I came across yet another version of a distributed social network, this one with hardware.  FreedomBox Foundation is working on figuring out how to make tons of tiny little web servers that take out the centralized model.  The New York Times has a decent article on explaining why Mark Zuckerburg having all of your information is a bad thing.

The introduction video on FreedomBox's site was a good non-technical description, and with graphics, for all of you who don't like to read that much...  :)

It mentions diaspora, friendica and buddycloud.  I'd heard of diaspora, and I have an account, but it doesn't interact with me very well.  I glanced through buddycloud this morning, and didn't see anything particularly interesting.  friendica emphasizes being able to interact with other current social networks, which is a good thing, since it is a hard thing to get people to switch.

I guess I should spend some time in figuring out how to install one of them and see if it is worth using.  I've not been clear on how much you can customize the installations, and how hard it is to add features, etc.  And how open the development really is, in terms of them wanting features from outside people, etc.

Mostly, I think the problem is that I want it just to work, and so I don't want to spend lots of my own time developing a system.  Maybe I could work on figuring out if I could add plugins into LifeType to make it do some interesting things with the new social networks.  LifeType 2.0 (if it ever comes out) started a couple years ago adding some social networking features, and so it might fit in well; I don' t know.

But, as facebook and google are increasingly unfriendly (Facebook announced they would no longer import notes, such as this one, starting in a couple weeks)  I suppose their theory is that people will manually double post, or move to facebook only, or something like that.  But, that is a pain, so I'll probably just stop posting to facebook.

Posted by Jon Daley on November 10, 2011, 6:00 pm | Read 132151 times
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Comments

I'd like to see something that does for social networking what Pidgin does for instant messaging, gathering them all into one interface. Don't know if it's possible, though.

Posted by SursumCorda on November 11, 2011, 12:27 am

Yeah, that's what Friendica sounds like it is trying to do.

Posted by jondaley on November 11, 2011, 9:53 am

Naw, what you really want is something like email where you can if desired run a server in your own house if you want and where the protocols like SMTP, POP, and IMAP are completely open and transparent. That way you connect peer 2 peer. Although pidgin does try to make a bad situation better, it's limited by the fact that you simply cannot communicate via IM directly from one network like AIM to another like MSN. An IM analogy you might consider is jabber.

Posted by The Mad Hatter on February 12, 2012, 12:01 pm

Hrm. Your IP address bypassed the moderation checker due to somehow you getting it to use the server ip address. The code in the ip getter did look odd when I looked at it years ago, but I hadn't ever seen it break, so I hadn't worried about it - I guess now I'll have to dig into it more.

I might need you to make some test posts on a separate php file for me or something.

Posted by Jon Daley on February 12, 2012, 4:07 pm

Is that why Mike was able to bypass moderation on my blog? I can't imagine his IP address is still the same....

Posted by Linda on February 12, 2012, 6:08 pm
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