The concrete use of the blockchain to register all the movements of a market—rather than each company doing their own, independently—and having a sort of autonomous notary is a easy game for big banks and centralizers.

An easy game because the viability of the system depends on “mining,” an industrial activity based on infrastructure. This is easy to verify when you look at the way that two Chinese “mines,” Antpool and DiscusFish/F2Pool, hoard more than half of the blocks created by the bitcoin blockchain. This basic design reveals the big lie of Bitcoin. But it also puts any blockchain product in the custody of whoever has big infrastructure and manages to attract large-scale capital. A concrete case is the Ethereum project.

The Etherum project

The Etherum project seeks to build an ecosystem on blockchain technology to develop “smart contracts” and all kinds of applications. Let’s say you wanted to expand the registry book as it’s defined in bitcoin, to be able embed applications in a new blockchain.

Leaving aside corporate developments, this kind of application of blockchain technology has already been put into practice with projects like Twister. Twister is microblogging software developed on its own blockchain. The problem with this kind of application is its dependence on infrastructure. This might still be a little fuzzy, but we can see it more clearly if we pay attention to the installation or entry process off any system developed on the blockchain.

Installing Twister

To install Twister, you have to install the software on the computer, start the service, and go to the browser to begin to use it. But hold on, if it’s the first time you’re using it, you have to wait for for Twister to replicate the whole chain of blocks the service works on, on your computer. For the moment—Twister has very few users and extremely few interactions—the chain of blocks is not very big, but even so, I had to wait more than half an hour, on a good connection, for the chain to finish replicating and to be able to register.

The need to replicate the whole chain of blocks on our computer is an insurmountable barrier to entry if you’re searching for an alternative to IBM, Amazon or Google. The Twister chain is still small, but think about how, to date, the initial synchronization for Bitcoin requires storage space of more than 65GB for the complete download of the blockchain.

For any of us, having to reserve 65GB on our personal computers has a large cost. But for IBM, or Google, or any of the Chinese Bitcoin miners, it’s nothing. And let’s not even talk about the astronomical differences between the processing capabilities of the great monsters of scale compared to ours. Because blockchain is consensual, after a certain point of centralization, the rules of the system depend on very few users. For example, the bitcoin “update” would be unviable if the two more Chinese mining organizations had refused to implement it. A network of nodes designed this way has a power structure with clear centralizers—the owners of infrastructure—that in the end presents a threat to the distributed future of the Internet.

In summary, when we use Blockchain technologies, the barrier to entry has a relatively small knowledge component—compiling and installing software—but an insurmountable infrastructure barrier beyond certain scales. If Twister had the level of interaction of GNU social, we wouldn’t be able to maintain our own node on our computers.

The alternative

The alternative is the very basis of the distributed nature of the Internet: the distributed structure of servers. In this design, barriers to entry are associated only with knowledge, and the costs of infrastructure are very low.

In practice, my website or GNU social installation are at the same level as the website or GNU social installation of any big business. And what’s as important or more, the possibility of having more or better infrastructure has zero impact on the functioning of the network and its rules. Additionally, it allows the infrastructure map to “track” the map of affinities, topics, and conversations. A distributed structure of servers helps distributed, autonomous, and sustainable networks of communities emerge and develop.

The alternative on which we can build a great new Internet era is projects like GNU social, Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora, and efforts to design common protocols like ActivityPub, not on the blockchain. Without a doubt, the blockchain will be very useful for registering large corporate capital markets and making cross-border banking transactions, but as system for the development of everyday applications on the Internet, it’s a danger to the distributed structure of the network.

Translation by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

Photo by IBM Research

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Collaborative consumption allows everything from car-sharing to go to work to exchanging hours of language practice, from offering babysitting services to offering hospitality to people who speak other languages or are part of our network of hobbies. It’s all set of demands whose satisfaction is key to weaving social cohesion.

Dozens of centralized platforms have tried to turn these demands into a source of business. The main business model and way of monetizing was the monopolization of the tools to incentivize and facilitate these kind of collaboration and exchange practices and relationships.

If a group of friends or neighbors was looking for a platform to begin to share objects or services, they couldn’t install their own platform, personalize it, and start to respond to demand for exchange. They’d have that resort to one of the centralized services, which means losing their autonomy and control over their relationships. As we know well, centralization always betrays.

A free and distributed standard for the Sharing Economy

One of the main challenges for the first GNU social Camp was to develop an alternative to the centralization of the collaborative economy using GNU social, a free standard for the development of distributed web applications.

Over the days of the event, we developed the first prototypes, but above all we overcame the limitation of seeing GNU social as a mere alternative for microblogging. Starting there, we’ve been releasing pieces for an “operating system” for the collaborative city.

First was WP-GNU social, and then SocialCapital. Today, with the release of Sharings—a plugin for GNU social—we’ve taken the first big step towards promoting a distributed alternative to the centralization of the collaborative economy.

Sharings: a plugin to share objects and services on distributed networks

This new plugin creates the possibility of adding objects and services to GNU social to share them with the users on your node or, if they’re on other nodes, connected to you through federation.

The result is a catalog of objects that the members of the node offer to share, which may vary from node to node, depending on their users’ connections. Sharings is still in alpha, but it already allows you to share objects, and other users can show interest in the object that you’ve shared and get in contact with you to agree on the details of the exchange.

In this version, the modeling of the objects and services is very simple. Every object or service is identified by a name and detail space where you can explain everything about the object or service you’re sharing and give details on exchanging. Communication between the one who’s sharing and the interested party, for the moment, is public.

Open questions

To continue development, we need to make progress on integration with Qvitter, create tools to edit the shared objects that include the ability to upload images and a more advanced search function, to be able explore the catalog comfortably.

But we also need to decide some even more basic things, like if we should do a more complete modeling of objects and services, and if communication between the one who’s sharing and the interested party should be private, at least after a certain point.

But the important thing is that the platform can already be used to share all manner of things. The alpha version already works without a problem in laMatriz.org and will federate with no trouble when other nodes include the plugin. Feel like creating your own catalog of things to share?

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original.

Photo by colink.

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The SocialCapital plugin is a key piece for the promotion of GNU social as an operating system for cities.

Overcoming the limitation of seeing GNU social as a mere alternative to centralized services like Facebook or Twitter was the most important contribution of the first GNU social camp. With this limitation overcome, GNU social becomes a platform on which we can build a thousand social and distributed applications.

The first set of applications designed with this thinking aim to offer a new operating system for cities. This is a new operating system meant to facilitate and drive participation and interaction between the people in a neighborhood, and, through federation, in the city. In the end, it’s about promoting social cohesion.

Let’s imagine for a second that we will create a system of rules to measure those interactions and estimate their impact on the community. Let’s imagine that a good part of that virtual skin of sharing is blended with neighborhoods, with neighborhood spaces that have their own nodes. We could at least have a index and a series of indicators of social capital in each neighborhood. Additionally, we could measure how the actions of an NGO influence social capital in its surroundings, or how incentivizing exchanges between two cities has an influence on the wealth of your neighbors. Let’s add to all this Juan’s latest reflections, returning to the relationship between common knowledge and social change. Far beyond “karma” or “popularity,” having a measure of what freely is shared would allow any city agent to have a much more effective plan of social action.

The development and specifications of this index us brings us to the first component in this set of applications: SocialCapital.

In a first development effort, we have created the basic structure of this plug-in and some early functionality. The core of this plug-in is the class SocialCapitalIndex where queries on users’ interaction are encapsulated and each one of them is assigned an index of social capital provided to the network. The early functionality of the plugin adds the index created by the class SocialCapitalIndex to the profile of each user.

In parallel to this early development effort, we’ve also written a first specifications document for the development of SocialCapital.

Starting from this first version of SocialCapital and its specifications document, our objective is to open up development of this important piece for the promotion of GNU social as an operating system for cities.

Among the next steps to continuing development are the improvement of current database queries, interaction, and visualization in Qvitter. But, the most important point is designing and improving the algorithm that creates the user index, or, as Andrés commented on GNU social, we want to have a number or set of labels associated with each user. Also, we would have to consult and evaluate other similar algorithms that can serve as a guide–for example, the reputation system at Stack Overflow.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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GNU social Camp will focus on digital literacy, the consolidation of the network of GNU social nodes and their users, and the development of new functionalities and integration of GNU social with other platforms.

The 7th and 8th of October, we will be holding the first GNU social Camp. The main objective is to promote the development of GNU social, the main social platform project supported by the Free Software Foundation, and consolidate the growth of the federated and distributed social web. We already have a first draft of the program with excellent news, like the participation of Mikael Nordfeldth, the main developer of GNU social, and Pablo Bernardo to talk to us about mobility in relation to GNU social.

We still have time to include chats and workshops in the event, and we would love receive your proposals. So that you have the framework of the event, we’ll give you some of the keys and main topics of the GNU social Camp.

• Digital literacy: Why promote platforms to create distributed networks? What is the federated social web? Network topologies. The objective is to promote and spread the theoretical framework of the web of autonomy.
• Consolidation of the network: Installation and maintenance of GNU social nodes, manuals and tutorials for new users, frequently asked questions, error correction. Ultimately, any initiative that contributes to consolidating and energizing the current network of working GNU social nodes.
• New functionalities and GNU social for the sharing city: Plug-in development, OStatus, topics, integration with blogs. The objective of this topic is to lay the foundation and offer the tools to turn GNU social into the free standard of the Sharing Economy and distributed social networks.

GNU social Camp will focus on digital literacy, the consolidation of the network of GNU social nodes and their users, and the development of new functionalities and integration of GNU social with other platforms.

Translation by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish

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The Facebook and Twitter socialization model, the FbT model, is like a large plaza where everyone can shout their slogans, while barely listening to each other and without taking responsibility for looking at context and understanding conversations. The result is like a big chicken coop, a “fray,” where any attempt to maintain a conversation on any topic is immediately cut off by an avalanche of slogans and aggression by users who, quite possibly, haven’t even read the article that led to the conversation.

Why does GNU social create more value in its conversations than Twitter?

It is no coincidence that what users most value is having “fewer links that on Twitter, more characters and more conversation,” “a space without noise for calm conversation,” “speaking calmly and dealing with other topics,” etc. All these messages point to the intimate relationship between the value of a conversation and the trust that has already been established within the nodes. It is a consequence of the distributed structure of GNU social. Thanks to it, GNU social is free of anyrecentralizing tendencies and builds the network based on independent nodes — generally formed by affinity between groups of friends who communicate with each other thanks to the federation of content.

What is “federation?”

The connections between the nodes of GNU social are established by the users who follow each other. Through these “following” relationships, all nodes can communicate and form a network. It’s what’s known as “federation,” and could be understood as a network of agreements.

All it takes is for me to follow a user on another node for everything that that user publishes to be visible to all members of my node. Thanks to this, you can see not only messages from the people that you follow in your inbox or on your personal time line and messages that are published in your node on the public timeline of the node, but also a much broader collection of messages, “the whole known network,” where, in addition to previous messages, you’ll be able to see messages from people in other nodes who at least one user in your node follows.

This creates wonderful things, like “the whole known network” being different in every node, because its composition is based on the people you follow and who follow your nodemates (or “nodies”). This is a very valuable aspect because it means joint exploration of the network. And starting from the existing relationship of trust between the members of a node, each time a member of the node follows — which is to say, establishes an agreement with — a user on an external node, the space of trust is expanded.

The key to creating space and favorable conditions for conversation is that the federation of content is based on what the users of each node follow on others, and not the general aggregation of all content by all nodes. The result is that if a person that neither I nor anyone else on my node follows says something in a conversation, I won’t see their posts. This might seem like a “bug”, but it’s really the result of an agreement, an implicit contract: to be part of a conversation of another node, I first have to have received the trust of someone who is taking part in it.

“Federation issues”

This model of federation is criticized by many new users who land on GNU social having had the experience of socialization of Twitter and Facebook. They label this difference “federation issues” and complain that conversations they participate in only show messages from the person that they themselves follow or other people in their node. The solution is as technically simple to implement as it is dangerous.

What such a request would do, in reality, is break the federation of content based on implicit contracts and open the doors to the aggregation of everything, everywhere, breaking any chain of trust. That is, it would remove the basis for allowing the nodes to create spaces for real conversation. By breaking this model of federating content, we would be importing the social model of the great centralizers, the Facebook-Twitter model, into the spaces and networks that we built on the basis of tools like GNU social, Diaspora, Friendica, etc.

Massive socialization through Facebook and Twitter has impoverished conversations and cut off the birth of new identities. It has done so by imposing a narrative about how the more accessible any conversation is to anyone, the better a network and its interactions are. In other words, when it is not necessary to have a minimum of prior trust to be able participate or interrupt the conversation of others. However, the search for this kind of accessibility obscures the very basis of distributed networks: the fact that a distributed network is made up of nodes, of independent groups that communicate among each other.

Conclusions

The problems or defects of the federation of content are only such if we accept and approve of the FbT socialization model. Really, we should call them “federation advantages,” because if which we’re seeking is to build enriching and conducive spaces for conversation, what we have today in GNU social is the structure that makes it possible.

The federation of content based on following relationships — agreements between people — is the base on which to build enriching and conducive spaces for interaction and for conversation. This is a determining aspect to not give in to centralizing pressure and turn spaces built with GNU social into a new version of the chicken coop that Twitter or Facebook currently offer us. The distributed structure of servers is “invisible,” and if we change the spontaneous logic of federation so that the user sees the network and behaves the same as in a centralized network, we will have changed everything to keep everything the same.

The world of the federation of content is passionate, and will largely determine the future of the web. Speaking concretely of the model of the federation of content, we sincerely believe that the challenges that we have to confront are in developing private communication and enlarging the system of exchanging short messages to a system where we can share everything useful — creating networks of hospitality, supply and demand, music, etc. — for our circle of friends, associations, community and surroundings.

That is, we believe it would be a mistake to replicate the centralized model and its culture. That would serve information without agreements between people, and therefore, approve of irresponsibility and encourage confrontation. For us, GNU social’s priority should be on becoming the “Swiss Army knife” of distributed networks based on sharing, by developing a culture of socialization based on trust within the nodes and the responsibility for understanding what is being talked about when someone joins a conversation. And for that, the key is to connect through federation, as has been done so far, on the basis of the minimum responsibility that comes with the fact that, to be an equal on another node, someone from that node has to considers what I say interesting enough to follow me.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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In recent years we have been through “a zombie attack” against the socialization and culture born in the Internet. This is known as the stage of recentralization, whose best-known proponent is the FbT-model. This is a socialization model that cut off conversations, wherever they took root, and the birth of new identities and the abundance of the Internet generally. There was no lack of strategies, and in fact, the distributed world worked for the creation of vaccine against the virus. But the response to this attack finally came from something much more basic and fundamental: Personal autonomy. Already, the debate on net topologies is a debate about the autonomy you have to participate in the creation of information, the definition of your agenda, and the possibilities you have to be authentic. The collision was inevitable, and — just like in the great movie “Warm Bodies,” something was alive in the zombies, they weren’t completely dead — our desire for personal autonomy was still alive. This explains the birth of, perhaps not numerous, but more and more islands in the net that are betting on a distributed world. The key words of the future are autonomy and sovereignty.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Esperanto)

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This use of the distinction between network topologies helps us to understand how information flows through a network from one node to another, which nodes of the network are capable of retransmitting information to other nodes, whether there are nodes whose the survival the network depends on, and whether some of the nodes have the ability to filter and control the information that the others receive. In summary, the debate on network topologies addresses the autonomy of nodes and structures of power. Not coincidentally, one of the most famous slogans of the cyberpunk movement reminds us that

Under every information architecture there hides a power structure.

The search for and distinction between different network topologies played an important role in the birth of the Internet. In 1962, a nuclear confrontation seemed to be an imminent threat. So, Paul Baran received an important order. The Rand Corporation asked him to define a structure to use to set up communication systems that could survive a first strike of a nuclear attack. The main result of Baran’s work can be seen in the image shown above to the right.

Robustness and network topologies

In 1966, Paul Baran, in his famous report on Darpanet, presented three different network topologies and their characteristics. The main difference between the three network topologies is how robust they are during a nuclear attack or, in other words, to what extent can they tolerate disturbances without suffering a total collapse. We could have a long, drawn-out discussion on this topic and give a wide-ranging presentation on the measurement of the robustness of a network but, in summary, let’s just say that the more robust a network is, the fewer nodes are disconnected by extracting any given node.

This, plus a look at the image above, allow us easily figure out that the first two topologies, which is to say, centralized and decentralized networks, are highly dependent on the centralizing nodes — the centralized network at the global level, and the decentralized network at the local level. In the centralized network, the loss of the main node would result in the collapse of the whole network, and as a consequence, the surviving nodes would not be able to continue communicating between each other because of the lack of the node that interconnects them. In contrast, in distributed networks — the third topology that appears in the first image of this post — each node is independent and the fall of any node would not disconnect any another.

The social nature of distributed networks

The originality of the Indianos was to use network topologies to explain the major features of social evolution since the eighteenth century as a function of the dominant media in each era (the post, the telegraph, the Internet). In the book The Power of Networks, we can read a broad historical tour through the last centuries and easily understand how technological advances gave life to new information structures which, in turn, created social changes. The key to the historical tour that we can read in The Power of Networks is in seeing people and connections between people where Baran saw computers and cables.

But, if through Baran’s view of a network topologies, we can technically measure the robustness of networks, what emerges from the view that David proposed to us a decade ago now in The Power of Networks?

This view quickly makes it clear that in distributed networks, the non-existence of central nodes not only makes it possible to have a network that is much more robust, but hierarchies also disappear, autonomy is favored and the control over others becomes impossible.

As a result, the nature of distributed networks is completely different from that of decentralized ones. A distributed network is not a more decentralized network. This is why it’s very important to answer the question of whether GNU social has a distributed or decentralized structure.

What is GNU social and what is its structure?

On the net, there are several descriptions of GNU social. Most of them present it as an alternative to Twitter or, more generally, as a microblogging service. Certainly, the current functions and options that GNU social offers are mostly characteristic of microblogging services. But in practice, what we find is thatconversations quickly flourish once again, and that more and more new functions appear that reduce the validity of these descriptions.

What is GNU social?

This conversation and especially the message belowput us on the track of a broader and more appropriate answer.

All microblogging and social networking sites are using selectively flawed ideas and should be transformed. Nobody needs ‘microblogging,’ they want socialization.

The desire to socialize and connect with each other shows the fact that all these systems and sites are not social networks in themselves, but tools that, like instant messaging and mail services, are used by social networks, which is to say, networks of people.

So we see that GNU social is a free tool for interconnection and communication used by different social networks. What functions will it offer, and what we will exchange through GNU social? That depends on what the social networks that use it want.

GNU social also has a particular characteristic that interests us especially, and it has to do with its structure. So, we return to the question, What is GNU social’s structure?

Is GNU social decentralized or distributed?

We’ve already presented widely on this, because it is important to answer this question. What will help us distinguish clearly between the three basic network typologies is the interdependence of the nodes that are part of the networks. Interdependence tells us whether the individual nodes depend on others to be able to communicate with others, and therefore, defines how robust they are under attack.

The nodes in a network driven by GNU social are the different installations like (lamatriz.org, loadaverage.org, quitter.se, etc.). A quick look at the image next to this paragraph us clearly shows that the nodes of GNU social do not depend on each other to communicate, and that the fall of one of them does not endanger the survival of the network at all. As a consequence, GNU social has a distributed structure.

Conclusions

From all this, we can draw two important conclusions. First, we realize that it is not necessary to look for a strict definition for GNU social, because what can be done with it will depend on what its users want. Secondly, GNU social has a distributed structure. This is an important distinction, because thanks to it, we see the birth of a social nature in which autonomy, privacy, and conversations are paramount.

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Could new free systems, thought of as alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, and with a distributed structure, create a different logic and dynamic from these born on centralized services?

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