> There is nothing inherently wrong with centrally stored data.

I'd argue that a 3rd party having the personal details and communication logs of 2 billion people is a massive problem. Privacy, governmental data requests, accidental information leakages, profiling, job applicant scrutiny, fake news, spam, data misuse by employees etc. Or even worse, in times of war.

What does this have to do with centrally stored data. Having data in a central store doesn't imply third parties.

If the store is decentralized, then any party could be equivalent to a third party, and therefore anyone has access to your data.

> Having data in a central store doesn't imply third parties.

How is that going to work then? Every single company holding your data in a central place is mining it today and selling the information to advertisers.

On a distributed network you replicate data only with people you choose. Since you're not going to add a government (or an ad company) to your friend list, they won't have your data. Private communications are encrypted and flowing directly to the recipient, so there's no port that agencies can tap into to listen. There won't be any big data to analyze, since data is spread across the network. Backup is easy, it's just a folder. Fake news never gets promoted, since there are no paid promotions.

Spam is a non-issue since there are no advertisers. There's no way to get into your feed than through your friends. There's no server or central storage, so employee misuse is not an issue. And you can have as many identities as you choose, there won't be a mandatory real name policy.

I could go on.

"Every single company holding your data in a central place is mining it today and selling the information to advertisers."

That doesn't mean it has to be that way in the future though. There are centralized social networks that are charging money for their use, and they are not selling to advertisers nor are there any.

but how is that guaranteed? If there's a single source of data, its a bigger target for bad actors, and a single source still needs an owner of some sort that you have to trust isn't going to cheat or change the rules in the future.

With decentralized, you still have the same issues (I don't really know how you solve those unless data transfer is truly peer-to-peer which I think causes discoverability and similar issues to usability), but at least the scope of them is inherently limited and you can opt in/out of the source based on your trust of it.

Replace advertisers with governments, and your centralized store has now been breached. See Lavabit.

> How is that going to work then? Every single company holding your data in a central place is mining it today and selling the information to advertisers.

It doesn't matter how it works, the fact of the matter is that while logistically third parties are typical in today's environment, they aren't implied by centralization.

Does Amazon's s3 sell your data to third parties? No. It's still centralized though!

> Since you're not going to add a government (or an ad company) to your friend list, they won't have your data.

Except when people use things like hashbase.io because they can't afford to run the server program 24/7 themselves. Then the hashbase.io analogous service sells your data to a third party, and congratulations you've got a system that has all of the lose of distributed systems, with all of the lose of centralized systems.

This is precisely the point: only give data to people you trust.

If Alice wants to communicate with Bob, she shouldn't be obliged to trust Facebook too.

Actually with a few tweaks, this technology would be much simpler to use than Facebook, for a person like your grandma, simply because it removes that annoying registration process. You just open the installed app, and that's it.

It's odd that we got used to the idea that "(1) registration, (2) strong password creation, (3) username selection (in case of conflicts), (4) email verification link, (5) login" is somehow a good user experience.

I have a question, how would my Grandma signal her identity to SSB from multiple devices? Say she has an iPhone and an iPad and she wants to use the iPad at home and the iPhone when she's out. I imagine it's not as simple as installing the app on both devices in this case? I'm curious how this is approached.

Cycle.js and xstream are amazing, as an aside. Thank you.

Using the same identity from several devices is not yet implemented.

Eventually, the client will probably have a “that's also me” button, which you'll press on both devices to confirm.

>It isn't an alternative to Facebook unless my grandma can use it, and she couldn't set this up for herself.

Facebook isn't an alternative to email if my grandma can't use it.

Computers aren't an alternative to telephones if my grandma can't use it.

Telephones aren't an alternative to mail if my grandma can't use it.

etc.

---

It'll get easier and simpler, I promise.

This is a variant of survivership bias and says effectively nothing.

Just because things have gotten more complicated and people have used them doesn't mean that people will start to use any complicated thing.

For example:

Google+ / Google Wave isn't an alternative to email if my grandma can't use it.

GPG isn't an alternative to talking in-person communication if my grandma can't use it.

... etc

Yes, you have valid examples where things that are relatively complex did become popular, but there are many many more examples of things that were more complicated and failed.

Just because scuttlebutt is complicated is not a reason it will succeed, but is indeed a valid reason it might fail.

My Grandma definitely skipped from a corded phone to an iPad with Facebook and right over email. It's still too complicated for her.

And yet billions of people use email. Goes to show the grandma argument is not very useful.

Most of them using an interface like gmail, which unsurprisingly looks a lot like (facebook) messaging.

Sure, thinking about user experience and designing user-friendly UI is important. But multi-million dollar UI and the ability to scale without losing performance (due to deep pockets) are the only reasons to use FB, goOgle or any of The Stacks. Once more UX people and graphic designers start working on decentralized, free code apps, and organic growth via community-hosting (userOps) allows them to scale as well as corporate server farms, where does that leave The Stacks?

Okay, but FB wasn't something your grandma used when it began.

Arguably it isn't FB if regular college kids can't use it. If they can subsequently onboard less tech savvy people, so be it, but that could be a future goal.

Why do we even want to be in a creepy digital relationship with our grandma? I used to think like you, then one day I realized that the real life is outside, I began calling my aunties, visiting them, and also created a Whatsapp group so the big family can have fun & share updates.

You do realize Whatsapp is owned by FB, right? so it's a "creepy digital relationship with our grandma" in exactly the same way messaging Grandma on FB is. The key issue here is not whether we use digital comms channels (or telephones, or carrier pidgeons), but whether those comms channels lead us towards getting together in person with our families and friends, or whether they lead us towards spending more ticking clicking around the comms channels. Check out Joe Edelman's videos on Vimeo about human-centred design for a more detailed discussion of this and related issues.

I live at the base of a mountain, and hike every day after work. I spent all last summer exploring every park in my state, and was on the news as an expert guide for some of the outdoor activities in my area. So you are presuming a lot by your response. My grandma, on the other hand, is in her 90s and not very mobile, and can keep up with family via their digital presences. Like you said... "the big family can have fun & share updates".

> It isn't an alternative to Facebook unless my grandma can use it, and she couldn't set this up for herself.

I wonder if Facebook is perhaps just not worth it.