Here's a try for some discussion. It seems like there actually is a great potential to try totally novel ways of approaching physically distributed networking and then developing services on such a network that use protocols for adding social applications that are not centralized.

If an app on people's phones could act as an always-on part of the distributed network that could be one component - another would be for small boxes to be attached to your home Internet router that are always on also acting as a part of the network. Individuals could have a personal filestore of message posts and photos that they perceive as just being available 'in the cloud' like facebook - but are actually stored in redundant chunks throughout an array of these mobile and stationary nodes that not only they own, but as well shared on their close friends and family's nodes.

For the static nodes connected to a router it could be a $35 raspberry pi + plan 9 operating system + tent.io protocol server - for mobile it's your iPhone/android running an app (perhaps plan 9/ inferno as a virtual machine( that uses local storage and acts as a client and server. Together with many of these nodes -- imagine at least one for everyone if the billion Facebook users --- and you'd have a new "meshwork" grid for decentralized (social) networking applications.

A rehash of an old joke, not done particularly well.

Basically, his theory is that any Distributed Social Network can/should be dismissed. Also, screw you for trying.

The (original?) SPAM version had more interesting reasons, and also, SPAM largely HAS be solved, at least compared to when it was originally penned.

So, I appreciate the effort put into writing this, but I think it detracts from conversation more than assists.

I guess that settles it. Everybody should just forget about distributed social networks and get on with their lives. In all seriousness, he did sum up some of the challenges distributed social networks face, but they are just that, challenges.

I think the most important point is that social problems are harder then technical ones. You will never get traction if the adoption barrier is higher then on other social networks(be them centralized or distributed). Unfortunately, in most cases, people take decisions based on their immediate interest and comfort without quantifying the whole chain of indirect impact it might have. One easy example would be the decision to buy a particular product, based solely on the price and characteristics of that product, without taking into account where it has been produced and the implications that come with that.

So, making your product easy to use and attractive goes a long way.

Even if this is a troll post, it is probably true that the distributed social networks are having a really really hard time gaining ground.

The biggest problem I see is the network effect of current networks (FB, G+) and the choice of the many decentralized networks that currently exist. Which one to pick? Which one is also convenient to use for my non-geek friends?

The important part to me is '“Users want to own their data” is an ideology not a use-case'

The last section of this post is in poor taste considering that at least one real person has committed suicide while building such a social network.

Why would someone 'enjoy' watching someone's sincere effort and dream die? Weird post.

I'll be interested to see if this generates any discussion - previous submissions have failed to do so.