Re: Federation protocols

Hi there,

I admire the amount of effort you put into this discussion. It makes me wonder 
what great things we could achieve had this energy been put into -- oh, I 
don't know -- creating and promoting an interoperable federated social web 
standard...

But do read on.

Dnia piątek, 31 maja 2013 o 17:11:52 Simon Tennant napisał(a):
> On 31 May 2013 16:52, Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak <rysiek@fwioo.pl> wrote:
> > > What do you think the reasons for Facebook's success were? Why did
> > > users leave Myspace for Facebook?
> 
> There were Terms of Service changes that were definitely not to users'
> 
> > liking,
> > which incidentally were similar to what Instagram did after being bought
> > by Facebook. Of course that was a minor issue, but issue none the less
> > (I remember talking to my friends in ~2008 about it, and it was a factor
> > in their
> > decision to ditch MySpace).
> 
> There's a huge friction to switching and you haven't identified what
> Facebook was doing differently to encourage users to move over. Why were
> early adopters joining before their friends were on Facebook?

Early adopters are early adopters, every new social network will have a few. 
It all depends on what they find within and if they can convince their friends 
to come over.

> I'd argue that facebook was simple and easy to use and solved a problem
> that college students had very very well. And kept iterating. I'd also
> argue that their introduction of the App platform gave the product a second
> life and helped create an ecosystem of developers that wanted to build
> products for the end users.

Great. We have great federated services already. We might need to work a bit 
on usability (looking at you, Friendica!), but the services are there.

> So what is the problem that open social networks will solve very very well?

Being dependent of large companies and their corporate policies, terms of 
service, etc.

From users' perspective, consider:
http://www.ur1.ca/dfipt
http://www.ur1.ca/bwx1n
http://rys.io/en/28
http://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/facebook-snitchgate/

From developers' perspective, consider:
http://www.ur1.ca/e4c6a
https://www.change.org/petitions/twitter-keep-your-ecosystem-open

> PS: I disagree on the super-federated diaspora-buddycloud-pump network
> being a silver bullet because I expect there's a 90% user overlap on each
> of them :)

I don't think it's as high as 90%, but yes, some overlap is in fact there. 
Which is irrelevant. The main problem now is that when I talk to a potential 
new decentralised, federated social network user, I have to decide which of 
the several *incompatible* services to suggest.

This causes the user to ask "why not SomeNameIHeardAlready", and instead of 
creating a profile, they decide they don't have the time for digging in and 
making an informed decision.

Likewise for developers. Likewise for public administration.

Once it was all interoperable, we could say "it's not that important, really, 
they all talk to each other".

-- 
Pozdrawiam
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak

Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania