Quote from: herzmeister on June 29, 2014, 01:26:14 PM

Diaspora* is pretty active by now, but still it's not perfect. But it's a nice online community for now and you will find people with the same attitude, to find and develop new models of social networking.

Friendica has even more features and can federate with Diaspora*, but it's still a horrible UX, no matter which design/theme is used. Friendica Red / Red Matrix is a restart/rewrite of the project with even better architecture and more powerful features and possibilities, but still horrible UX (but a bit better from what I see). Any help from designers would be welcome of course, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to create a smooth UX for it.

After taking a closer look, it seems like these projects have created decentralized social networks based on protecting user privacy, so those are definitely a step in the right direction and an improvement upon the currently available mainstream social networks. However, I don't believe that privacy alone will make people want to switch over to something like this, and in their current form I don't think they are necessarily beneficial to Bitcoin in the way I had imagined because they both leave out the important factor of monetizing the site and kicking back some (or ideally a large percentage) of the profit to the site's users.

I think this is the selling point with decentralized technologies.. either something can either be done cheaper than a current centralized solution, or users can actually get paid for using them. Privacy is great don't get me wrong, and more people around here understand that more than most, but I feel it is not enough to make this go mainstream. Ignoring privacy for a second, if someone is going to pay me (even a very small amount, as it would add up in a lifetime of use) to use a social network or look at videos on youtube, I am exponentially more likely to use their services than Facebook/Youtube if I knew that such a service existed.

Quote from: tidda on June 29, 2014, 06:34:52 PM

sounds pretty anarchist

I consider myself libertarian but anarchism is pretty much the same thing, except that the public generally views anarchism as being hostile. I think the word libertarian is a friendlier word for what I believe in, but I don't really care what others think about my political beliefs anyways.

The need for decentralized technologies goes way beyond political beliefs, as they are built to solve some sort of problem. Social networks make a ton of money off of the backs of people that use them, no one cares or does anything about it because they don't know any better. However, we as Bitcoiners and decentralized technology enthusiasts, can look at the problem more completely than the average social networking user. Bitcoin (et al) has already enlightened us as to the benefits of such a system. If wanting to see some (or most) of this money go to the actual users that give these things value is anarchist, then sure I am an anarchist.