Towards a GNU autonomous cloud

I can't believe I haven't put the words "Gnu" and "Facebook" together in my mind before....<p>Of course, something like this should be done. There are important questions about the technical architecture (I only ask one thing -- DONT USE XML...), especially because of privacy, but there are also opportunities to explicitly and collectively decide processes (Yay democracy!) -- if the users of FB could vote on issues of data sharing, things there might be really, really different.

I've had similar thoughts in the past and brought them up on HN here:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625917" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625917</a>

I like the link posted in the first article comment: <a href="http://onesocialweb.org/" rel="nofollow">http://onesocialweb.org/</a> (except their code base is not up on github yet - hopefully soon) Written in Java, uses XMPP, and comes with an Android client - at least it sounds good.<p>The article has some interesting points but ideas without code for a prototype implementation to back them up is not very useful.

While impractical and reminiscent of 90s crypto-wankery (<i>oh no clipper chip</i>, et al), it's still far more worthwhile than what Stallman's been pushing lately about cloud services.<p>Stallman seems to think that users give a shit about software, as if everyone using the AGPL would somehow fix everything — except that thet's total bullshit — people only care about access to their <i>data</i>, the code serving it up is completely irrelevant. You wouldn't be able to run your own instance of Facebook on localhost anyway, even if that was somehow useful.<p>Stallman's refusal to use any cloud services leaves him woefully out of touch with the reality of their implications.

As stated this is far too ambitious a goal. But let's say we don't worry about traffic analysis and just protect the content. What would a minimal "git with privacy" look like?

This is absurd and will probably be about as successful as GNU Hurd.