[Freedombox-discuss] "What's a Distributed Social Network?" -- the comic

stephen white steve at adam.com.au
Fri Feb 25 10:37:38 UTC 2011


I commented on the comic via the buddycloud developer area, and Jonas suggested that I repost here. I apologise for my first post being a criticism:

That comic makes it a lot harder than it needs to be. If I was explaining this to my grandma, I would say "everyone's been using email for decades. It works and it's proven... Now Google and Facebook want your information so they want you to use their website, and now we have all of these privacy problems you keep reading about in the news. Buddycloud does the same as Facebook but like email, so there are no privacy problems because it's being done the way email worked for decades"

That version of the explanation points out the established solid history, then says it's continuing that history. The problem with the comic is that it argues the merits of both cases, making people need to consider one or the other as though they're on an equal basis. They're not. The centralised Facebook approach is the design that doesn't have the history, hasn't proven itself, and has the privacy issues. This is a substantial advantage that shouldn't be wasted by "fair and balanced" arguments.

--
  steve at adam.com.au




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