Today the Diaspora Project launches a new service called Makr. On Diaspora's latest blog post they explain Makr using 6 paragraphs and an extra 3 FAQs. They managed to publish many words without explaining anything about Makr.

I went to Makr to see WTF they are talking about.

What they should have wrote in their blog post: We don't know how to convey ideas using words, so visit makr.io to find out what the WTF it actually is. If they knew about words they could have explained Makr in one phrase: Makr is a web tool to place text over images and then remix and share via Facebook.

One of the things they say is: We realized after a while, however, that giving people ownership over their bits was only part of the problem. Indeed, while most decentralised social networking projects have been focused on making it possible for anyone to host their own piece of the puzzle themselves, we have all totally missed the most important part: A centralised web tool where users can overlay words on images and share them via Facebook !!.

This will revolutionise the way I consider Diaspora, I used to think it was a bunch of self centered hipster programmers that want to change the world while trying to earn themselves some riches and fame, now I don't really think they give a shit about decentralised social networks. Heck, for all I know now they might even be working for Zuckerberg.

Today I heard about Zurker, it's a social networking site that aims to be better because.. Because that's what Nick Oba told Wired:

How is it better than Facebook?

Zurker is better because of its DNA: Zurker would never implement something purely for the purposes of monetising the user base, such as Open Graph. Zurker is better because it is the future. A good way to think of it is this: Facebook is the 10-tonne dinosaur, while we are the little shrew-like mammal. We may look small and insignificant, but the future belongs to us, because we are better adapted for the new environment of openness, transparency, and people power.

Most people will have read "Zurker is better because I said so", I hope you did too.

This lead me to another article on Zurker titled Be wary of cooperative social network Zurker by Lea Simpson, I went through the post and then did what I often do, read the comments. It is incredible to see so many evangelical replies, it's as if Jesus Christ came back to earth and gave them Zurker. This looks like an orchestrated response, normal comments wouldn't be so outrageously praising.

BTW, reading this could help understand who Nick Oba (or should I say Naoki Oba) is.

Zurkerscam.com

So I now go to Google, and just type "zurker", nothing else. On the first page is zurkerscam.com, I am so glad to find a website that might have some critique I can read to at least get the other side of the story.

I am honestly surprised when I see zero critic, tl;dr: Is Zurker Scam?
No, it's not. There is zero doubt to me that this site was created by a person heavily invested in Zurker. Zurkerscam.com is a website designed to catch Zurker skeptics and to explain how great it is.

Domain Owners

I of course did a 'whois' so see who own's what domain. Both domains use anonymous cloaks (hide the domain owner's identity). On zurkerscam I get it, but on zurker.com ?

Interesting and funny thing, zurker.com and zurkerscam.com were both created in september 2011, strange.. . : Domain Name: ZURKER.COM Registrar: ENOM, INC. [...] Creation Date: 03-sep-2011 Domain Name: ZURKERSCAM.COM Registrar: NAME.COM LLC [...] Creation Date: 25-sep-2011

Looks like someone at least made the effort of not using the same registrar.. .

Oh but wait, they also have zurker.eu and EU domains aren't cloaked but the whois info must be obtained from eurid.eu : Name: Naoki Oba [...] Organisation Name.com LLC

Same registrar as zurkerscam.com, of course that could just be a coincidence.. . I must be true to myself and give them the benefit of the doubt.

WT-HTML !

I know this may seem unheard of to speak of a website's HTML, but seriously, I can't trust a website that wants to be the next Facebook when their HTML code is so bad. Not just bad, really really bad. Zurker is selling a web based application, not organic cheese directly from the farm. I expect at least a DocType and I don't expect to see the layout done using tables. 2012 and tables ?

I am not even exaggerating in saying that even a beginner would not make so many mistakes. On a purely technical level I wouldn't trust the product itself solely based on this. All I can say is WT-HTML !

Throw in Keywords to Make People Wet

Open Source, Cooperative, anti-corporate, anti venture capitalist, driven by democracy, are a few of the words thrown in to get people excited, make them feel like rebels taking back the power (and the code is not open source).

That's all crap, because in the end you do not have any power on a social networking website if you are not root on the server that runs it.

You do not have any decisive power when you own 0.000001: You can buy additional vShares for $1 (£0.62) and one vShare is the equivalent to ownership of 1/1,000,000th of the Zurker in your territory You can buy more shares ! What happens if you buy many many of them ? I am going to guess that there is no maximum limit to how much you can own, nothing about this on their FAQ. (update) I have been told that the maximum is 500 vshares per user, I can't confirm this but let's say that's true.

I wonder if owning more shares gives you more voice, it would seem logical that it would be like that. If so it's not really a democracy, and by the way, from the FAQ: Can I sell my vShares?
A vShare is an agreement between the co-founding developers and yourself that you will own a stake in the venture to be established. An agreement between two parties can't be sold so our understanding is that it would be odd, and potentially illegal, to allow the trading of vShares. If only the answer was a clear as the answer to "Is Zurker Scam?"

As per my various jobs and occupations I have read much spam, from reading it I have learned a lot. Quality Spam (never thought I would write those 2 words together) consists of phrases and various words chosen to make people want them to be true. Reading Zurker's websites, interviews and fan's comments feels like reading spam.

The Revolution is.. Not Here.

There are no new features mentioned, the only thing they say is that there are new features that the others don't have. In fact this tool does not seem to want to federate with other social networks, like Friendica, Diaspora, StatusNet, and so on, Zurker does not mention any of them.

Zurker is not part of any social networking revolution, it is simply trying to profit from a trend already in motion.

The biggest problem with Facebook and Google+ is that they are centralised social networks. The solution to a centralised social network is not a centralised social network. Duh.

Conclusion: Can I Trust Zurker ?

No.

Update: Friends (comments here, on Friendica and IRC) have pointed out that, except from Lea Simpson's post for Wired and now this post, there is almost nothing online that even remotely questions Zurker. I've searched deep into Google, 40 pages deep, and found that almost every result is a blog post that contains a unique invite link to Zurker.

Because Zurker promises to reward users that recruit other users, this naturally creates a wave of excessively positive posts with these invite links, each trying to recruit as many users as possible. It's like with those chain letters.

Update 2: I am being told that the maximum is 500 vshares, I updated the article.

Update 3: I did find a few of other pages with negative reviews on Zurker, there are some buried under the link spam:

• Why you aren’t missing anything by skipping Zurker
• Zurker.com A scam or social networking service
• Zurker. Proof we’re desperate.

And a sad video that should convince even the hardest Zurker that this looks very wrong

• Zurker - Make Thousands of Dollars

Update 4: added another link to a Zurker review.

Lately there have been more and more attempts to legislate, censor and control the Internet and with that many protests to counter these measures. There are also more and new groups and political parties that advocate Internet freedoms, freedom of speech and all that stuff. Even some website that wants to have a "Bat signal" to gather activists when action is needed.

There are a few things that have been bothering me for quite some time now, if you already understand how we ended up with the Internet we have today you may skip to the end.

Brief History

Internet was designed to be a global distributed network, which means no central point of failure or governance. Having a decentralised network was key in the design, this made it virtually impossible to shut down communications between peers as there would be many different possible routes from point A to B.

Before 2000 it seemed normal or at least common for people to host their own services even at home on their desktop computer.. Even though things like AOL, Hotmail and other such services existed, censoring and/or controlling the Internet was nearly impossible. People used so many different email providers, different search engines and various forums and chatrooms, the users were scattered all over the place.

The network slowly concentrated in to bigger centres. Some services grew and became better and better to a point were their names became synonym for the type of service they initially provided. Some extended their services to new domains, like that search engine who quickly understood that user data was the real money maker. They offered to capture user data as a service, they called it "email with unlimited space". People loved it so much that the other providers had to follow the same path or risk extinction. It became the most popular way of monetizing the Internet.

Later on newcomers landed directly on this new world of "ad-supported data violating web based services" and saw it as normal Interweb procedure. Meanwhile many "computer geeks" abandoned their personal servers and signed up for FaceSpace+ accounts, with that the wild west style communities started to die off, their users were outraged by any web page that did not have Ajax effects or OMG kittens. The first battles in the war on Digital Autonomy and Freedom were lost to fancy user interfaces and pokes.

Current Situation

It's very simple, most users rely on one major search engine to tell them where to go, the same company provides them communication tools (email, chat), news aggregation, maps, calendars, document editors, etc etc. If you look at the top 500 global sites (according to Alexa) you can see that most of the biggest sites are all owned by a very small club.

Internet services are mostly centralised. It is now easier than ever to censor content on the Internet, Twitter accepts per country censorship on their network. Google has been complying too. In this case I am not judging Twitter and Google on their censorship policies and/or methods, they are quite open about this unlike others we might not always hear about.

This shows how easy it has become to control what information gets propagated on the Internet. Countries like Egypt may find it more effective to censor Tweets and Google searches rather than pulling the plug on the whole Internet. This more discreet approach should have something closer to the desired effect, indeed censorship works best when it goes unnoticed.

Tracking Users to Provide Tailored Content

Most Internet users nowadays have all their emails read by robots/scripts which then find the most appropriate advertisement to incorporate to their webmail page. Most of the data we feed into the machine gets mashed up into data that is sold to marketing researchers. If you don't have an account with any of these companies, you might still be feeding them copious amounts of data via cookies, analytics and other types of embeded web content.

It is nearly impossible nowadays to visit a web page that does not ask your browser to retrieve data from other sites. Even a simple image embeded to a website will provide useful statistics. True story, some random guy once linked to an image from my website for his site's footer, I suddenly had his complete visitor statistics.

Imagine how much more can be done from a company that owns an incredible amount of very popular websites and provides many analytical services to a point where almost every website visited implies a request to at least one of their servers. Now imagine that a lot of the people running around on this Internet are logged in to this big company's services and are hence personally trackable among almost all the sites they visit.

One of the goals of all this is to provide "tailored content", not the advertisements that happen to match your recent conversations, but your actual search results, news, etc. You might not have the same results using Google as someone sitting right next to you. Some say this is good, others say this is evil. I say is that it's a demonstration of what is technically possible today and it should make you react.

Internet Freedom Defenders, Please

The main reason why any of those CISPA/ACTA/PIPA/SOPA/CABANA things could affect the Internet is because of the way most of us use the Internet. Being mainly passive users has made it technically possible to apply very creepy legislation. I see these protests mainly as a wake up call for people to start changing their habits and to take the Internet back.

A few things many movements that try to defend and promote Freedom, Internet freedom, Free speech or any variant of those things need to start doing are:

• stop using Facebook as your primary point of contact
  

  I get that you must use those tools to reach the masses, but you are losing the core by doing so exclusively. I really can't take you seriously if you communicate mostly via the same website that supports the law you are protesting against (Facebook supports CISPA). Just setup a public webpage somewhere with the infos people need, then share/spread the info via other mediums such as social networks, email, forums, etc.

• Learn to use distributed and decentralised social networks
  

  You should use and promote usage of social networking tools that do not depend on a central authority, a great example is of course Friendica, there are many others too. Avoid corporate policy censorship by being your own social network administrator.

• Don't use URL shorteners
  

  It should be obvious that shortened links are obfuscated links, there is no good reason to use them, ever. If you have a link to share, just share the link, not a link to the link.

• Emails, install your own server
  

  This should be the most important element, a private mail server. This is where you tend to concentrate most of the confidential stuff. You should already want to do this by default, especially if you want to defend the Internet and Freedom, etc etc... . .

• Avoid embedding tracking devices on your websites
  

  All those gadgets to "like", "sign in with", "comment using", etc etc are often tracking devices. By embedding them you automatically identify most users to their email and/or social network providers about their visit, without the user's consent.

Just one more thing, when Facebook, Twitter or some site like that starts acting weird, remember this: Their terms of Service allow them to do pretty much anything and you agreed to them (if you have an account). They do not owe you anything because you are not the customer, you are the product.

I feel sad sight when I see organisations like Demand Progress ask their subscribers to sign a letter to ask Facebook to stop supporting CISPA. Instead of trying in vain to change the corporation, do what these fine people did when Godaddy supported SOPA, change your habits.

What you do counts more than what you sign.

It's been a few years now that some of us have been watching closely as a few distributed social networking tools have been developing. I am one of those, I don't like to have personal accounts on corporate servers and I do think that if it's not distributed it's not an Internet communications tool.

I haven't tested them all, but I have installed and used 3.5 of them. I count the 0.5 because at some point I had well, that's a GNU-Social/StatusNet "issue". I did briefly try to install a few others, but the experience was kept so short I don't have anything interesting to say about them. So this is just my personal experience with the following and is hence far from being a complete comparison.

Diaspora

It's been about 2 years since Diaspora managed to seduce people into giving them money to program a usable decentralised alternative to Facebook. Today, they are still working on the interface.. .. . No really they are, they want to make the experience more emotional.. . Whatever that means.

The whole thing seems to not even have a goal other than to be seen coding on a mac while wearing skinny jeans. I have to admit the interface looks good, but you can tell it's been at least their main focus.

Everything seems quite unclear with this project, which is now managed by Diaspora, Inc. Yeppe, incorporated.

GNU-Social/StatusNet

This is the 1.5 of those I tested, the reason being that I installed GNU-Social first, and then turned it into a StatusNet node. The thing was this: It was super easy to install but then it was just insane. Every upgrade, though rare, was a battle, I can't even remember the details, but it broke, I had to restore DBs and redo upgrades, I had to revert at some points. I ended up moving the code to StatusNet which was basically the same, but seemed to work a bit better or something like that.

For the GNU-Social part, as much as I enjoyed the chats with Matt Lee, I think that the project is/was (I never know) just not active enough. I think the initial idea was to fork off StatusNet and create a less twittery more facebookish tool.. That never really happened.

Switching to StatusNet helped make maintaining the thing a bit easier, but there was still this big problem.

With StatusNet you feel like you're on the edge of the social web.

There's this big central server called identi.ca, and if you're not on it, you're almost on the other side of the fence. There are features that will only work with users of the same node.

You can only send private messages to people on the same node as you. You can only block users that are on the same node as you. Replying is sometimes tricky and sending "@" notices to specific users is nearly impossible. And because 99% of it's users are on identi.ca, nobody sees any problem with that.

In the end, it's not a distributed social networking tool, it's a tool where you can subscribe to other people's dents and to groups, but you can't avoid loading posts from those who just love to post everything to every group all the time, and other users (from identi.ca) cannot easily reach you.

Friendica

Yes, I did save the best for last.

This tool provides something you would expect from Diaspora, except that it's been been funded using zero money and all started with one programmer, Mike Macgirvin. He was later joined by a few other volunteers. Nobody gets paid to do this.

The project was functional since I installed my node, that was in October 2010. Already then (or even before) you could connect to others and send messages.

Some critics have been a bit harsh in regards to Friendica because of the user interface. I must say a few things to these people:

• The design has been getting better and better, thanks to more template designers.
• WTF people ?!! I mean, the tool works, it's secure, it's rock solid, it's free and Free, and all you do is bitch about how you hate it because of the styling ?!11!
• The program allows you to develop your own template, if you don't like the current templates, and there are many, create your own.

I too didn't like the first themes, but what's more important ? Why are you interested in distributed social networks ? If it's just for the UI then you don't get the point.

Anyway, it does exactly what you'd expect such a tool to do, it's fast, easy to maintain and it's truly decentralised.

This thing was programmed by someone who knows what he's doing. I've not had one issue with upgrades, actually it's been too easy. I started using the git version, then after a year or so of zero maintenance I switched to the tarball version and was prepared to spend the day upgrading bits of DB and what not.. But none of that, it just worked. I even switched back to the git version, because it's just that easy and reliable.

The people involved are not interested in hosting your account, the goal is to get people to install their own node, because that is the what a decentralised social network is. Unlike Diaspora who mainly promotes using 2 of their servers, Friendica lists all public servers equally, and then still informs users they could/should probably install their own node.

It's as easy as installing a Wordpress.

Friendica doesn't stop there. It can connect to many other services like StatusNet, Diaspora, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, Tumblr and whole bunch of other things I didn't even know existed.

Conclusion

I think it's clear. My Diaspora server didn't last long and my StatusNet is just there to pickup spam and eat RAM and CPU while keeping me in Social Web suburbia.

Friendica nodes puts each user in the centre, like it should do.

You probably want to find out more, here are links to the projects mentioned here:

• Friendica
• GNU-Social
• StatusNet
• Diaspora

Last night I received a "google+ link", something about a conversation etc etc.. I was assuming that even though I don't have a google account I could probably read and maybe even participate in the conversation. Not. I was obnoxiously invited to create a gaccount.

This morning I followed a friend's link to an article on google+, it says that google+ will force facebook to be more open to other platforms. Of course the previous experience showed me that I will absolutely need a gaccount before touching anything.

First reaction to the article is, IF and really IF google does anything to "open" other online social networks then we must note that they are very far from being the first to help. Just the fact that it is not by default designed from ground up on that basis is already a problem. Actually, I don't see any mention of their platform even remotely wanting to be capable of interacting with other servers (Alert: could be wrong).

For me the projects that will have had anything to do with opening anything up are:

• GNUSocial and StatusNet
• Friendika (used to be Mistpark)
• CrabGrass
• Diaspora

Finally Diaspora is ready, after 3 months and 200 000 dollars it is finally ready for pre pre alpha beta alpha testing. It seems they have kept it to the strict minimum, I mean no extra features, plugins or add-ons or fancy poking beer racing card games, I like that. So after installing about millions of software and then starting the server I logged in and found that basically nothing works, then some things did work, and then uploading photos did not and then with some browsers weird things happen. I think there has been alot of work on the interface.. . maybe that could be a problem.

This still led me to wonder what else has been going on, and after stumbling on jappix and appleseed I found the truth, of course, that is where my search should have started: GNU-Social. I am going to say that I did not see the benefit of projects like StatusNet until now. They have developed ways to connect nodes. Without having to open extra ports and install half of the internet and steal CPU.. This is like Diaspora but in Php/Mysql ! You can sign up, upload photos and connect with other instances of GNU-Social. So you don't have to build a dedicated (v)server just for this to reserve certain ports and block others etc (and keep your other systems clean), all you need is a basic LAMP setup.. . I like. (it's still in beta but it works.)

With all these open/free projects, some even a bit old, I do still think we can has cheeseburger one of these days.

/addon:
I just realised today why I was not getting anything from the mailing list I signed up to. Because the real mailing list is somewhere else, it's on.. google mailing lists !

A few years back I heard quite a few times things like "What do I need a website for ?", some would add things like "Why would I ever post photos of my last vacation, family and/or pets online ?". Today, almost everyone I know has a social network profile (orkut, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter, etc etc). Of course there is one major difference; Everything is neatly centralised and completely out of the control of those who create all the content. A few side effects are:

• Communications between 2 peers always goes through a third party (and their sometimes partners) system, and stays there
• Loss of publishing freedom
• Limited formats/method of communication (videos, image sizes, things like that)
• Censorship
• Terms of service - nobody ever reads this stuff ! Why ?
• Copyright issues - because this is not a private space and we must all obey United States laws
• Targeted advertisement, because of course it is not free (IMHO having advertisements in a "private" space can be slightly annoying)
• Personal data and anything you do on the site can be used for marketing studies.. up to you to weigh the good/bad

So what now ? Well this situation has created a need for something more Internet-relevant and voilà, 4 guys have decided to dedicate their summer vacation to creating an open platform that will allow people to be their own part of the social web. The idea is to provide a CMS type application that people can install wherever they want, just like a personal web site. This means you would have control over your stuff and communications would not go through a central 3rd party service and get read/analysed, altered, moderated, censored or any such thing.

This is not even about being against social networking sites but more about the limits of their design, a commercial website must follow rules/laws/regulations etc, in short they have to take some responsibility for the published content as well as the interactions between users of their service. Of course you can (and should) also add the fact that the main interest of most (if not all) of these social networking sites is revenue by advertisement, this kind of means that the user is not the real client and hence is not the most cared for.

Because each node runs completely independently the whole network is never directly connected, meaning if you wish you may completely isolate your node from the public eye, restrict access to it to specific nodes or even run a set of nodes on a private network for some kind of intranetish activities.

This project should hit the first usable stage somewhere in September so stay tuned to: Joindiaspora.com.