I'm actually fine that it is not de-centralized. It is true that federated systems are too complicated for practical use. However, to go against Facebook, we need something like Wikipedia, not Facebook by some other guy who pinky promises that he will be good.
This right here kills it for me, and hopefully others too.
"Why is Openbook not a non-profit?
Making Openbook a for-profit was a hard choice to make.
We love Wikipedia, the Ghost Foundation, Founders Pledge, Mozilla and many more. However we see the same struggle repeated over and over again. These companies struggle to grow beyond their profitability. These companies struggle to grow to the size and resources needed to compete with for-profit businesses.
When we need to grow exponentially, we need to be able to raise the large amounts of money needed to do so. Therefore we are officially a for-profit company.
But do note that when we do this, we will make sure the people investing in the company will be people with real interest on the platform, its core values of privacy, security, freedom, openness and its humanitarian nature."
NO NO NO NO NO!!! Why do you have to exponentially grow to be useful. Be the right service, and growth comes by that virtue. People love Wikipedia for what it is, not because it "grows exponentially". You're just another guy with good motives until you succumb to investor pressure.
I've been hoping for a Mozilla/Wikimedia like foundation to come up with a modern centralized alternative to Facebook, that just has it in their bylaws that prevents any creepy tracking from being implemented in the first place.
As they say, "False pretence of security is worse than no security because it makes you let your guard down". Don't dilute the community driven foundations by profit driven projects like this, please.
I happen to think that Google, FB & such were founded with a solid ethic. I think Google meant "don't be evil" when they said it. But, the questions come later. Will you increase consumer privacy at the expense of CPCs (and value to advertisers). Will you de-fund some of your blue sky R&D to balance reduced yield on advertising.
Wikipedia is the right model. After all this time, they really are still focused on wikipedia's original goal. I am personally very happy that Wikipedia exists.
The way Wikipedia is supposed to scale, is not by making an amazon-scale wikipedia. It's by doing their job well, and being a prototype/inspiration for others to do other jobs. If Wikipedia was a social network, maybe it would not have "scaled" to also be the world's no. 1 news source. Maybe it would not have become a major IM app. That's not a bad thing. We didn't need Facebook to take over news. We could have gotten our news elsewhere. We didn't need facebook to do IM, same reason.
Wikipedia is not a failure because it didn't scale this way, it is a success for that reason. Being not for profit has let them pass on opportunities for land grabs, in a way that for profits would not have resisted.
>People love Wikipedia for what it is, not because it "grows exponentially".
That's because Wikipedia is not a social network. A social network is only worthwhile if it gains a critical mass of users such that there are enough friends on it (or sometimes, i.e. Twitter, enough interesting people on it) to make spending time there worthwhile. Massive growth is more important to the survival of a social network than to any other business model.
> You're just another guy with good motives until you succumb to investor pressure
This. Always chose “open” by design, never by charity.
Funny thing, the marketing seems very close to what we're used to coming from Facebook. Happy-go-lucky language, bright colors, the "be good" attitude and the founder in the center of the spectacle. This whole thing is just a bad joke.
I've always thought that a novel approach would be a social media company in a cooperative structure - where the employees and users are also part owners and would have a say in some of the decision making, as well as sharing in the profits being generated from the information published by the users.
This is probably a non-trivial thing to do correctly, but after reading The Dictators Handbook I think that the power structure contributes significantly to behavior and think a social network structured more similarly to the Green Bay Packers operate would create a better system than Facebook.
I agree with you in general terms, but not on this particular issue. Things that rely on a network effect need to grow exponentially - at least at first, or they will die. The reason people use Facebook is because people use Facebook. The reason people do not use alternatives is because people do not use alternatives.
That said, Facebook at one time also had this problem and I think they solved it extremely well by making access feel like a privilege for you rather than patronage to them, by limiting it to exclusive universities. And then all universities. And then finally, to anybody. Google did the exact same thing with 'gmail beta' when invite codes were a sort of mechanism of making users feel like it was a privilege to get to use their software.
On the other hand, neither Facebook or Google was facing a competitor with billions of monthly active users approaching global market saturation.
There is an obvious model which can be for profit but bakes in user ownership and control: cooperatives.
There is plenty of work being done on this area in online spaces - the platform cooperative movement. I wonder if it a major failure of this movement in terms of visibility that this wasn't their go to model.
Not sure they have their priorities right. The last item in the list of goals (at $500,000, no less) are iOS and Android apps. I would think that should come first as without this very few people will want to use the service at all.
I am tired of Apps that really should just be websites. Unless you have some kind of real, functional need to access my phone's hardware or software I don't need you taking up space on my device. I'd much rather just save a book mark to my home screen and launch from there.
So far I've only read comments that have a strong tendency towards the destructive or even pejorative end of the spectrum. I think that's unfair considering all the effort they are putting into this.
Having said that, I'd like to know what distinguishes this from e.g. Facebook in the long term. It's easy to put out a manifesto and pledge that you are never going to do bad things. It's also easy to come up with a vague theoretical business model that doesn't really say how it will work.
Let's assume they succeed with this – there is nothing that enforces these early statements anymore and soon investor pressure will lead to an outcome similar to the established success stories.
That's why I think you have to be much more different if you really aim to make a difference at scale.
They're not just trying this. They're asking for money from regular folks with no real sustainable revenue model apart from "we're crowd-funding" [0]. People are free to donate as they like, but I think the whole pitch is not entirely honest.
Might be interesting if it was federated. Federation is AFAICT the only way to avoid network effects, which are why we're in this whole mess to begin with. (Many more people would have left Facebook after all the scandals if they could interact with their Facebook friends from another site.) There's no way of ensuring that Openbook wouldn't become as evil as Facebook once it had a big userbase.
Today, everybody can build a social network. Apparently though building a social network that's actually used is quite hard and many failed. So I'd expect somebody who tries again to have some novel approach but it doesn't look like it. How does this compare to disapora or mastodon except the lack of federation?
I really wish them to succeed since I'd like to see somebody breaking the facebook monopoly, yet I'm quite sure this won't end any different than disapora, mastadon, app.net and the several ones I can't even remember anymore.
There is this common mistake of seeing these platforms as a technical challenge but in reality, unless you have a novel approach that people crave for, it's a lot of non-technical hustle.
Does it federate with other services? I have not seen anything mentioning this on the website and I consider it to be crucial for me backing the idea of this service. I don't want or need yet another centralized *book.
Based on the FAQ I'd say it will not be federated, at least not initially, and in the FAQ they explain why. In short, they think that's where other initiatives fall short, and they want to sidestep the issue completely, and come back to it once they're profitable.
If it's not ad supported, how do they plan to keep the lights on once the Kickstarter funding gets exhausted and when they don't get any institutional funding? Somehow the following paragraph form the manifesto doesn't sound very convincing (it sounds like some messaging services that have said that they'll make money selling stickers):
> "We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
> Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management."
"drag and drop your old social media archive... import all your photos, videos, chats and more".
Photos/videos I can sort of understand, but 'chats' - they're done with other people, none of whom would have been granting permission for their content to be migrated to openbook. Am I being too literal here, or is this a privacy violation being promised on day one?
I don't think all parties of a chat need to consent for that information to be shared, aside from specific cases like doctor-patient and lawyer-client.
Here we go, another Social Network engine :) Just following the NIH syndrome, once again.
> OpenBook is OpenSource
Yeah awesome. Like many other projects. Having the OpenSource stamp is not really an advantage anymore. Building and maintaining a community around it, with strong support and integration is something way more difficult to do.
> On Openbook you will not only be able to personalise your profile, but the entire network itself! From changing the color of your homepage to adding plugins, you can make it as unique as yourself.
So basically I can customize everything. On my instance? Is it federated/decentralized (doesn't seems so)?
> We don’t track anything you do, neither monetize your information nor share it without your explicit and informed consent.
Hopefully the GDPR has already cover all those things :)
> All applications will be reviewed by us. We will make sure they: only request the needed information, have the exact location of your data available for you, at all times, delete all your information if you’d revoke the permission...
GDPR
> Some examples of the technology we'll be researching and developing:
> Cryptographically enforced data sharing policies
> End to end encryption, even on the browser
> Public key cryptography on the browser
> Post-quantum cryptography algorithms and protocols
NIH syndrom, all those things are already covered by many other projects, why not reusing that? Also, "post-quantum" cryptography, looks like a nice buzzword thrown in there.
> Migrating to Openbook will be easy-peasy, with our simple drag-and-drop system. Just download your data from your old social network1 and transfer them to Openbook. Shazam!
Good luck with that. GDPR is indeed forcing social platforms to have a Data-Portability politic. Facebook is exporting the user content in HTML flat file with no proper identifiers or easy way to reconstruct the data structure.
> ...we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
So basically they are developing another centralized Social Network engine.
> Some examples of the technology we'll be researching and developing: > Cryptographically enforced data sharing policies > End to end encryption, even on the browser > Public key cryptography on the browser > Post-quantum cryptography algorithms and protocols
"If you give us money we'll invent great crypto" -> "We're secure"
A nearly empty webpage that lags like crazy is very bad promotion and makes me question whether they have the knowledge to create a high-traffic social network. Also, the quote of the founder:
Openbook is not only an evolutionary step for social networks, it's also a humanitarian project at world scale.
Makes me want to vomit. You're making a website, not feeding hungry children.
>In partnership with FoundersPledge, we'll be giving 30% of our revenue towards projects for education, sanitization, climate change prevention and more.
Not knocking this effort, but why are all decentralized, open social networks that hope to compete against Facebook and Instagram so...dull?
Their marketing is all the same wholesomeness and positive messaging. There's no "rebellious" streak to it at all.
But wholesomeness didn't help Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram grow. Facebook was the "adults only" social network that required a .edu address when it was challenging MySpace. Snapchat was pretty much a sexting app. Instagram is basically semi-nude models in its search feed.
I get what these people are trying to do, but you're not going to do that by being boring and corporate.
I'd rather have a functioning, 'dull' project than an edgy 2kool4skool meme disappearing in a couple of months because the hipster userbase moved to the next cool socnet.
I built two working, bug free social sites and yet nobody cares about them. At the end of the day someone else comes with a vaporware manifesto and takes the discussion away from actual products.
as much as I applaud the effort, the next Uber or Facebook won't be a better Uber or Facebook but something totally different. I wish companies would stop trying to be better copies of existing services. Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.
Also they have no idea how to finance and fund their growth:
>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.
We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
> Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.
Not really. Facebook was hardly the first social network, but it was better (at certain things, like friends discovery) and worse at others (like publishing your own content).
> Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.
How was Facebook radically different than other social media sites? In my opinion, it was almost exactly the same as the rest. They just leveraged some clever marketing.
The splash page is hideously slow and stuttering even on desktop. Is the CSS/JS just this bad, or is this site trying to mine cryptocurrency in the background?
At this point I don't trust the sunny promises of any for-profit that wants me to give them my data. Data is the new oil. If an organization can get it and legally profit from it, be assured that they will.
While it's easy to point out at moral level that nothing is guaranteed that if this sort of project gets big it cannot just run off with investor money to go off on Zuckerberg hijinks which has no good reason to even exist at this point -- the notion that it is "too difficult" to implement federated social networking is not going to sway me away from my advocacy of it.
The most important identity system in the world -- the one that even the biggest websites in the world want you to identify yourself with is definitely your email. The protocols underlying your email are my vision for social networking: A common format that accurately sends a message to feature-complete implementations. There's really not any reason we can't have your federated social media be your email replacement barring that the W3C standard doesn't call for any sort of secure mailbox (Mastodon doesn't have REAL "private messages") but it's still a damn good solution to the problem of trying to work in the social media space: you need users. What if the users are already there?
Perhaps as the APub standard and implementations grow we can see them become standardized to the sort of SSO that we are used to when we "connect with Facebook/Twitter" but another closed-loop timeline-based for-profit social media won't ever have my attention because there's not a market.
«Making Openbook a for-profit was a hard choice to make. We check all the non-profits boxes and we love non-profits. We love Wikipedia, the Ghost Foundation, Founders Pledge, Mozilla and many more. However we see the same struggle repeated over and over again. These companies struggle to grow beyond their profitability. These companies struggle to grow to the size and resources needed to compete with for-profit businesses. When we need to grow exponentially, we need to be able to raise the large amounts of money needed to do so. Therefore we are officially a for-profit company. But do note that when we do this, we will make sure the people investing in the company will be people with real interest on the platform, its core values of privacy, security, freedom, openness and its humanitarian nature.» [0]
As a for-profit corporation’s legal operational boundaries end at the financial interests of its shareholders, any corporation-defined “core value” may not and does not benefit from legal guarantees.
While a benefit corporation [1] may allow to balance the interests of shareholders and stakeholders, any form equal to a UK company limited by guarantee with “limited” exemption [2] [Section 60, Section 62] binds, secures a corporation’s objects (or “core values”) to interest-free legal requirements.
For trust to ensue and persist, any “for-benefit” alternative to existing for-profit corporation- or nation state-controlled platforms must state its “core values” as the controlling corporation’s objects.
[+] [-] reacharavindh|7 years ago|reply
This right here kills it for me, and hopefully others too.
"Why is Openbook not a non-profit?
Making Openbook a for-profit was a hard choice to make. We love Wikipedia, the Ghost Foundation, Founders Pledge, Mozilla and many more. However we see the same struggle repeated over and over again. These companies struggle to grow beyond their profitability. These companies struggle to grow to the size and resources needed to compete with for-profit businesses.
When we need to grow exponentially, we need to be able to raise the large amounts of money needed to do so. Therefore we are officially a for-profit company.
But do note that when we do this, we will make sure the people investing in the company will be people with real interest on the platform, its core values of privacy, security, freedom, openness and its humanitarian nature."
NO NO NO NO NO!!! Why do you have to exponentially grow to be useful. Be the right service, and growth comes by that virtue. People love Wikipedia for what it is, not because it "grows exponentially". You're just another guy with good motives until you succumb to investor pressure.
I've been hoping for a Mozilla/Wikimedia like foundation to come up with a modern centralized alternative to Facebook, that just has it in their bylaws that prevents any creepy tracking from being implemented in the first place.
As they say, "False pretence of security is worse than no security because it makes you let your guard down". Don't dilute the community driven foundations by profit driven projects like this, please.
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
I happen to think that Google, FB & such were founded with a solid ethic. I think Google meant "don't be evil" when they said it. But, the questions come later. Will you increase consumer privacy at the expense of CPCs (and value to advertisers). Will you de-fund some of your blue sky R&D to balance reduced yield on advertising.
Wikipedia is the right model. After all this time, they really are still focused on wikipedia's original goal. I am personally very happy that Wikipedia exists.
The way Wikipedia is supposed to scale, is not by making an amazon-scale wikipedia. It's by doing their job well, and being a prototype/inspiration for others to do other jobs. If Wikipedia was a social network, maybe it would not have "scaled" to also be the world's no. 1 news source. Maybe it would not have become a major IM app. That's not a bad thing. We didn't need Facebook to take over news. We could have gotten our news elsewhere. We didn't need facebook to do IM, same reason.
Wikipedia is not a failure because it didn't scale this way, it is a success for that reason. Being not for profit has let them pass on opportunities for land grabs, in a way that for profits would not have resisted.
[+] [-] koboll|7 years ago|reply
That's because Wikipedia is not a social network. A social network is only worthwhile if it gains a critical mass of users such that there are enough friends on it (or sometimes, i.e. Twitter, enough interesting people on it) to make spending time there worthwhile. Massive growth is more important to the survival of a social network than to any other business model.
[+] [-] unicornporn|7 years ago|reply
This. Always chose “open” by design, never by charity.
Funny thing, the marketing seems very close to what we're used to coming from Facebook. Happy-go-lucky language, bright colors, the "be good" attitude and the founder in the center of the spectacle. This whole thing is just a bad joke.
[+] [-] gooseus|7 years ago|reply
This is probably a non-trivial thing to do correctly, but after reading The Dictators Handbook I think that the power structure contributes significantly to behavior and think a social network structured more similarly to the Green Bay Packers operate would create a better system than Facebook.
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
That said, Facebook at one time also had this problem and I think they solved it extremely well by making access feel like a privilege for you rather than patronage to them, by limiting it to exclusive universities. And then all universities. And then finally, to anybody. Google did the exact same thing with 'gmail beta' when invite codes were a sort of mechanism of making users feel like it was a privilege to get to use their software.
On the other hand, neither Facebook or Google was facing a competitor with billions of monthly active users approaching global market saturation.
[+] [-] conatus|7 years ago|reply
There is plenty of work being done on this area in online spaces - the platform cooperative movement. I wonder if it a major failure of this movement in terms of visibility that this wasn't their go to model.
[+] [-] calibas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laurent123456|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naravara|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drchaos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starbugs|7 years ago|reply
So far I've only read comments that have a strong tendency towards the destructive or even pejorative end of the spectrum. I think that's unfair considering all the effort they are putting into this.
Having said that, I'd like to know what distinguishes this from e.g. Facebook in the long term. It's easy to put out a manifesto and pledge that you are never going to do bad things. It's also easy to come up with a vague theoretical business model that doesn't really say how it will work.
Let's assume they succeed with this – there is nothing that enforces these early statements anymore and soon investor pressure will lead to an outcome similar to the established success stories.
That's why I think you have to be much more different if you really aim to make a difference at scale.
[+] [-] bko|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.open-book.org/en/faq
[+] [-] wuliwong|7 years ago|reply
Putting in effort into something does not insulate you from criticism.
[+] [-] logcat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wuliwong|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iaml|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drngdds|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] discordianfish|7 years ago|reply
I really wish them to succeed since I'd like to see somebody breaking the facebook monopoly, yet I'm quite sure this won't end any different than disapora, mastadon, app.net and the several ones I can't even remember anymore.
There is this common mistake of seeing these platforms as a technical challenge but in reality, unless you have a novel approach that people crave for, it's a lot of non-technical hustle.
[+] [-] rainbowmverse|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phoe-krk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MzHN|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newscracker|7 years ago|reply
> "We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
> Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management."
This should also be listed in the FAQ.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|7 years ago|reply
Photos/videos I can sort of understand, but 'chats' - they're done with other people, none of whom would have been granting permission for their content to be migrated to openbook. Am I being too literal here, or is this a privacy violation being promised on day one?
[+] [-] wilsonnb2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzfld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edhelas|7 years ago|reply
> OpenBook is OpenSource
Yeah awesome. Like many other projects. Having the OpenSource stamp is not really an advantage anymore. Building and maintaining a community around it, with strong support and integration is something way more difficult to do.
> On Openbook you will not only be able to personalise your profile, but the entire network itself! From changing the color of your homepage to adding plugins, you can make it as unique as yourself.
So basically I can customize everything. On my instance? Is it federated/decentralized (doesn't seems so)?
> We don’t track anything you do, neither monetize your information nor share it without your explicit and informed consent.
Hopefully the GDPR has already cover all those things :)
> All applications will be reviewed by us. We will make sure they: only request the needed information, have the exact location of your data available for you, at all times, delete all your information if you’d revoke the permission...
GDPR
> Some examples of the technology we'll be researching and developing: > Cryptographically enforced data sharing policies > End to end encryption, even on the browser > Public key cryptography on the browser > Post-quantum cryptography algorithms and protocols
NIH syndrom, all those things are already covered by many other projects, why not reusing that? Also, "post-quantum" cryptography, looks like a nice buzzword thrown in there.
> Migrating to Openbook will be easy-peasy, with our simple drag-and-drop system. Just download your data from your old social network1 and transfer them to Openbook. Shazam!
Good luck with that. GDPR is indeed forcing social platforms to have a Data-Portability politic. Facebook is exporting the user content in HTML flat file with no proper identifiers or easy way to reconstruct the data structure.
> ...we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
So basically they are developing another centralized Social Network engine.
[+] [-] catwell|7 years ago|reply
( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 )
[+] [-] g-b-r|7 years ago|reply
"If you give us money we'll invent great crypto" -> "We're secure"
[+] [-] ssdspoimdsjvv|7 years ago|reply
Openbook is not only an evolutionary step for social networks, it's also a humanitarian project at world scale.
Makes me want to vomit. You're making a website, not feeding hungry children.
[+] [-] briandear|7 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2-L3Kgc6Y7E&t=89s
[+] [-] pavs|7 years ago|reply
>In partnership with FoundersPledge, we'll be giving 30% of our revenue towards projects for education, sanitization, climate change prevention and more.
[+] [-] yeleti|7 years ago|reply
https://money.cnn.com/2010/08/26/technology/teachbook/
[+] [-] throwawayqdhd|7 years ago|reply
Their marketing is all the same wholesomeness and positive messaging. There's no "rebellious" streak to it at all.
But wholesomeness didn't help Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram grow. Facebook was the "adults only" social network that required a .edu address when it was challenging MySpace. Snapchat was pretty much a sexting app. Instagram is basically semi-nude models in its search feed.
I get what these people are trying to do, but you're not going to do that by being boring and corporate.
[+] [-] tomcooks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] have_faith|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lcnmrn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x6c6f6c|7 years ago|reply
"If I delete the spam accounts, they come back. It’s an automated script."
Why not consider users who invited spammers as part of the problem and delete them too? The level of recursion would be the largest hurdle
[+] [-] pweissbrod|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|7 years ago|reply
It's hard to take anyone seriously who uses that phrase... Especially in this sort of context.
That's been a joke for a long time now, everyone knows it's nonsense.
[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|7 years ago|reply
Also they have no idea how to finance and fund their growth:
>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.
We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.
Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.
[+] [-] ekianjo|7 years ago|reply
Not really. Facebook was hardly the first social network, but it was better (at certain things, like friends discovery) and worse at others (like publishing your own content).
[+] [-] flabbergast|7 years ago|reply
Based on what premise?
> I wish companies would stop trying to be better copies of existing services.
Why? Almost all creativity and improvement goes by creating a better version of something that exists already.
[+] [-] cmorgan8506|7 years ago|reply
How was Facebook radically different than other social media sites? In my opinion, it was almost exactly the same as the rest. They just leveraged some clever marketing.
[+] [-] JacKTrocinskI|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hurtwed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiburizu|7 years ago|reply
The most important identity system in the world -- the one that even the biggest websites in the world want you to identify yourself with is definitely your email. The protocols underlying your email are my vision for social networking: A common format that accurately sends a message to feature-complete implementations. There's really not any reason we can't have your federated social media be your email replacement barring that the W3C standard doesn't call for any sort of secure mailbox (Mastodon doesn't have REAL "private messages") but it's still a damn good solution to the problem of trying to work in the social media space: you need users. What if the users are already there?
Perhaps as the APub standard and implementations grow we can see them become standardized to the sort of SSO that we are used to when we "connect with Facebook/Twitter" but another closed-loop timeline-based for-profit social media won't ever have my attention because there's not a market.
Unless it's Vine.
[+] [-] wll|7 years ago|reply
As a for-profit corporation’s legal operational boundaries end at the financial interests of its shareholders, any corporation-defined “core value” may not and does not benefit from legal guarantees.
While a benefit corporation [1] may allow to balance the interests of shareholders and stakeholders, any form equal to a UK company limited by guarantee with “limited” exemption [2] [Section 60, Section 62] binds, secures a corporation’s objects (or “core values”) to interest-free legal requirements.
For trust to ensue and persist, any “for-benefit” alternative to existing for-profit corporation- or nation state-controlled platforms must state its “core values” as the controlling corporation’s objects.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the...
[1] http://benefitcorp.net/sites/default/files/Benefit_Corporati...
[2] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/part/5/chapter/2...