[Freedombox-discuss] blogging in the FB (was Re: Roadmap Brainstorming)

[Yannick]

Le vendredi 18 mars 2011 à 23:12 +0000, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson a écrit :
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 10:37 PM, Les Orchard <l.m.orchard at pobox.com> wrote:
> >
> > For network effects, that's what I mean when I say that a FreedomBox should
> > talk to things like Twitter and Facebook. If you give me a box that can talk
> > to almost no one, I'll never use it. Give me a box that lets me talk to my
> > friends on existing services, yet gain more control over my life online, and
> > I'll start using it every day.
> 
> FWIW, Eben Moglen has repeatedly advocated exactly this strategy in his talks.
> 

Well, I'm not sure what you mean here.

We are talking about the network effect effect, i.e. people being
imprisonment into one system, because those systems are designed to not
be replaced. Expressed in technical words they do not interoperate well.
The freedom box must interoperate well. Being based on Debian and more
deeply on free software, I do not have a concern about that.

Interoperabilty is a concern pushed strongly by the free software
movement. It hurts quite deeply many business models, especially those
based on network imprisonment. It is so important that without it you're
stuck and what you loose is free innovation.

Strategically speaking, I do think the freedom box should comes with a
special defensive mesure against that issue. If we take into account
facebook has a win with the "network effect", we should turn that into a
fail.

The freedom box could be some kind of front end between the end user and
services like facebook, specifically designed to put the user into a
choice, which can be a little bit analog to the choice devs do when
choosing a licence: choosing between giving the work and possibly
loosing it (LGPL, BSD licence type), and the "copyleft" system (GPL)
which protect the work in a sens that it will remain usable for anyone
else in the same manner.

This is fine grained control of your datas and communication: the
freedom box should not allow you choose to publish in a system you loose
the control without at least a warning (and this will include e.g.
facebook), and should always encourage you to publish in a way in which
you are *sure* to stay in control.

e.g. you could choose to publish some news at home using the web server
of the freedom box, and as you aim the general public while do not fear
to be pointed out as the author, the system will allow you to publish
just a link and an abstract to your facebook page if you have one. This
turn facebook into some kind of a poor RSS feed aggregator, still the
user choose what should be there and what should not.

e.g. when the web browser of the freedom box try to access
http://facebook.com it will not open the page but instead will present
the front end to the user.

This proposal is some kind of working around the poor interoperability
of hierarchic systems like facebook.

All this only make sens if we do have another system in the freedom box
for social networking/web publishing that can superseed facebook and
twitter with a better design for freedom.

We should fix the issue, not just work around it.

Best regards,
Yannick