I believe the main problems of "the social network" (FB) can't be solved in this way, it focuses almost entirely on the privacy and "freedom from surveillance" aspect, to the detriment of other vital aspects (like non-anonymity).
What we seem to need is a solution that does what Facebook does right, which corresponds to the networking needs of billions of people, combined with a transparent and ethical content policy approach. Plus: that doesn't leak data at an individual level (except after a court order), to name some of the requirements that seem most important.
On the other hand, a non-corruptible utility-type service like this might be too much to hope for as well ... ?
In principle every problem solved by facebook in a centralised fashion has already been solved by phone companies in a decentralised fashion. You can buy one or several numbers, which are quasi anonymous and distribute them to anyone you care to share them with. Noone can easily find you unless you give them that number, it easily possible to separate between work and private numbers and you get a new number if you change your job. Calling by phone is nearly universal as is access to SMS, it already connects all people across the globe without any need to sign up to a centralised service. The only advantage services like WhatsApp and Facebook have is that it is really cheap to communicate over them, whereas the only way of operating a traditional phone service is to charge money.
I think what will eventually happen is that the traditional telco providers will gradually improve their service quality, prices and infrastructure and eliminate the need for parasitic communication platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram by introducing standardised and provider agnostic solutions. For example why not extend the protocol that is used to route phone calls to a protocol that allows to route arbitrary packet or streaming data transfers.
>I think what will eventually happen is that the traditional telco providers will gradually improve their service quality, prices and infrastructure
That's going to take a long time. Maybe 50 years? Working in the telecom business has taught me that federation has pretty ugly failure modes. The result of the structure of the telecom business has been the SIP "standard" and the horrible abuses of SS7 before that. The horrible reality of telecom is that most work is integration work. New features or similar is a secondary priority. Did you know that telecom providers actually test every single new phone on their network and add workarounds? It's the Tower of Babylon, except made from technical debt and divergence from expected behavior.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've arrived at an explanation: Each telecom provider is large enough to do their own development, switching costs are high, and vast majority of traffic is internally in a country. This situation incentivices creating new features and services that only need to work internally in a country or even just in a single network on a low budget using the path of least resistance (read:abuse of standards, bad solutions, technical debt). Most advanced functionality break down at country borders. For advanced functionality it's common to only support a small set of clients.
I'd suggest not waiting for Telco providers. They're going to become dumb pipes because of their incentives. Centralization works extremely well. Any decentralized network needs a lot of thought put into how it will avoid the traps of the telco industry.
> "Noone can easily find you unless you give them that number"
Yeah well, finding anyone is not a flaw; it's a one of Facebooks killer features, without which it would not have become the de facto global registry of single individuals.
> "The only advantage services like WhatsApp and Facebook have that it is really cheap"
I believe this is a gross misunderstanding of the utility of social networks compared to older systems like telephony. But granted, the brave new world comes with a number of problems as well.
Actually the real name requirement and the fact that anyone could easily find me is what kept me off Facebook, so I don't consider it a killer feature at all. If you know my real name it is easy enough to find me with some additional information on google and get a work email + current office phone number, I don't feel like sharing more than that with random strangers anyways.
Yes, it's a sentiment you share with many here on HN, I'm sure. But Facebook doesn't address our needs primarily; it addresses the networking needs of the average person, which may add up to half the global population or more by the time they are done.
Who can at any time reach out to another average person on the other side of the globe, be it acquaintance or stranger, and discuss matters of mutual interest, without jumping though hoops or even knowing how to google, and (because of the real name policy) be reasonably safe from harassment.
I'd be content to have a feature where I give the network a salted hash of my name (i'll hash it myself on my own machine), as a lookup. This way I can be discovered by only people who I want to discover me (I give the salt to my email contacts, put it on my blog, or use no-salt if I want).
What we seem to need is a solution that does what Facebook does right, which corresponds to the networking needs of billions of people, combined with a transparent and ethical content policy approach. Plus: that doesn't leak data at an individual level (except after a court order), to name some of the requirements that seem most important.
On the other hand, a non-corruptible utility-type service like this might be too much to hope for as well ... ?