Re: trsst microblogging

On 08/27/2013 01:26 PM, Adam Levine wrote:
> On the micropayment side, this is now the 4th implementation of the idea
> not including my Watershed FOSS project to tackle this issue in
> basically the same way.   Non-crowdfunded options that are already
> available are bitwall.io <http://bitwall.io> bitcredit.io
> <http://bitcredit.io>
> bitmonet http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1jh8lh/bitmonet_monetization_platform_for_content/

Neat, I had not heard about those projects. Thanks for the links!

> The microblogging and encrypted communications are interesting, but
> again there are lots of options out there for both that haven't taken
> off.   I've been pulling back from crowdfunding projects like this
> recently because there are so many hands working towards the goal already.

It's difficult to pick who will be successful. The whole decentralized
blogging thing is littered with successful implementations that failed
to gain adoption.

Diaspora and Status.net being two of the bigger, more long-running
solutions. They have working systems and it wouldn't take much to graft
some greater security onto them, or add the RSS feature described in
trsst (which might be already installed).

I think many of these project focus on the wrong thing. The technology
is the easy part, it's the social aspect that's difficult. If you can't
pull and push to Twitter, G+, Facebook, etc, then it's problematic. If
you don't have a solution that people can just use w/o being technical,
it's a problem. It seems like there are so many things that you have to
get right in this space, and even when you get all of them right, people
don't seem to be interested.

I've read a number of studies that say that people both young and old
still do care about privacy. However, many are just unaware of what
systems protect their privacy and which ones don't. Fewer are willing to
pay or fund systems that protect their privacy because the existing
systems seem to be good enough.

Take email for instance. It's a fairly terrible protocol, rife with
spam. Many of the email solutions today are pretty terrible and unable
to cope with the level of spam and size of our ever growing mail
history. Gmail does a good job. It's also hooked up to the NSA in ways
that have been surprising to people that use Gmail. However, notice that
there hasn't been a mass exodus from Gmail and other hosted mail
solutions. People care about privacy, but not to the extent that they're
willing to absorb some pain to get some of their freedoms back. This is
more of a societal problem than a technical one.

I really hope that we can move back towards a more decentralized social
Web. This group is working on a number of technologies that could enable
that, specifically:

JSON-LD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vioCbTo3C-4
http://json-ld.org/

Secure Messaging (and identity)
https://payswarm.com/specs/source/http-keys/

I'm not certain that projects like trsst will be successful in doing so.
I do think that if we get all of them to start using certain messaging
standards, like Secure Messaging and Activity Streams, that we will have
a better chance of moving to a more decentralized messaging future.

Other projects in this area to check out:

http://pump.io/
http://app.net/
https://joindiaspora.com/

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Saturday, 31 August 2013 16:00:25 UTC