Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been
I'm pretty familiar with FOAF, LinkedData, RDF and all of the rest of the Semantic Web standards. But saying that all of these can replace a system like facebook is a bit unintelligent. Facebook brings much more to the table that users need which semantic web has never been able to accomplish like near-instant response times, UX that even my grandma can use and 99% availability... just to name a few.Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous.Facebook is a centralized monopoly I agree, but a bunch of standards isn't going to replace the stuff that Facebook built.I believe the problem of centralization can be solved by looking at the problem differently: what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. We need better ways to explore our "connection graph", not just a static feed of people we know and things they post.For instance I'd like to be able to change the algorithm that generates my main feed. I want to grab the "political liberal" feed from github (as an open source example) and load it onto facebook; then grab the "climate change biased" feed and load that and test how that works. I want to change the variables of the algorithm, test it for a few days see how that works and change it to something else if I see it's only reporting fake news.This to me seems the problems we need to face this decade when it comes to social networks; building p2p networks from scratch, or using other decentralized standards is cool but isn't inherently solving the problem imho. There's nothing inherently wrong with the social media giants if they prove to us they can show us different views of the graph without getting in the way.