Tent v0.1
Decentralizing things like this is never <i>ever</i> going to work. In terms of running it... my mom/sister/dad/cousin are not going to host this themselves. They might depend on me to do it, but even I'm not going to run a decentralized social network myself. There's too much liability involved. Not to mention, it's a pain in the ass.<p>I want to hack and work on my own ideas. That's why I trust my mail hosting to Google. Sure, they read all my emails and analyze me for marketing. That's a small price to pay though. I get a rad web client, Apple Mail + iPhone support, and never need to worry about my email server. Anyone remember qmailrocks.org? I used to sit for hours messing with and playing with qMail back in the day. I've done it. I've hosteed mail servers for friends and family. What a pain in the fucking ass!<p>Same for hosting. I <i>love</i> configuring infrastructure. I taught myself HAProxy, load balancing, nginx, and clustering years ago when people were still using mod_python. I built a FreeBSD box for fun with old parts an an old SSD the other weekend. I have quite a few linodes running right now. But it's also a pain in the ass. Because of that, I also enjoy pushing my personal site to Heroku and not worrying about it ever again. git push, boom done.<p>A lot of people take things like Facebook for granted. We all bitch and moan about all kinds of issues it has or features it lacks, but it's a gargantuous network that virtually everyone that I know or care to talk to is on it. My family and friends back home in LA where I grew up, my new friends in Sweden that I met while abroad recently. It's got a handy mobile app (that was luckily redeveloped recently) and best of all it's 100% free.<p>This decentralized stuff is nonsense. There's too many layers of crap. Even if there was a one-click-deploy social network for people where all they needed to do was rent a server somewhere... someone is still running that server and you need to worry about them snooping your data or whatever else the neckbeards are worried about.<p>Remember Diaspora? Hah.