Standards, access, frictions, legal obstacles, implementation costs, and much more.
How, precisely, do you distinguish "artificial" and "non-artificial" barriers?
There were open networks, with Usenet being a particular example. Usenet still exists, sort-of. It's entirely a non-starter in social networks. You might want to enquire as to why. Similarly, Diaspora, Friendica, FOAF, blog+RSS, etc., etc.
>How, precisely, do you distinguish "artificial" and "non-artificial" barriers?
An artificial barrier is something that constrains by fiat, especially when that barrier comes from a third-party like the government. It's "because I said so".
You're correct that things like standards, access, and costs are barriers that must be overcome, but with a relatively small amount of effort, these barriers are surmountable.
The ongoing cat and mouse game between something like Facebook and something that multiplexed its data on the user's behalf would be the most expensive/irritating "natural" barrier; natural because, while Facebook would be intentionally creating it, it's a real capability restriction that must be circumvented technologically and not the government saying "Don't do that, or else".
A natural barrier that may constrain some otherwise illegal activities would be the disdain of the public. In this case, there is no such disdain; copyright and IP law long ago exited the space that most people consider reasonable.
>There were open networks, with Usenet being a particular example.
Fixing the law would make the data open without requiring any material change in FB. They don't have to open up. The point is that in cyberspace, the data is natively open.
As Bruce Schneier says, "trying to make digital bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet". Easy copying is an intrinsic, inextricable mechanism of the medium. Indeed, it's the fundamental mechanism that allows computers to function at all.
Blog+RSS did extremely well. Facebook and Twitter succeeded because they were simple forms of aggregation. Throughout the 00s, before FB took off with the adult crowd, many people had personal/family blogs to share information about their lives with families and friends, and you'd add them to your feed reader to keep up. FB has supplanted that by having greater usability, but at the core, the concept is the same. The difference now is that FB can lock it up due to the favorable legal situation.
As for things like Diaspora, though I admittedly haven't studied them thoroughly and they probably suffered significant real flaws, they're hamstrung by the artificial effects discussed here.
Diaspora likely would've been an acceptable "social interface" if it could multiplex streams from Facebook and multicast out both to its own network and Facebook (and for all I know, there probably is software that allows this to happen on open protocols like Diaspora; it just can't be deployed in a usable way by anyone looking not to get sued out of existence).
True there are barriers like technology and cost to overcome, but the one intractable barrier is the one that is totally arbitrary: the laws that prevent it.
Anyway, I know that we don't agree, but I do appreciate your contributions to this thread. The discussions have been interesting and given me some good feedback on how to phrase this moving forward.
I think we're at about the limits of an HN discussion length here. I appreciate your thoughts, though I also think you're severely understimating the emergent properties which can lead to lock-in effects. That's not to say there aren't some imposed barriers, though I'd argue ultimately those legal bars themselves are in some sense emergent (virtually any empowered agent will seek to reinforce its power through available means).
The good news, if there is that, is that aspirational social networks tend to follow cycles, both online and off, and Facebook will all but certainly fall, eventually. The bad news is that the same dynamics which created it will create the next instance, and I'm really not sure those dyanamics can be disrupted, no matter how much I'd like to see that they are.
While it's hard to make digital information uncopyable, it's relatively easy to make it nonsensical. Obsolete or opaque formats, hoop-jumping, rate-limiting, and more, all impose costs. And the larger your population is, by definition, the less sophisticated it is (sophistication is a definitionally minority characteristic). So the harder it is to manifest a shift.
Something to keep in mind: any time someone pitches an idea to you with the line "all we've got to do is convince people to ...", run. Just run. Unless people would sell their children and mothers to get what it is you're selling, it won't fly.
But they're not.
Standards, access, frictions, legal obstacles, implementation costs, and much more.
How, precisely, do you distinguish "artificial" and "non-artificial" barriers?
There were open networks, with Usenet being a particular example. Usenet still exists, sort-of. It's entirely a non-starter in social networks. You might want to enquire as to why. Similarly, Diaspora, Friendica, FOAF, blog+RSS, etc., etc.