To me it's sad and scary for humanity that one profit seeking corporation has managed to wedge itself in the middle of all our relationships. In my ideal world Facebook would be run by a benevolent nonprofit, ala Wikipedia but more democratic.
Once upon a time, all Internet protocols were distributed, passed-along by ISPs peering bandwidth (email, IRC, Usenet). The users paid their ISPs, and the ISPs had agreements to share and not bill each other (sort of).
This broke down, because most people monetizing an idea don't want others to host it outside their control. And now, even the peering agreement is breaking down, as Verizon tries to shakedown both sides of a network connection, and not just their subscribers.
We had a friendly, open Internet, and now we have ads and closed-ecosystem apps. In Africa, Facebook Zero is trying to create the illusion that there's no other Internet, just Facebook.
If things like Diaspora had the resources Facebook did, we could totally have distributed social networking, paid for by users.
> In Africa, Facebook Zero is trying to create the illusion that there's no other Internet, just Facebook.
If there is no Internet access then there is no Internet. Critics of Facebook's initiatives should need to provide compelling alternatives if they want to be taken seriously.
Usenet still exists, but herding cats never got any easier, and the cost for hosting didn't go away. There is a reason it became marginalized: user experience.
Facebook Zero is no longer doing what you allege, and never actually did. It was just a plan that was scrapped.
Diaspora never had a design or plan to work. It was a couple college kids who thought it would be neat despite never having written a distributed protocol before. We've had lots of smart people attempt this, and haven't gotten anywhere close to a usable "distributed" social network prototypes.
If your idea can't bootstrap itself from zero users the way modern startups work, maybe it isn't such a great idea after all.
Sure. Why not? The only thing really stopping us from having distributed apps (like diaspora) is a way for people to easily install them on always-connected hardware they own.
If there were a well designed open source router with a decent app store with equivalents of all the web apps you use online, I'm sure you could get a lot of people to start sharing their baby pictures using software installed on that.
I'd switch to something like that in a heartbeat if it existed.
Would your friends and family? Because that's the real trick. It has to be easier than typing "facebook dot com" on your laptop and your phone, anywhere in the world, to be a serious contender. I like the idea, but I don't see that happening.
That's my point. At the moment routers are in the same position smartphones were pre-iphone - they're functional beasts for 99% of people and while they can be 'smart' it's a niche geek activity and it's super tedious. Kind of like what smartphones were like pre-iphone.
Once somebody makes an easy to use, beautiful router with a vibrant one-click-install app ecosystem (backup, calendar, photos, dropbox, email), I'm sure people will want to migrate to it. It's not just about privacy it's also about being more in control of your data, being 'closer' to your data (uploading your baby photos wouldn't take as long) and not having your experience dictated by profit seeking (your app won't mysteriously switch itself to top stories every other day).
We're just not there yet. Every kind of 'smart router' and associated OSS software is kind of a pile of crap, to be honest.
Why would anyone care about being "closer" to their data? Photo uploads are already so fast as to be without considering. And by all indications, nobody materially gives a damn about Facebook picking and choosing what to show you. And Americans obviously don't care about privacy, either.
I think you're asserting a demand without any indications of its existence.
