Conversation

Notices

1. Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Apr-2017 21:59:40 UTC Bob Mottram

   • Maiyannah Bishop
   • Gideon Rosenblatt
   @maiyannah @gideonro I was once on Google+ long ago, but it had some problems:
   
   

   • It's not FOSS
   • It doesn't follow open standards
   • It doesn't federate (is a centralised silo)

   To understand why Google behaves the way it does you only need to grok a few things:
   
   

   • It's income is primarily from advertising
   • Targeted advertising means surveillance which means Google always need to be able to see plaintext. E2EE is therefore kryptonite to them.
   • For the ad model to work information processing needs to be hierarchical such that the advertiser entity exists at a higher level than the user and can see/spam lower levels.

   This means that Google simply cannot compete within certain technology spaces. To do so would break their business model. Notice how they withdrew from XMPP some time ago, despite it remaining as one of the most secure communications methods.
   
   It's highly unlikely that we'll have any real competition from Google in the realm of federated socnets following open standards. They might tinker, run a GSoC one time or whatever, but that will be about the extent of it.
   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Apr-2017 22:29:23 UTC Bob Mottram

     • Freedombone Home Server
     • Gideon Rosenblatt
     @gideonro I'm running my own gnusocial server and then just federate with the rest. When you're the admin you can set the limit to anything you want. It also means I keep control of my data, can back it up and so on. You too can do this easily with !Freedombone https://freedombone.net
   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Apr-2017 22:38:38 UTC Bob Mottram

     • Maiyannah Bishop
     • Gideon Rosenblatt
     @gideonro @maiyannah my conjecture is that the kind of community atrophy you're pointing out is actually a function of network topology. The structure of the network doesn't match the social affinity groupings and tends to work against them or forces them into the same space where they then conflict and burn out in the fighting. Monolithic, hierarchically structured systems like Google+ are bound to suffer from that.
   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Apr-2017 22:48:36 UTC Bob Mottram

     • Gideon Rosenblatt
     • sulman
     @sulman @gideonro I expect they will drop it. One thing I never really understood was why so many open source folks used Google+. I mean, fundamentally it was never open source so far as I know.
     
     But on the various occasions I've pointed this out people always just said "yes Bob" and then immediately went straight back to typing their G+ post.