Tent v0.1
Decentralizing things like this is never ever 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.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!Same for hosting. I love 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.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.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.Remember Diaspora? Hah.