" and "non-paying customer" are common(?) phrases.
But will they change? Zuckerberg, as far as I can tell, started Facebook because he wanted to be master of the (internet) universe. And then he hired a lot of really smart people with the same motives.
Are you hoping that at some point in time he is going to have a great moral conversion and decide to forego power and wealth and become a sort of saint who will give it all away? Seems to me far more likely Zuckerberg will pretend to reform, but keep pursuing the same goals.
What you are saying seems to be that we should not push decentralization and instead just wait around for something good to happen. Which in turn makes me wonder about your motivations.
The article is about why we need to decentralize. This is an important issue, and so we need to have a discussion to decide whether or not this is the right course of action. And we have this great resource, an internet comment section, in which to discuss it. And you are a netizen, so you should think about it and add in any useful comments you might have.
Instead you made a comment that derails the conversation off onto a track that it seems to me isn't useful. I see this happen a lot here at HN. There is a lot of useful discussion, but so often there are also people who make comments that derail the discussion, provoke an argument that isn't really relevant. I wish every commenter would first think out what is the basic issue at stake, and avoid making comments that lead to disputes that are off track from what needs to be discussed and decided.
Also I'd like to hear the author's thoughts on GPG's viability, as discussed below:
https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/
Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG. I don’t mean someone who cares about privacy, because I think we all care about privacy. There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers.
I stand corrected. I'll have a look at Mastodon.
Facebook has a disincentive to sell data: if they sold user data, they no longer have exclusive control over it and somebody else can profit off their efforts in its collection. The value of Facebook is they have lots of eyeballs and they have lots of data on what those eyeballs like to see. If they simply sold this to an advertiser, why would the advertiser want to come back and pay them in the future? What they actually do is let advertisers target on this data, but the advertisers never actually have direct access - they can only assume that the users they target are ones that have the attributes they requested.
So what is Facebook selling? The same thing any other media platform, from newspapers to TV, is selling: your attention. Are you the product? Kind of. But just like any other marketplace, Facebook knows that if their platform doesn't provide value you're not going to come back and then neither will the advertisers.
Personally I think Google has played this balance far worse, by comparison: their interaction time with their users is so small that they have gotten more and more spammy to wedge into the little bit of your attention they get. Facebook gets a lot of user time and thus can be far more judicious on when and how they show you advertisements.
That's what this whole uproar is about: they're allowing wholesale data access, not aggregated targets through their API.
Google, whom you criticize, is the one actually only selling aggregates.
Second, Google grants just as much access to your data via API, if not more, than Facebook. Using Google’s APIs, you can grant full access and control to your email, calendar, contacts, etc. If you think companies aren’t currently abusing that in ways that make Cambridge Analytica look like children, you would be mistaken.
But as the article points out, in order to get people's attention it does things like allow fake news to be posted, and allow apps to collect your personal data.
Check it out - matrix.org
PS: Even more importantly, the Host Identity Protocol. The US army has been using it for over 10 years. If that doesnt speak volumes ...
Plus, the author talks about Mastodon, which solves an entirely different problem than matrix to begin with.
Matrix doesn't even support ActivityPub, which is basically the W3C approved standard for federated social activity, it should be easy for Matrix to integrate into the fediverse.
Until then I won't consider matrix as a serious solution to anything.
I do agree that mastodon and matrix - of which I'm a fan of both - solve for different scenarios. Mastodon replaces twitter; sort of short social media bursts/broadcasts. While matrix replaces slack (and other chat platforms like xmpp). I've always seen matrix as a modern-day irc; also allowing expansion and enhancement via plugins, and programmability like good ol' irc is/was.
ActivityPub was only recently approved, so can't expect every project to instantly support it; though to be fair it has been on many projects' radar well before its approval by w3c. I truthfully haven't followed the latest matrix news, so not sure if support for activitypub is coming soon. I do feel that supporting activityPub really make it that much more powerful of a protocol AND platform...but i'm sure that's not a trivial matter.
If you haven't played around with clients for matrix (such as the Riot clients), i suggest you give it a try. Riot keeps getting better and better with each new release.
Aggregators would be where you go to set up your friend list and see your feed. It could look and feel like Facebook does now. It would have an open standard protocol that content hosters would use if they wanted to be aggregated. This could still be an add driven business, but subscription, self hosted, and DIY solutions could exist too.
Content hosters could either charge a monthly hosting fee, or they could serve up their own adds. Self hosted and DIY solutions could also exist.
The big benefit to this would of course be the competition. Since it's an open standard anyone could be a content host, and anyone could be an aggregator.
To make extra sure there is competition, and this could come in a phase two after the initial splitting up of Facebook, there should be open standards for exporting and importing friends, follows, likes, etc. to and from aggregators, and open standards for importing and exporting content from the hosters.
Speaking of follows and likes, there could also be aggregator aggregators (AAs). People could opt in to publicly and anonymously share their likes and follows and the AAs would consume those and report on trends that cross aggregator boundaries. Anonymity could be much more protected this way while still giving us that interesting information about what is trending.
One tricky part of this is how do I as a content author only allow my friends to see certain posts of mine? It would have to be with encryption. My content provider could keep public keys of my friends and only my friends (well, their aggregators) would be able to decrypt my posts using my friends' private keys. I can see some challenges and holes in this, but it doesn't seem any worse overall than how Facebook protects privacy now. Open implementations and peer review could get us to better-than-Facebook privacy quickly.
Is there a connection between any recent event and German(y) that I missed?
Some words, phrases and symbols from foreign languages can become internationally-famous so almost everybody can understand them and also gain meme-like semantic self-emphasize.
¡No pasarán!
ॐ
PS: I have also heard it's quite popular among French metal bands to use German in their names to sound scarier (e.g. Blut Aus Nord).
Why not? Not a fan of the 60s?
If you want to decentralize the servers then you MUST also decouple user accounts from the server they signed up with. Today, if you switch to Masterdon (or perhaps someone you know is running a diaspora node), everything appears to go well until a year from now when the volunteer who was providing the server loses interest or moves on, and your account/photos/journal/social network vanishes. So you start over by creating a new account with another server... tick tick tick, gone. Rinse repeat.
Centralized services don't have this problem - even myspace is still up today, meaning this killer problem isn't on our radar when we evaluate things like Masterdon, or promote it. We don't realize this is a temporary arrangement with a clock ticking down to complete account destruction.
Hubzilla is the only decentralized social media project I've encountered that tackled this problem and sort of solved it (they call it "nomadic identity"). I hear that needing an architecture able to solve this problem was why when Friendica was gaining popularity, the guy behind it realized the whole concept was a lost cause and subsequently started again with what would later be called Hubzilla.
Regardless of whether Hubzilla itself is your cup of tea, separating user accounts from volunteer run servers is necessary before centralized social networks can be challenged, otherwise you just inoculate people against ever leaving the central networks again.
(not to suggest this is the only necessary thing, or only hard nut to crack)
* Identity management via blockchain (one of the use cases where IMHO this is a good, or at least defensible choice).
* Metadata storage in a DHT
* Content storage in torrent swarms
None of this depends on any single peer/server.
[1] http://twister.net.co/
Y'all got any more of them "examples"
I'm now aware of two social media alternatives that aren't dead accounts walking. Twister is in beta, but that looks interesting enough to play with and keep an eye on.
On twister, you could regularly see people having their "oh shit" moment when they published a post with a typo or such for the first time. You get used to it.
I chose twister as an example because its decentralization contrasts nicely/clearly with the federation being discussed in the parent.
Mastodon is working on migrating accounts between servers so that in the exact case you describe people can take their data and move elsewhere.
Of course, you'll need permission (though sometimes asking for forgiveness can be good enough)
You do not want to start there, Facebook's MO is exactly that.
Facebook's MO is "store all the shit and never delete it", an archival project should have an MO of "archive everything we can get and delete it when somebody complains".
Otherwise you'll never be able to archive any significant portion of the internet or fediverse.
> If you want to decentralize the servers then you MUST also decouple user accounts from the server they signed up with.
I somewhat disagree. Email is a decentralized service that works well and its accounts are coupled to the server you signed up with. It merely requires you to do some research when picking a node² or running your own.
Ideally there would be some provision in the protocol that allows you to transfer your content and notify your friends whenever there is an address change. You could do this with a digital signature. You could also bolt on a decentralized identity that's on the blockchain, e.g. register a domain with namecoin (which is completely decentralized) and point it to your current social identity. Problem solved¹.
--
¹ to be fair, registering a domain with namecoin is not trivial at the moment.
² perhaps pick one that requires payment, that creates an obligation to provide the service
Additionally, there are features in email that you won't expect from these nodes like a useful (to muggles) data export. I can pull down my email with IMAP or POP, close that account, and still have access to all of my old email. Hell, I could _reply_ to one of those old conversations using my new account/provider and keep right on trucking.
Yes, decentralization would be the right solution. But this will always be discouraged by governments and corps alike, basically by everybody who has already lots of power and wants to have more power over your life.
As always you as a single person can choose to either be part of the ant swarm, giving someone else all power over you, but by that sharing in the ant swarms gains and luxuries as long as you are loyal, or by being self reliable but therefore also really be required to build everything by yourself that you really need and want to have.
If you decide for the first part there is really no reason not to give the person who has power over you also access to all your data. It's part of how a group works. And if the people at the top don't like you anymore then they will find ways to kick you out no matter what you do or keep secret. On the other hand its also part of the deal that the people above you don't use their power to peek into your life as long as you stay loyal and support their goals.
So FB either needs to accept to only live on the fringe instead of being the market dominator, or they need to accept that the government has bigger power and yield to them.
The only thing I feel one needs to be wary about is parasites who wants to keep the whole cake without sharing even a little bit with people below them. Trump is one such example. With these people you can't do either of the two paths, there's only the battle for who's stronger. And if you are like most people you don't really enjoy being in a constant struggle for survival.
It might very well be that Zuck is fighting against Trump here, and then that's the parasite situation and all Zuck could do is move out of the US, give up that market until Trump is gone again.