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by leot 5171 days ago
I've been advocating (to friends) the need/inevitability of this kind of system.

One possible marketing phrase that's been thrown around is "data asymmetry", as in "TheMux aims to rectify the massive data asymmetries that give Facebook and Google orders of magnitude more power than their users."

Even better would be the development of a completely peer-to-peer version of Facebook (which Diaspora isn't).

1 comments

Nice phrase, I'll have to keep that in mind - at least when talking to hackers.

Re: replacement of Facebook, I don't think it's realistic for someone to develop an actually decent federated replacement for a true social network. The difficulty of doing some of the stuff that Facebook users like, but trying to make it work when all of the nodes are on different networks with different constraints, seems to be very high.

I'm not so much in the "Facebook shouldn't have my data" camp... more like the "I want control of my all data TOO" camp.

Our concept for people writing apps that leverage TheMux doesn't require them to actually load data live from their user's instance of TheMux (because that's crazy, a single point of failure, and probably very inefficient) but that there is simply the agreement to interchange data.

To steal your phrase - we want to make the data symmetric.

So that no matter where I create or update my data, the systems involved makes a best-effort to return that data to my MuxDB, and then my MuxDB will make a best-effort to get that data out to the sites I've authorized and who need the data to do what I've signed up for.

Obviously, we're still in the early stages, but it's been an exciting and challenging journey so far.