Re: Audiences for federated social network technologies

On 2013-06-02, at 8:13 AM, Evan Prodromou <evan@e14n.com> wrote:

> Families with children under 13 - The COPPA act has high requirements for services to collect private information on children under 13. Most social networks don't bother and just ban kids under 13. With children well under 5 able to do basic tasks with tablets and phones, I think there's a huge untapped market here. And if Mom set up the network on her own server, she's (probably - IANAL) not subject to the same COPPA rules as a commercial service. And except for families that practice exclusive endogamy, family networks are naturally federated. (Thanks, sexual reproduction!)

I agree that kids under 13 is an interesting opportunity, but I also expect that the sweet spot is somewhere in between a server-per-family and a server-to-rule-them-all.  Getting your average family to install a server is a tough road to hoe.  And COPPA is sad-making -- the more I've learned about the law, the more it makes me pessimistic about anything other than a set of data islands that won't legally be able to talk to each other.

One thing to consider in all of this federation talk is that federation need not mean a pure p2p system.  As Evan says, there are real economies to consider (spam control, natural trust fault lines), including aggregation of users in a natural "server" (school, neighborhood, province, country, slice-of-life).

I'm glad to see so much energy in that list, somewhat saddened that everyone thinks the answer is easy.  If it were easy, it'd have been done already.  I do like the fact that many have brought up sociological, UX and economic & business factors, which are much harder IMO to untangle than protocol negotiations.

My own advice is somewhat along Evan's -- don't try to solve the entire problem -- find a problem that you care deeply about and that a small number of users _also_ care about, and try to build a system which works for you and them (that may involve a business model, if you need money to pay rent).  As to the purpose of this list, I expect it could do worse than be a place for people who do build federated systems to cheer each other on, rather than a place to negotiate interop.

--da