I'm actually fine that it is not de-centralized. It is true that federated systems are too complicated for practical use. However, to go against Facebook, we need something like Wikipedia, not Facebook by some other guy who pinky promises that he will be good.<p>This right here kills it for me, and hopefully others too.<p>"Why is Openbook not a non-profit?<p>Making Openbook a for-profit was a hard choice to make.
We love Wikipedia, the Ghost Foundation, Founders Pledge, Mozilla and many more. However we see the same struggle repeated over and over again. These companies struggle to grow beyond their profitability. These companies struggle to grow to the size and resources needed to compete with for-profit businesses.<p>When we need to grow exponentially, we need to be able to raise the large amounts of money needed to do so. Therefore we are officially a for-profit company.<p>But do note that when we do this, we will make sure the people investing in the company will be people with real interest on the platform, its core values of privacy, security, freedom, openness and its humanitarian nature."<p>NO NO NO NO NO!!! Why do you have to exponentially grow to be useful. Be the right service, and growth comes by that virtue. People love Wikipedia for what it is, not because it "grows exponentially". You're just another guy with good motives until you succumb to investor pressure.<p>I've been hoping for a Mozilla/Wikimedia like foundation to come up with a modern centralized alternative to Facebook, that just has it in their bylaws that prevents any creepy tracking from being implemented in the first place.<p>As they say, "False pretence of security is worse than no security because it makes you let your guard down". Don't dilute the community driven foundations by profit driven projects like this, please.
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.
First of all, kudos for trying this.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That's why I think you have to be much more different if you really aim to make a difference at scale.
It is worth mentioning that protocol-based social networks exist. Like <a href="https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/</a>
Might be interesting if it was federated. Federation is AFAICT the only way to avoid network effects, which are why we're in this whole mess to begin with. (Many more people would have left Facebook after all the scandals if they could interact with their Facebook friends from another site.) There's no way of ensuring that Openbook wouldn't become as evil as Facebook once it had a big userbase.
Today, everybody can build a social network. Apparently though building a social network that's actually used is quite hard and many failed. So I'd expect somebody who tries again to have some novel approach but it doesn't look like it. How does this compare to disapora or mastodon except the lack of federation?<p>I really wish them to succeed since I'd like to see somebody breaking the facebook monopoly, yet I'm quite sure this won't end any different than disapora, mastadon, app.net and the several ones I can't even remember anymore.<p>There is this common mistake of seeing these platforms as a technical challenge but in reality, unless you have a novel approach that people crave for, it's a lot of non-technical hustle.
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.
If it's not ad supported, how do they plan to keep the lights on once the Kickstarter funding gets exhausted and when they don't get any institutional funding? Somehow the following paragraph form the manifesto doesn't sound very convincing (it sounds like some messaging services that have said that they'll make money selling stickers):<p>> "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.<p>> 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."<p>This should also be listed in the FAQ.
"drag and drop your old social media archive... import all your photos, videos, chats and more".<p>Photos/videos I can sort of understand, but 'chats' - they're done <i>with other people</i>, none of whom would have been granting permission for their content to be migrated to openbook. Am I being too literal here, or is this a privacy violation being promised on day one?
Here we go, another Social Network engine :) Just following the NIH syndrome, once again.<p>> OpenBook is OpenSource<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>So basically I can customize everything. On my instance? Is it federated/decentralized (doesn't seems so)?<p>> We don’t track anything you do, neither monetize your information nor share it without your explicit and informed consent.<p>Hopefully the GDPR has already cover all those things :)<p>> 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...<p>GDPR<p>> 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<p>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.<p>> 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!<p>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.<p>> ...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.<p>So basically they are developing another centralized Social Network engine.
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:<p>Openbook is not only an evolutionary step for social networks, it's also a humanitarian project at world scale.<p>Makes me want to vomit. You're making a website, not feeding hungry children.
A long long time ago (in 2010), Facebook sued a start-up called Teachbook for using 'book' in its name. Hope you don't get into that muddle.<p><a href="https://money.cnn.com/2010/08/26/technology/teachbook/" rel="nofollow">https://money.cnn.com/2010/08/26/technology/teachbook/</a>
Not knocking this effort, but why are all decentralized, open social networks that hope to compete against Facebook and Instagram so...dull?<p>Their marketing is all the same wholesomeness and positive messaging. There's no "rebellious" streak to it at all.<p>But wholesomeness didn't help Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram grow. Facebook was the "adults only" social network that required a .edu address when it was challenging MySpace. Snapchat was pretty much a sexting app. Instagram is basically semi-nude models in its search feed.<p>I get what these people are trying to do, but you're not going to do that by being boring and corporate.
I built two working, bug free social sites and yet nobody cares about them. At the end of the day someone else comes with a vaporware manifesto and takes the discussion away from actual products.
> helping make the world a better place.<p>It's hard to take anyone seriously who uses that phrase... Especially in this sort of context.<p>That's been a joke for a long time now, everyone knows it's nonsense.
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.<p>Also they have no idea how to finance and fund their growth:<p><i>>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.<p>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.<p>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>
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?
At this point I don't trust the sunny promises of any for-profit that wants me to give them my data. Data is the new oil. If an organization can get it and legally profit from it, be assured that they will.
While it's easy to point out at moral level that nothing is guaranteed that if this sort of project gets big it cannot just run off with investor money to go off on Zuckerberg hijinks which has no good reason to even exist at this point -- the notion that it is "too difficult" to implement federated social networking is not going to sway me away from my advocacy of it.<p>The most important identity system in the world -- the one that even the biggest websites in the world want you to identify yourself with is definitely your email. The protocols underlying your email are my vision for social networking: A common format that accurately sends a message to feature-complete implementations. There's really not any reason we can't have your federated social media be your email replacement barring that the W3C standard doesn't call for any sort of secure mailbox (Mastodon doesn't have REAL "private messages") but it's still a damn good solution to the problem of trying to work in the social media space: you need users. What if the users are already there?<p>Perhaps as the APub standard and implementations grow we can see them become standardized to the sort of SSO that we are used to when we "connect with Facebook/Twitter" but another closed-loop timeline-based for-profit social media won't ever have my attention because there's not a market.<p>Unless it's Vine.
<i>«Making Openbook a for-profit was a hard choice to make. We check all the non-profits boxes and we love non-profits. We love Wikipedia, the Ghost Foundation, Founders Pledge, Mozilla and many more. However we see the same struggle repeated over and over again. These companies struggle to grow beyond their profitability. These companies struggle to grow to the size and resources needed to compete with for-profit businesses. When we need to grow exponentially, we need to be able to raise the large amounts of money needed to do so. Therefore we are officially a for-profit company. But do note that when we do this, we will make sure the people investing in the company will be people with real interest on the platform, its core values of privacy, security, freedom, openness and its humanitarian nature.»</i> [0]<p>As a for-profit corporation’s legal operational boundaries end at the financial interests of its shareholders, any corporation-defined “core value” may not and does not benefit from legal guarantees.<p>While a benefit corporation [1] may allow to balance the interests of shareholders and stakeholders, any form equal to a UK company limited by guarantee with “limited” exemption [2] [Section 60, Section 62] binds, secures a corporation’s objects (or “core values”) to interest-free legal requirements.<p>For trust to ensue and persist, any “for-benefit” alternative to existing for-profit corporation- or nation state-controlled platforms must state its “core values” as the controlling corporation’s objects.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the-honest-open-source-and-awesome-social/faqs#project_faq_255412" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://benefitcorp.net/sites/default/files/Benefit_Corporation_White_Paper.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://benefitcorp.net/sites/default/files/Benefit_Corporati...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/part/5/chapter/2/crossheading/required-indications-for-limited-companies" rel="nofollow">http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/part/5/chapter/2...</a>
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.
There's a lot of marketing on here about honesty, fun, and being personal. That being said, none of these attributes are being applied to the social network part of the social network. In their current form, they're just buzzwords about the project.<p>For once, I'd like to see a project use these words in a meaningful way. Build a manifesto that isn't just "we are building a platform." Focus on actual social interactions and social behaviors that the platform should have. Build something that actually encourages honesty, openness, and fun posts over lying, fake personalities, and cynicism.<p>Normal users don't see benefits in switching away from Facebook to an equivalent platform with more honest caretakers. That's the sad reality of it. But if a social network pledged to only allow posts that are positive about things, or actively banned people for spreading lies, that would be totally different. It's an execution thing -- people would need to see policy in action -- but if pulled off, it would result in a fundamentally different and easily comparable platform to Facebook.
I was thinking about making an open source social-network just this morning. I'm all about "for profit" in general but as has been echoed a bunch in the comments already, a lot of corporations start off on a good trajectory but ultimately wind up in a place we don't like. I don't want to stoke any political flames, so I'll just leave it at that. :)<p>The reasons I would like to see a project like this succeed would be to have a network that better protects privacy and has very transparent censorship. I'm not super well versed in open source and non-profit but my current thinking is that making an organization of similar style to wikipedia would be the best strategy. Open source the code, own the hardware and raise money through donations.<p>Do you think I'm missing something or would this be the best strategy? Also, is there already a project(s) like this?
I can't click on any links, am I doing something wrong? The only links that are working for me, are the ones on the right side of the page.<p>Website looks like this for me:
<a href="https://i.imgur.com/7OkVlUz.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/7OkVlUz.png</a><p>I am using Google Chrome on Windows 10
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.
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.<p>It's an insanely hard market to chew into and thus I can say they've already lost.
I like it that there are attempts to change the status quo and not accept Facebook in our lives as a fact, and push back against the monetization of personal information. But shouldn’t this be backed up by an organization with some trackrecord in the domain of user's digital rights, free and open standards? EFF, FSF... join existing umbrella projects, even if not leveraging existing code... <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/social..." rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/software/social...</a>? Like someone else said here already, today everybody can build a social network.<p>Btw they don’t seem to even own openbook.org ...
What's the monetisation model?<p>edit: found this<p>"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.<p>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 don't get it. Who is asking for another Facebook? Except for a few vocal minority carrying on over privacy and decentralization, none of which will even bother. The rest of the world doesn't care, Facebook is there for them already. When everyone inevitably tires of it, they'll move to a new idea, not another clone. Facebook knows this, that's why they continue purchasing upcoming services like Instagram.
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.<p>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.
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.
Valiant effort, I don't understand why the community is responding so toxic. Rather than assuming that growth will lead to this social network becoming the next corrupted Facebook, why don't we focus on the unique aspects that make this open-sourced network worthwhile to begin with?<p>Security - Privacy - Customisability - Compatibility with status quo. We can all agree that we lost faith in the monstrosity that Facebook has become, it doesn't mean that we can't place faith in other technology to produce a different outcome.