this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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He's right, but centralized services like BlueSky won't be it.
Social networks don't need servers playing middlemen, friend-to-friend networks with onion routing to pass messages to friends-of-friends would more accurately reflect the structure of real-world social networks.
Jay Graber is a woman
Ah, that's my bad. Didn't bother learning who the CEO was. XD
Fixed my post, thanks!
We can't assume the gender.
Are social networks and social media the same thing?
Depends on the usage.
"Social Networks" can be a reference to the various social media services available online, but they can also be an reference to the collection of social connections one has offline.
Social media provides the tools and platforms for social networking to take place, but social networking is the actual practice of using those tools to connect with others.
Not sure why this was downvoted. The business model of BlueSky is that they're the indexer or whatever they want to call it. Technically it is federation but it's a disingenuous implementation.
i feel more afraid of bluesky than meta/threads. they are already pushing a very corporate-centric solution with a bolted on feature the fediverse if frothing for (portabability).
What is onion routing?
Say you want to send a letter to a friend of a friend, but you don't know their address so you can't send it direct.
Instead, you can package your letter inside a second letter to your mutual friend, asking them to finish filling out the mailing label for you so your message will reach the intended recipient.
They call it "Onion Routing" because the message can be wrapped in multiple layers of these routing requests, with each recipient stripping off the layer addressed to them and forwarding the remainder on to the next connection in the chain.
Using this protocol, so-called "Friend to Friend" networks can still enable communication between non-friends so long as a "5 degrees of Kevin Bacon"-style connection exists between you and whoever you're trying to reach.
Tor.
The TOR network is indeed the most widely-used implementation of onion routing, but it isn't the only example.
My go-to reference is Retroshare, an open-source app that implements onion routing on top of an encrypted friend-to-friend network:
http://retroshare.cc/
You only connect to your trusted friends, but by passing messages along the Kevin Bacon chain it's still possible to reach anyone on the network. Retroshare's built-in services include email, instant messaging, traditional web forums, microblogging, and a Reddit-style karma-ranked forums/linkboards, and third party plugins include voice and video chat. It's desktop-only, but I think it demonstrates that serverless social networks are possible.