the ethical social network

[David Gerard]

On 27 August 2011 14:15,  <judith at movingyouth.eu> wrote:

> This is the reason why I tried to write down the concept of ethical social
> network.
> I. The ethical social network
> II. How to respect those freedoms?


This is important and necessary, but not sufficient. One of the big
problems with social network software is that it must not only be free
- it has to actually offer reasonable security to the nontechnical.

Freedom is insufficient - it actually has to be technically good,
because it'll be used by nontechies out on the hostile Internet.

This is something I'm seeing a lot. People disgruntled with Facebook,
and newly disgruntled with Google+, are advocating Diaspora. But
Diaspora is horribly shoddy software deep in its architecture:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned-from-the-diaspora-launch/

with no visible security architecture (these are all the same post,
with three discussions):

http://oda.dreamwidth.org/2828.html
https://plus.google.com/u/0/102376799902430080799/posts/GHg5nZRHbUA
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/404422

I would go so far as to say that advocating it to nontechnical users -
the typical user disgruntled with Facebook or Google - is presently
the *wrong* thing to do, because they simply don't know enough to
protect themselves from its problems, and would be exchanging a single
threatening agent (the large company attempting to monetise their
click trail) for an unlimited number of threatening agents (every
griefer on the Internet).


- d.