A better comparison would be with telephony companies of the old days. We now have the Telecommunications Act [1] that does for telephony what the article is suggesting for social networks.<p>Quoting from Wikipedia:<p>> Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers. Thus, another key provision of the 1996 Act sets obligations for incumbent carriers and new entrants to interconnect their networks with one another, imposing additional requirements on the incumbents because they might desire to restrict competitive entry by denying such interconnection or by setting terms, conditions, and rates that could undermine the ability of the new entrants to compete.<p>So either social media companies should be classified as telecommunications companies (imho not far-fetched), or we need something similar to the Telecommunications Act but for social media.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996</a>
I'm pretty familiar with FOAF, LinkedData, RDF and all of the rest of the Semantic Web standards. But saying that all of these can replace a system like facebook is a bit unintelligent. Facebook brings much more to the table that users need which semantic web has never been able to accomplish like near-instant response times, UX that even my grandma can use and 99% availability... just to name a few.<p>Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous.<p>Facebook is a centralized monopoly I agree, but a bunch of standards isn't going to replace the stuff that Facebook built.<p>I believe the problem of centralization can be solved by looking at the problem differently: what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. We need better ways to explore our "connection graph", not just a static feed of people we know and things they post.<p>For instance I'd like to be able to change the algorithm that generates my main feed. I want to grab the "political liberal" feed from github (as an open source example) and load it onto facebook; then grab the "climate change biased" feed and load that and test how that works. I want to change the variables of the algorithm, test it for a few days see how that works and change it to something else if I see it's only reporting fake news.<p>This to me seems the problems we need to face this decade when it comes to social networks; building p2p networks from scratch, or using other decentralized standards is cool but isn't inherently solving the problem imho. There's nothing inherently wrong with the social media giants if they prove to us they can show us different views of the graph without getting in the way.
> Did Facebook simply get there first, or did they instead just do social networking better than everyone else?<p>Isn't that kind of obvious? The article kind of answers that itself:<p>> In the beginning, way back in 1996, it was SixDegrees. Last year, it was Friendster. Last week, it was Orkut. Next week, it could be Flickr.<p>Friendster, Orkut, Myspace, Google+ (ironically, I had to Google the latter, as I couldn't even remember its name). Many social networks have come and gone.<p>That's not to say Facebook hasn't likely done unsavory things to perpetuate its dominance. But it was better, in one or many ways, than all that came before it, and all that have tried to succeed it. Many haven't even tried. Twitter and Instagram don't even attempt to replicate your real-life connections. Hell, I can't even remember what pseudonym my real-life friends are using on these other networks. They're playing a different game.<p>This is a strength for those networks, in some ways. For those who care about what "influencers" say, or in what opinions are shouted the loudest by the folks followed by the most loud-shouters. If you care about both a footballer's opinion on a match as well as what he ate for breakfast; what a Kardashian wore as well as what she was paid to say.<p>In many ways, the various social networks aren't attempting to compete, they're attempting to 'win' their own niche.
On the subway tangent, Tokyo does continue to have multi-company competition in its transit system, yet has continued to build out its network, including new lines through the middle of the city in 2008! (Fukutoshin)<p>There’s a lot about why the system works, but it goes to show that network effects aren’t insurmountable<p>It’s a bit more costly then some alternative systems, but it’s better to have an expensive line that exists rather than a cheap line that doesn’t.
The piece starts with an analogy about the MTA, but I find it a rather weak one. The NYC government could have imposed a regulation that any subway built in the city must be built by certain standards for tunnel size and the ability to interchange. That would have helped provide some ability for the two systems to interlink. Moreover, the city government intervened significantly into the operation of private train and subway businesses. The article even notes the city tried to compete directly. Government-run businesses often use the law to squash competitors. Then, when the competitors go out of business, they say it's a natural monopoly and everyone forgets about it.
> This issue of identity was an acute one for FOAF. (...) there does not exist and probably should not exist a "planet-wide system for identifying people," (...)<p>> Do we trust the homepages and conclude we have two different people? Or do we trust the email addresses and conclude we have a single person? Could I really write an application capable of resolving this conflict without involving (and inconveniencing) the user?<p>It seems the author identifies identity online as a major problem.<p>Interestingly, the last years have witnessed significant efforts towards a concept called "self-sovereign identity" [1, 2] that tries to solve exactly this. Emerging standards at the W3C [3, 4], open source software at the Hyperledger Foundation [5], and even non-profits [6] are working globally on the technology and governance of such a system.<p>Eventually, I think, self-sovereign identity will happen. I wonder what will be the impact on decentralized social networking.<p><pre><code> [1] http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html
[2] https://sovrin.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/The-Inevitable-Rise-of-Self-Sovereign-Identity.pdf
[3] https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
[4] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
[5] https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/hyperledger-indy
[6] https://sovrin.org/</code></pre>
Around 20 years ago, friends in college used this French social networking website Zdarmanet. We mostly used it as a distributed contact list. I often wonder what it could've been if they had been a bit more aggressively commercial.<p>Realistically though, the strong (at the time) French database and computer privacy laws likely would've prevented it from every doing the slow-boil takeover that Facebook accomplished. In the end, even those laws were ineffective in handling the foreign behemoth that Facebook became.<p>Edit: website is now closed, displaying "<i>After more than 15 years I am stopping this service. Sorry... in case you would need anything related to that please see notojo.cz for how to contact me.</i>" and I guess it was of Czeck origin, not French?
Distributed things are more resilient, but centralized competitors tend to scale faster.<p>Once a given centralized competitor has scaled sufficiently they will achieve a monopoly due to network effects and predictably abuse that monopoly to reduce future competitors. Tale as old as time.
Here's an idea: Plaid for social networks, built on the FoaF standard. The first vertical could be a personal website built from your social data.
Friend of a Friend: Boy was the internet a different place in the pre-Cambridge Analytica era.<p>Seriously, I can't see how something that revolves around the assumption that everyone would just merrily broadcast their entire friends network to the whole internet would be able to fly nowadays.
Legislating natural monopolies way after they were obvious has been a problem for more than a hundred years. It is probably a case where the free market leads to a problematic situation and hence it is hard to discuss for ideological reasons.
Note that the social network Hi5 used (still uses? not sure) FOAF. So it can live harmoniously with centralized networks, if the networks choose to make use of it.
it’s amazing how much quiet your life becomes after you unfriend 99,9% of your social graph, bit similar to noise canceling on the airpods. give it a try :)