as much as I applaud the effort, the next Uber or Facebook won't be a better Uber or Facebook but something totally different. I wish companies would stop trying to be better copies of existing services. Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.
Also they have no idea how to finance and fund their growth:
>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.
We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
> Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.
How was Facebook radically different than other social media sites? In my opinion, it was almost exactly the same as the rest. They just leveraged some clever marketing.
Probably because, if one wants a social network, there are already many good ones in the market. And the people who care enough about privacy to quit facebook, probably won't use any social network at all.
> Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.
Not really. Facebook was hardly the first social network, but it was better (at certain things, like friends discovery) and worse at others (like publishing your own content).
If it made any sense to the common person, the front page shouldn't have "open source" in its description. Because your average grandma has no idea what that means.
It's an insanely hard market to chew into and thus I can say they've already lost.
It does not matter that the average grandma has no idea what that means. New products need early adopters, and the average grandma is not a potential early adopter, neither is the average grandpa or anyone average, really.
Any argument, including being Open Source, is good to get early adopters. Communication can change later on.
Too many products try to appeal to the general public too soon. This is not how user acquisition works.
You don't build a social network around tech, you bootstrap it with a community. Bootstrapping it with Open Source enthusiasts is fine. If you say "we're yet another social network" you have no value proposition. Not that I think that "we're yet another Open Source social network" is good either...
Also, the fact that a grandma doesn't know what Open Source means doesn't really concern me, but the fact that the children of someone who posts on HN and works at Google don't, does. Maybe that's part of the reason why proprietary, centralized services are winning.
Anyway, I do have concerns along the same line, not because "Open Source" is on the front page but because:
- The team is not diverse enough in terms of experience. The COO is an "information-security expert"; the CMO is a "security and international relations expert"; the Chief of Product is a "pragmatic software engineer" and "crypto-geek". This is a problem, even though not necessarily deadly.
- They plan to allocate 70 % of the budget to software engineering, and basically 0 % to marketing / user acquisition / community management. This is the biggest red flag for me.
Just googled the COO, she is pretty big in the security community. Also was CISO at a Dutch Telecom, and they have Phil Zimmerman!
Im not worried about the budget for marketing, they seem to have managed to get themselves into a few leading publications already and the early backers will provide initial beta users + word of mouth marketing.
What remains to be seen is if the team can execute, I guess only time will tell. Overall good initiative though.
Your average grandma will also be annoyed, when she learns that the website doesn't work without javascript, because she doesn't know what JavaScript is so she turned it off along with many other options she didn't understand when she combed through about:config after installing Firefox from source code.
Does it federate with other services? I have not seen anything mentioning this on the website and I consider it to be crucial for me backing the idea of this service. I don't want or need yet another centralized *book.
Based on the FAQ I'd say it will not be federated, at least not initially, and in the FAQ they explain why. In short, they think that's where other initiatives fall short, and they want to sidestep the issue completely, and come back to it once they're profitable.
I don't think that FAQ entry answers the question asked by the parent comment.
They say that they don't want to decentralize the service (as in, everyone can run their own instance), and I can understand their stand on that. However, they say nothing about federation with other similar attempts that are popping up.
Instead of "Will I be able to run my own instance?", think: Will I be able to follow an Openbook account from my Mastodon account?
This is something I didn't know I cared about until I followed Blender's PeerTube instance account from a Mastodon instance. Pixelfed is working on it, and Plume, and...
It's something I've come to expect. If your hot new app doesn't federate, I don't care about it.
Me too. All they needed to do was profile their webpage in modern browser to see the glaring performance problems. Doesn't bode well for a more complex piece of software like a social network.
"We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management."
I have high end computer (i7-7700 with 32GB of empty RAM) with pretty good graphics card (GeForce GTX 1060)... and this site is lagging. I can't even scroll properly.
Based on wappalyzer, webpack & jquery are used on the website. But no other framework (React, Vue, Ionic) is detected... So it's just jquery + webpack?
I don't know what you're looking at, but for sure they're using vue.
Most likely suspect is the typewriter animation, which ought to be done with https://github.com/tameemsafi/typewriterjs (but maybe it's just how they used it - or maybe something entirely different, I just had a quick look).
Here we go, another Social Network engine :) Just following the NIH syndrome, once again.
> OpenBook is OpenSource
Yeah awesome. Like many other projects. Having the OpenSource stamp is not really an advantage anymore. Building and maintaining a community around it, with strong support and integration is something way more difficult to do.
> On Openbook you will not only be able to personalise your profile, but the entire network itself! From changing the color of your homepage to adding plugins, you can make it as unique as yourself.
So basically I can customize everything. On my instance? Is it federated/decentralized (doesn't seems so)?
> We don’t track anything you do, neither monetize your information nor share it without your explicit and informed consent.
Hopefully the GDPR has already cover all those things :)
> All applications will be reviewed by us. We will make sure they: only request the needed information, have the exact location of your data available for you, at all times, delete all your information if you’d revoke the permission...
GDPR
> Some examples of the technology we'll be researching and developing:
> Cryptographically enforced data sharing policies
> End to end encryption, even on the browser
> Public key cryptography on the browser
> Post-quantum cryptography algorithms and protocols
NIH syndrom, all those things are already covered by many other projects, why not reusing that? Also, "post-quantum" cryptography, looks like a nice buzzword thrown in there.
> Migrating to Openbook will be easy-peasy, with our simple drag-and-drop system. Just download your data from your old social network1 and transfer them to Openbook. Shazam!
Good luck with that. GDPR is indeed forcing social platforms to have a Data-Portability politic. Facebook is exporting the user content in HTML flat file with no proper identifiers or easy way to reconstruct the data structure.
> ...we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
So basically they are developing another centralized Social Network engine.
Even that thread itself was the "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." thread of the future.
It's an interesting phenomenon that in the age of the internet there are easily accessible public records of how hard it is to tell what is going to be a big deal.
> Some examples of the technology we'll be researching and developing: > Cryptographically enforced data sharing policies > End to end encryption, even on the browser > Public key cryptography on the browser > Post-quantum cryptography algorithms and protocols
"If you give us money we'll invent great crypto" -> "We're secure"
If it's not federated, there is little control already. If the business models for centralized networks are not aggressive right now, nothing stop them from evolving once there's more money on the table.
I wonder what folks here think about ActivityPub. I been craving for a federated protocol since Google Wave. I'm yet to go through it in detail and see if it really stands.
If you're looking for a real-time federated social-network (that is what I understood by "Google Wave") solution have a look at solutions based on the industry standard XMPP. I'm building one (Movim https://movim.eu/) and started to explain how is made the architecture in this blog post https://nl.movim.eu/?blog/edhelas%40movim.eu/how-s-made-movi....
Not sure they have their priorities right. The last item in the list of goals (at $500,000, no less) are iOS and Android apps. I would think that should come first as without this very few people will want to use the service at all.
I am tired of Apps that really should just be websites. Unless you have some kind of real, functional need to access my phone's hardware or software I don't need you taking up space on my device. I'd much rather just save a book mark to my home screen and launch from there.
The splash page is hideously slow and stuttering even on desktop. Is the CSS/JS just this bad, or is this site trying to mine cryptocurrency in the background?
I hadn't heard about this. They've sued several companies whose names end with "book". Apparently a lawsuit coming from FB is scary enough that they've acquiesced and changed their names, without standing up in court. Replacebook!
I'm not sure I can imagine any path to success here. Maybe focus on a small interest group or locale to begin with, then look to spread outward from there. A small college campus perhaps. ;) Still...this needs a hook other than the privacy angle, and a big one at that.
A nearly empty webpage that lags like crazy is very bad promotion and makes me question whether they have the knowledge to create a high-traffic social network. Also, the quote of the founder:
Openbook is not only an evolutionary step for social networks, it's also a humanitarian project at world scale.
Makes me want to vomit. You're making a website, not feeding hungry children.
>In partnership with FoundersPledge, we'll be giving 30% of our revenue towards projects for education, sanitization, climate change prevention and more.
> So far we have been completely self funded. However, this has proven to be very hard. With most of us working full-time jobs apart from Openbook, it could take us long time till we release the first version and even then, we would not be able to afford the IT infrastructure needed to compete with any of the established networks. As we wanted the project to be driven by people and not capital, we decided to go for crowd-funding. We'll be launching our Kickstarter campaign on the 17th of July.
They don't appear to have a revenue model. I'm not sure if they consider donations from kickstarter revenue, but so far its their only source. I don't think passing on 30% of donations to FoundersPledge is really changing the world
So far I've only read comments that have a strong tendency towards the destructive or even pejorative end of the spectrum. I think that's unfair considering all the effort they are putting into this.
Having said that, I'd like to know what distinguishes this from e.g. Facebook in the long term. It's easy to put out a manifesto and pledge that you are never going to do bad things. It's also easy to come up with a vague theoretical business model that doesn't really say how it will work.
Let's assume they succeed with this – there is nothing that enforces these early statements anymore and soon investor pressure will lead to an outcome similar to the established success stories.
That's why I think you have to be much more different if you really aim to make a difference at scale.
They're not just trying this. They're asking for money from regular folks with no real sustainable revenue model apart from "we're crowd-funding" [0]. People are free to donate as they like, but I think the whole pitch is not entirely honest.
You should read their FAQ on Kickstarter [1]. There they answer why their project is not federated, what revenue model they aim for, and why they aren't a non-profit.
Here's their take on the business model:
>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.
>We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
>Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
If their revenue model is based on people selling each other stuff, it will end up the LinkedIn for MLM.
The Enterprise play sounds like a Holy Grail project. A social network, project management, ActiveDirectory/LDAP all-in-one? As a side project to fund a social network?
>The Enterprise play sounds like a Holy Grail project.
To me it sounds like they want to do what most other social networks do, make businesses pay for their profiles and features.
The trading part I'm doubting as well. That's something quite difficult to set up and scale. So it doesn't bode well when they don't offer a proper explanation.
> There they answer why their project is not federated, what revenue model they aim for, and why they aren't a non-profit.
No, they don't.
Federation-wise, there's not a single word on federation. They talk about decentralization, not federation. To quote my other comment:
> Instead of "Will I be able to run my own instance?", think: Will I be able to follow an Openbook account from my Mastodon account?
As for the business model, I really need more than "atomic digital units of value" and "our ambitions go way beyond that". The last sentence does tell me something, but that something directly contradicts their stand on decentralization.
As for why they aren't a non-profit, they generalize pretty much every non-profit and say that they "don't grow exponentially" (without defining what they mean), and they mention names that do indeed grow year after year.
At the end, none of those three questions are answered for me.
Federation is a sub-category of decentralization, so if they reject the latter it's usually obvious they don't plan to support the former either.
Besides, their reasons for not running a decentralized service do apply for a federated service as well, and as far as I can see, they're using the terms synonymously anyway.
Whether those are good enough arguments, that's another debate.
>At the end, none of those three questions are answered for me.
Well, it's still their answer, and that's what my post was about.
In their (now archived) ideas repo, one guy suggested ActivityPub. But they rejected that specification as not fitting with their requirements. See: https://github.com/OpenbookOrg/ideas/issues/1
> This seems to go to far. Give the users control over their data in your system AND give them control over how their data is sent to other systems.
Depending on how you define "system", being unable to track and/or delete data federated out might put you in a hazardous position around GDPR. It's not just about users controlling their own data. It's also about system operators being able to enumerate who they shared data with, what safeguards and processes they follow, and so on.
I consider fundraising a part of trying. Without funding it's just not possible to do anything and maybe that's the reason why there are so many open points here.
With regard to your point on the business model. I've criticized exactly this in my comment. I think they need to put more work into this.
If people are willing to donate without a better understanding of their plans then I'm disproven (for now) and it's their right to do so :)
Sure, but that wasn't my point. I was rebutting your statement. I was not saying what would or would not be nice.
Honestly, I have a completely different read on the content of the comments on this page. I think you are going out of your way to find "pejorative" and "destructive" comments. The majority appear to be pretty well thought out by my eyes. Most people seem to be questioning the efficacy of openbook's approach to the problem. It is obviously something people care a lot about and there are a lot of very legitimate issues with openbook's approach that have been discussed on this page.
You quoted a piece of my comment out of context and then said that "putting effort into something does not insulate you from criticism".
I never said that.
I said that the comments I read up to the point in time when I wrote my comment looked not exactly constructive or helpful.
I agree that later some people made up their minds and contributed helpful criticism.
That does not invalidate my point though.
Maybe we wouldn't have to deal with things like FB anymore if qualified people would use their time to come up with a solution instead of pointing out what does NOT work all the time.
How are openbook going to fund this? It costs a lot of money to run a social network. I read through the material and the only thing I saw was a pi-chart, nothing explained their revenue model. Not to mention their privacy model seems exactly the same as facebook's.
I guess thats why the kickstarter! And if they get traction they can always later go for venture capital. I know its an uphill task but I'm overall positive. Kickstarter will also get them a lot of beta users right out the door so that was a smart move if you ask me
I think I saw something about their revenue model on their website FAQ.
The kickerstarter will only bring in a finite amount of money. Long term operations will surely require more than that. Why would anyone want to invest in this? Twitter/facebook etc can at least collect advertising information. There is some discussion about what seems to basically be a cryptocurrency, but its surely not sustainable.
167 comments
[ 109 ms ] story [ 1150 ms ] threadAlso they have no idea how to finance and fund their growth:
>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.
We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
How was Facebook radically different than other social media sites? In my opinion, it was almost exactly the same as the rest. They just leveraged some clever marketing.
In terms of features it was a static page with the only dynamic capability being the ability to poke someone.
Based on what premise?
> I wish companies would stop trying to be better copies of existing services.
Why? Almost all creativity and improvement goes by creating a better version of something that exists already.
Not really. Facebook was hardly the first social network, but it was better (at certain things, like friends discovery) and worse at others (like publishing your own content).
It's an insanely hard market to chew into and thus I can say they've already lost.
Any argument, including being Open Source, is good to get early adopters. Communication can change later on.
Too many products try to appeal to the general public too soon. This is not how user acquisition works.
My 23 year old son and 18 year old daughter didn't know what open-source meant.
If you could build a social network around tech people we'd all be using Google Plus.
Also, the fact that a grandma doesn't know what Open Source means doesn't really concern me, but the fact that the children of someone who posts on HN and works at Google don't, does. Maybe that's part of the reason why proprietary, centralized services are winning.
Anyway, I do have concerns along the same line, not because "Open Source" is on the front page but because:
- The team is not diverse enough in terms of experience. The COO is an "information-security expert"; the CMO is a "security and international relations expert"; the Chief of Product is a "pragmatic software engineer" and "crypto-geek". This is a problem, even though not necessarily deadly.
- They plan to allocate 70 % of the budget to software engineering, and basically 0 % to marketing / user acquisition / community management. This is the biggest red flag for me.
Im not worried about the budget for marketing, they seem to have managed to get themselves into a few leading publications already and the early backers will provide initial beta users + word of mouth marketing.
What remains to be seen is if the team can execute, I guess only time will tell. Overall good initiative though.
Your average grandma does not know Kickstarter.
They say that they don't want to decentralize the service (as in, everyone can run their own instance), and I can understand their stand on that. However, they say nothing about federation with other similar attempts that are popping up.
Instead of "Will I be able to run my own instance?", think: Will I be able to follow an Openbook account from my Mastodon account?
It's something I've come to expect. If your hot new app doesn't federate, I don't care about it.
edit: found this
"We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management."
”Atomic digital unit of value?”
Who writes this stuff?
Hard to believe that Phil Zimmermann is on board. Assuming that's true...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the...
Who types in a url any more?
Most likely suspect is the typewriter animation, which ought to be done with https://github.com/tameemsafi/typewriterjs (but maybe it's just how they used it - or maybe something entirely different, I just had a quick look).
> OpenBook is OpenSource
Yeah awesome. Like many other projects. Having the OpenSource stamp is not really an advantage anymore. Building and maintaining a community around it, with strong support and integration is something way more difficult to do.
> On Openbook you will not only be able to personalise your profile, but the entire network itself! From changing the color of your homepage to adding plugins, you can make it as unique as yourself.
So basically I can customize everything. On my instance? Is it federated/decentralized (doesn't seems so)?
> We don’t track anything you do, neither monetize your information nor share it without your explicit and informed consent.
Hopefully the GDPR has already cover all those things :)
> All applications will be reviewed by us. We will make sure they: only request the needed information, have the exact location of your data available for you, at all times, delete all your information if you’d revoke the permission...
GDPR
> Some examples of the technology we'll be researching and developing: > Cryptographically enforced data sharing policies > End to end encryption, even on the browser > Public key cryptography on the browser > Post-quantum cryptography algorithms and protocols
NIH syndrom, all those things are already covered by many other projects, why not reusing that? Also, "post-quantum" cryptography, looks like a nice buzzword thrown in there.
> Migrating to Openbook will be easy-peasy, with our simple drag-and-drop system. Just download your data from your old social network1 and transfer them to Openbook. Shazam!
Good luck with that. GDPR is indeed forcing social platforms to have a Data-Portability politic. Facebook is exporting the user content in HTML flat file with no proper identifiers or easy way to reconstruct the data structure.
> ...we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
So basically they are developing another centralized Social Network engine.
( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 )
It's an interesting phenomenon that in the age of the internet there are easily accessible public records of how hard it is to tell what is going to be a big deal.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
"If you give us money we'll invent great crypto" -> "We're secure"
I wonder what folks here think about ActivityPub. I been craving for a federated protocol since Google Wave. I'm yet to go through it in detail and see if it really stands.
It doesn't help that javascript is required
https://money.cnn.com/2010/08/26/technology/teachbook/
Openbook is not only an evolutionary step for social networks, it's also a humanitarian project at world scale.
Makes me want to vomit. You're making a website, not feeding hungry children.
>In partnership with FoundersPledge, we'll be giving 30% of our revenue towards projects for education, sanitization, climate change prevention and more.
>Who's paying for everything so far?
> So far we have been completely self funded. However, this has proven to be very hard. With most of us working full-time jobs apart from Openbook, it could take us long time till we release the first version and even then, we would not be able to afford the IT infrastructure needed to compete with any of the established networks. As we wanted the project to be driven by people and not capital, we decided to go for crowd-funding. We'll be launching our Kickstarter campaign on the 17th of July.
They don't appear to have a revenue model. I'm not sure if they consider donations from kickstarter revenue, but so far its their only source. I don't think passing on 30% of donations to FoundersPledge is really changing the world
They are probably trying something similar to ghost blogging platform.
Whether they are successful or not is to be seen, but I am not enjoying how some people are unnecessarily shitting on their effort.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2-L3Kgc6Y7E&t=89s
Website looks like this for me: https://i.imgur.com/7OkVlUz.png
I am using Google Chrome on Windows 10
So far I've only read comments that have a strong tendency towards the destructive or even pejorative end of the spectrum. I think that's unfair considering all the effort they are putting into this.
Having said that, I'd like to know what distinguishes this from e.g. Facebook in the long term. It's easy to put out a manifesto and pledge that you are never going to do bad things. It's also easy to come up with a vague theoretical business model that doesn't really say how it will work.
Let's assume they succeed with this – there is nothing that enforces these early statements anymore and soon investor pressure will lead to an outcome similar to the established success stories.
That's why I think you have to be much more different if you really aim to make a difference at scale.
[0] https://www.open-book.org/en/faq
Here's their take on the business model:
>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.
>We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
>Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the...
The Enterprise play sounds like a Holy Grail project. A social network, project management, ActiveDirectory/LDAP all-in-one? As a side project to fund a social network?
To me it sounds like they want to do what most other social networks do, make businesses pay for their profiles and features.
The trading part I'm doubting as well. That's something quite difficult to set up and scale. So it doesn't bode well when they don't offer a proper explanation.
Especially if the admins lock themselves out of the kind of data you need for fraud prevention.
No, they don't.
Federation-wise, there's not a single word on federation. They talk about decentralization, not federation. To quote my other comment:
> Instead of "Will I be able to run my own instance?", think: Will I be able to follow an Openbook account from my Mastodon account?
As for the business model, I really need more than "atomic digital units of value" and "our ambitions go way beyond that". The last sentence does tell me something, but that something directly contradicts their stand on decentralization.
As for why they aren't a non-profit, they generalize pretty much every non-profit and say that they "don't grow exponentially" (without defining what they mean), and they mention names that do indeed grow year after year.
At the end, none of those three questions are answered for me.
Besides, their reasons for not running a decentralized service do apply for a federated service as well, and as far as I can see, they're using the terms synonymously anyway.
Whether those are good enough arguments, that's another debate.
>At the end, none of those three questions are answered for me.
Well, it's still their answer, and that's what my post was about.
This seems to go to far. Give the users control over their data in your system AND give them control over how their data is sent to other systems.
Edit: In the linked issue, OpenBook CEO said that you can't delete mastodon accounts, but Mastodon got that feature a couple weeks after his post:
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/3728
Depending on how you define "system", being unable to track and/or delete data federated out might put you in a hazardous position around GDPR. It's not just about users controlling their own data. It's also about system operators being able to enumerate who they shared data with, what safeguards and processes they follow, and so on.
With regard to your point on the business model. I've criticized exactly this in my comment. I think they need to put more work into this.
If people are willing to donate without a better understanding of their plans then I'm disproven (for now) and it's their right to do so :)
Putting in effort into something does not insulate you from criticism.
Honestly, I have a completely different read on the content of the comments on this page. I think you are going out of your way to find "pejorative" and "destructive" comments. The majority appear to be pretty well thought out by my eyes. Most people seem to be questioning the efficacy of openbook's approach to the problem. It is obviously something people care a lot about and there are a lot of very legitimate issues with openbook's approach that have been discussed on this page.
I never said that.
I said that the comments I read up to the point in time when I wrote my comment looked not exactly constructive or helpful.
I agree that later some people made up their minds and contributed helpful criticism.
That does not invalidate my point though.
Maybe we wouldn't have to deal with things like FB anymore if qualified people would use their time to come up with a solution instead of pointing out what does NOT work all the time.
I think I saw something about their revenue model on their website FAQ.