You can get the same network effects of these cloud services through federated networks. Imagine "Federate-book" I run and host my own "Facebook wall" on my local box (or wherever I choose to host), friends can request access to view my content ("friend requests") which I can then control and manage myself, "Facebook groups" are hosted by wherever their creator decides, and moderation is the right/responsibility of the creator of the group.
If some host-er of the federate-book wants to aggregate my data and sell it to third parties, they can make that clear in their terms and I can opt-in/out of that arrangement. If my host-er wants to use machine learning and other methods to wipe my feed of their definition of "abuse" or "fake news", they can try that and I can determine if I trust their judgement. I'll choose whether I want to hear what Alex Jones has to say for myself, thank you very much. If somebody is illicitly calling for violence and should be forcefully banned and punished, then this can be dealt with by the (admittedly imperfect,) relatively transparent and principled system of laws that include foundational principles of justice like innocence until proven guilty, and the rights of the accused to defend themselves.
The status quo cloud-silos governed by a small group of executives opining about what censorship-policies will garner them the greatest profits next quarter are dangerous single points of failure for user privacy, and inherently at risk for becoming tools of tyrannical control and manipulation. Yes there is much work to be done in building good protocols for federated social networks that even grandma can make use of, but guess whose fault that is? "The cloud" didn't exist 20 years ago either, and its ubiquity and ease of use should be attributed to the literal billions (if not trillions) of dollars of R&D that has been thrown at it.
We really can "have our cake and eat it too" in this domain, if the engineers and venture capitalists that build/fund these tools directed R&D appropriately. As the (predictable but unfortunately unmitigated) true cost of a generation of "cloud" mania slowly becomes apparent to the general public, we will likely see a greater groundswell of market demand "fediverse" products and services. Undoubtedly the rent-seeking cloud providers will try and prevent this through propaganda and by force -- we're already seeing this in the "fake news" hysteria and Zuckerberg's call for regulation of social media. But if America's legal institutions and popular support can hold the barbarians at bay, we will hopefully be living with a very different internet 20 years from now.
(Didn't really know where I would end up with this comment and it sort of turned into a rallying cry so I'll go with it. Yeah HN, let's do it!)
We've had this for years already, more or less. It's called Diaspora, and it hasn't succeeded in pulling the masses away from Facebook.
You can get network effects through any kind of network, but you still need to get your friends on that network in order to build those effects. I just don't see this sort of thing being successful at that.
There are certainly more people angry about what FB has been doing with their data there was a couple years ago, but the majority of them seem to still continue posting on FB, because that's where all their friends are.
If some host-er of the federate-book wants to aggregate my data and sell it to third parties, they can make that clear in their terms and I can opt-in/out of that arrangement. If my host-er wants to use machine learning and other methods to wipe my feed of their definition of "abuse" or "fake news", they can try that and I can determine if I trust their judgement. I'll choose whether I want to hear what Alex Jones has to say for myself, thank you very much. If somebody is illicitly calling for violence and should be forcefully banned and punished, then this can be dealt with by the (admittedly imperfect,) relatively transparent and principled system of laws that include foundational principles of justice like innocence until proven guilty, and the rights of the accused to defend themselves.
The status quo cloud-silos governed by a small group of executives opining about what censorship-policies will garner them the greatest profits next quarter are dangerous single points of failure for user privacy, and inherently at risk for becoming tools of tyrannical control and manipulation. Yes there is much work to be done in building good protocols for federated social networks that even grandma can make use of, but guess whose fault that is? "The cloud" didn't exist 20 years ago either, and its ubiquity and ease of use should be attributed to the literal billions (if not trillions) of dollars of R&D that has been thrown at it.
We really can "have our cake and eat it too" in this domain, if the engineers and venture capitalists that build/fund these tools directed R&D appropriately. As the (predictable but unfortunately unmitigated) true cost of a generation of "cloud" mania slowly becomes apparent to the general public, we will likely see a greater groundswell of market demand "fediverse" products and services. Undoubtedly the rent-seeking cloud providers will try and prevent this through propaganda and by force -- we're already seeing this in the "fake news" hysteria and Zuckerberg's call for regulation of social media. But if America's legal institutions and popular support can hold the barbarians at bay, we will hopefully be living with a very different internet 20 years from now.
(Didn't really know where I would end up with this comment and it sort of turned into a rallying cry so I'll go with it. Yeah HN, let's do it!)