[tanker]

Consumers are like water seeking the path of least resistance. It takes lots of engineers to reduce the resistance. Someone pays these engineers. That money comes from the users. Users don't like to actually pay for things if there is a free alternative, so users pay indirectly with their information.

A Facebook clone wouldn't pull many users due to network effects. I think decentralization is opposed to network effects in this case.

The article mentions the somewhat current but certainly future problem of decisions being made by algorithms which "casually crush" users without any human being able to determine why it happened (and in many cases unable to fix it).

They could fix this problem by hiring more people and giving them more power to correct the system, but it will probably never be a big enough problem to affect the bottom line.

Increasing awareness of the problem and technical skill among users would probably cause users to become more autonomous and less like water. This is a long term possibility, but it strikes me as an unappealing fight. It’s like trying to convince an entire generation to take bitter medicine without any parents to assist. I’ll assume users won’t be getting better. Perhaps we just need to focus on building better ways to protect ourselves from the almighty algorithm, so there are options when the system fails. We can protect our data from online shopping sites by having nodes that process purchases for a large number of users and perhaps ship to a network of local points where pickup is by some type of PKI based system. Social networks seem like a lost cause. A return to blogs with lots of links rather than a replacement network may be the answer.

[Animats]

The open source social crowd does not get this at all. Federated social networks exist, and their user-facing sides suck.

Here's the home page for joining Diaspora.[1]

Here's the home page for joining Urbit.[2]

Here's the home page for joining GNU Social.[3]

Any questions?

[1] https://joindiaspora.com/ [2] http://urbit.org/ [3] https://gnu.io/social/

[yarvin9]

Ha! I can assure you that by the time Urbit is ready to compete with Facebook, it'll be as easy to sign up for as Facebook. That's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. It ain't happening any time soon, neither.

Metcalfe's law is an impossible problem in theory, but not necessarily in practice.

For instance, one way for a new system to get around Metcalfe's law is to steal the network effect of the existing network. This is the same principle as in Tantek Celik's POSSE (publish on self, syndicate elsewhere) design, but a little more general.

Concretely, it's very hard to compete with Facebook, but relatively easy to let a user control their own Facebook account from their own general-purpose computer. Especially if you can get them to bring their own API key ("BYOK").

From controlling your own data in Facebook, you may move to mirroring it; from one-way mirroring, to two-way sync; from two-way sync, to discarding the silo. So it's not even necessary to replace Facebook in one impossible step; you can build a stepladder for users to migrate off gradually.

Of course, that this is possible doesn't make it easy!

[swsieber]

But, it is possible to make distributed systems that are interopable. In that case, the standard, not a system itself is what gains the network effect.