[cyarvin]

This might be (just a little) too pessimistic.

The sweet spot both Tent and Diaspora are/were aiming for is one where most users use somebody else's service, but a few crazy neckbeards choose to self-host.

The neckbeards who actually care (often quite unreasonably) about privacy, etc, provide a very useful service to the ordinary users - they keep the central service(s) honest, ie, keep them from turning into Facebook. Because it's possible to escape, because the neckbeards keep that possibility open, the ordinary users are not captured.

At least, that's the theory. Diaspora didn't execute on it. Tent, well, we'll see.

[sbarre]

I agree. This is like Usenet, or further back the old Fidonet days where most people accessed through a small local hub, but you still had the nutty people who ran their own node.

Make it easy for people to participate casually, but also make sure that people can customize to their liking and exert full control over their own stuff if they wish to, without causing trouble to the rest of the network.

[Sami_Lehtinen]

No, nodes were usually BBS systems. If you wanted to use same protocol, then you did run your own point usually. Of course there were a few sysops with their own nodes. But Point was the usual way of personally joining the network using official protocols. Of course most did use qwk and bluewave etc to get messages quickly without setting up systems without mandatory zone mail hour etc. Didn't you run your own point / node? ;)

[sbarre]

You're right, I got my terminology mixed up (it's been a while heh).. Point is what I meant.. Thanks. :-)

[lhnn]

SPOT ON CHAP.

This is truly, exactly it. I don't expect my mother or friend to run a Tent server. But imagine Facebook were a Tent/Diaspora host. People would have left in DROVES by now if another, somewhat equal host could migrate their data in and provide better user respect.