@Free a few comments to the topics touched by you and others
- Regarding decentralization
IMO, decentralization in itself is a red herring*. What new or better functionally does it bring to the users in itself?
There have been successes in the past such as Wikipedia killing off Microsoft Encarta.
Wikipedia took over MS Encarta, not because it is built on decentralized technology, but because it is better (more comprehensive, more dynamic) encyclopedia.
By the same logic, Validbook Social is IMHO a great alternative for Facebook (that might very gradually replace it), not because it is going to be decentralized, but because of it better functionality - - compartmentalized social profiles comparmentalized inverted fiollowing model. Compartmentalized social profiles>>more comprehansive view on personality>>dampened down envy spirals. Comparmentalized inverted fiollowing model>>more real-world-like mutual exposure on each others life and personality.
BTW, these were not implemented by Facebook because they would lessen engagement, which is ok with Validbook as it is not based on Attention Bases Business Model.
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Regarding, privacy (end-to-end encryption)
I think E2EE will become standard with main cloud storage providers (e.g. Google Drive) and email providers (e.g. Gmail) not because of “new decentralizing” technology, but because of a competition pressure from startup services that provide E2EE (NextCloud, KeyBase; ProtonMail.).
I think WhatsApp introduced E2EE because of pressure from Telegram.
As for privacy on Social Networks it is in a sense an oxymoron - users share data from one to many (publicly or semi-publicly) so there is not much privacy from the beginning. The aggregation of that data and selling attention of its users to advertisers can be fixed by replacing Attention Based Business Model with something new (see Self-Sovereign Identity based Business Model) not by decentralization in itself.
Also, IMO the real beef (the root cause of issues) with Social Media is about envy spirals (Is it all about envy? – trying to flash out "the main beef", the root cause of issues that people have with Social Media) and has little to do with privacy loss and attention depletion. -
Regarding, portability of data and contacts.
I think this would be a great thing, mainly because of the increase in competition between service providers. I do not agree, how a lot of people think this will be achived via intermediary locally hosted applications.
The major barriers to this are:
– mental load that it causes to users. People minimize their mental load (in other words: people have habits, people do not like to change their habits, people do not like to do unnecessary work, people want to do stuff and go places)
– incumbents will block or obstruct such portability
These barriers can be overcome by standardization of transferring data and contacts between existing services and by and enforcing them to do so by introducing new competition laws. Here is my musings on how portability of contacts can be done in real world by using Decentralized Identifiers and what I call Base Identity. -
Regarding incentives
Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of www standards had so much impact not only because they were open source and free (although this was necessary for their wide adoption). Most importantly, they created opportunities and incentives for thousands and millions of talented people to create services and products. Practically, all Internet products and services that we use now where created because people had opportunties and great incentives to work on those opportunities.
How much more opportunities and incentives will decentralization technology like SOLID add*, beside what already exist with conventional web technologies? - I am not sure. I do not see how it adds a lot. I might be wrong. I’d like to see some explanation about opportunities and incentives that this technology will provide.
As for Validbook roadmap - we plan to gradually decentralize all its services to make it more secure (“nuclear-war-proofed”) and more performant (relevant when decentralization technology matures). But before decentralizing it needs to be built. As put in the article Centralize, then Decentralize - “Let’s stop playing pretend and start building.”
*Note - I am not talking about blockchain here - where value of making possible sovereign money and sovereign identity is clear.