[9712263]

The most successful decentralized communication system - email as it turned out, people would concentrated to large free provider like Google. Decentralized server does not protect privacy for normal user because not most people could handle owning their server.

The most success decentralized service is BitTorrent. It is decentralized and it is decentralized in client level. Though it also caused uncontrollable piracy, since it is too easy to spread any data using Bittorrent. I think a true decentralized social network to protect privacy should be a p2p app, not server to server federation.

[optimuspaul]

Playing devils advocate here, but I also kind of believe this... There is no such thing as privacy in the social network. It is foolhardy to assume it is even possible. Even a real life social network relies on trust, trust that can be broken very easily and totally outside of your control. Maybe the answer is to accept that privacy isn't a real thing and stop sharing things, even in what you assume is a protected environment, that you don't wish to be public. I don't think there is a technical solution to "people can't keep secrets"

[daveFNbuck]

Technical solutions can't stop people you intended to share your secrets with from breaking your trust, but they can help prevent uninvolved third parties from getting direct access that no one intended to give them.

[znpy]

Not really. I've been using Mastodon for the last four months and I feel pretty safe. My instance doesn't know much more than I already told it. And I don't get reminders, emails telling me to check in, or ads following me. I could also run my own instance, and still be connected to the people I know.

Mastodon is pretty cool.

[dkn]

Sure but the real-life equivalent of that would be God telling Nike what kind of shoes you and your friend were talking about in secret.

[SlowRobotAhead]

That’s an interesting point and I’m stealing it for in real life conversations, to point out the human element of secrets - but we should understand people are bad at keeping them while also not allowing Facebook to monitor messages to find a better way / leverage to sell us things.

[some-username]

I fully agree. The problem is that it's even harder to design something that is fully p2p than something federated. (One thing that tries to be exactly what you want would be https://secushare.org/ But its in a very very early stage, right now. There exist others, though.) And you have to agree that (even if most people choose the biggest provider) simply having the choice of different providers or even being your own provider is a huge improvement.

[zanny]

Its not really about the design. At some point you have to recognize the physical impossibilities of p2p models - primarily availability. The reason why Matrix is more popular than Tox or why we haven't seen any remotely successful p2p social network while projects like Mastodon took off is because there is simply no way to make the UX of the scenario where you want to send a message to X, who is offline, and before they come online you go offline and the message is never sent.

The way Tox does it (and any network trying to work around this problem) is to locally cache messages en masse as close to the destitination as you can get. But as you can imagine that makes the bandwidth and power requirements of maintaining the network too streinuous to be competitive with a federated option that simply works when the always-on server is available or doesn't when its offline.

[marci]

When I see projects like https://webtorrent.io/ https://openpgpjs.org/ or things like https://github.com/cjb/serverless-webrtc I sometimes wonder if just a 2018 web browser is enough.

[ForHackernews]

Maybe. But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time, and don't want to be hosting videos and photos off their mobile device.

So you're stuck with replicating that data out to all the peers, which means you've just lost control of "your" data again.

[some-username]

The content could live at peers that are online all the time. This could be either your own node or not. If it's not your own node the network has to be designed in a way that the online node does not learn a bit about what it is storing. An example of this would be lake: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8974-practical_mix_network_desig... It's also mentioned on those slides: https://grothoff.org/christian/snt2017.pdf

[kodablah]

> But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time

I think most people know someone who does and we can start there. The first step is to make it really easy to host on a desktop (including addressing and NAT busting, both of which Tor provide).

[kylegordon]

Have you had a look at https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork ? I think it ticks all of the boxes you mentioned!

[skocznymroczny]

Another example - Git. It's decentralized in principle, but in reality, people either centralize around GitHub and alternatives, and even when self-hosted, there is usually a notion of master repo.

[flavor8]

That's partly a tooling issue, though. If git had native requests and a decent UI around them baked in, and the UI client also had some way of discovering your peers across networks, then the need for gitlab/github would be diminished.

[znpy]

You might want to check out https://snake.li - It's a cryptography-based "social network" born out of a masters' degree thesis. AFAIR most of it works in the browser, while the server doesn't really know much about the data.

A nice idea that sadly didn't get enough funding, and their creators eventually moved on.

It's AGPL though.

[erikb]

Bittorrent is decentralized in theory, but I think nowadays it's not worth much without trackers. Trackers again enable centralized groups with self-serving interests to centralize the activities and track user activity.

Check out what gnutella or the dat-protocol have to offer for reasonable alternatives.