Comment Distributed social networks won't work. (Score 1) 269
Distributed social networks won't work.
The problem is that if you are hosting the content on your own server, you have ultimate revisionist control of what you've said in the past, and now regret to the point that you're willing to rewrite history. In the limit, there's always the "off" switch if you want to duck out on the responsibility for what you've said.
I'm also not sure I'd be comfortable with some types of content showing up in "my feed", particularly content that happens to be illegal in my jurisdiction. I certainly don't want some anarcho-syndicalist tearing down all of the political borders because he thinks he should be able to post Nazi propaganda into Germany, or some other radical element deciding that I should have to hear his manifesto.
Right now we are seeing the problem with this with the whole "GamerGate" fiasco with Twitter because Twitter has strong distribution links for all their content (unlike Facebook). People who want to be seen, heard, and use social networking for self-promotion, or for a cheap way to send out coupons to their followers appreciate the strong links in Twitter, and complain bitterly about the less strong links in Facebook. Sometimes having the ability to self-damp these things is not altogether bad.