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
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