All existing social network tools use interfaces built from the same collection of elements. It is well-worn territory and so we have a good list of what elements our interface will need. Even better for us, all of the existing interfaces are built using web tools (html and css) that allow users to choose their own arrangements for those elements. We don’t have to build the perfect interface, we just need to let users build their own.

Building Blocks of a F2F interface

Most of the functionality we expect from “Social network” tools is provided by a series of older communication bundled together. These older tools are still visible in the social network’s interface, as an Instant messenger-like contact list on one side, an email-like message window in the middle, or an RSS-like activity feed. I’ve highlighted a couple of the relevant sections from a twitter and facebook screenshot below.

For giant “social network” services like facebook, the design process is simple, just select the traditional communication elements you want to build your service around and arrange them on the page. Our job is slightly more complicated because we are building a system where individuals have much more control over their tools than in the case of centralized commercial services.

Some people are going to run email, IM, and photo sharing services and have an interface that looks a lot like Facebook or Google Buzz, Others might only want activity streams and an interface more like Twitter’s, with any number of combinations in between and some new kinds of services that we haven’t even thought of yet, let alone come up with interfaces for. Thankfully, html and css are well suited to this task.

For an example of what this might look like, check out the NatSkin style browser and play around with the options. All of the major elements of the page can be displayed or hidden, their position can be placed around the screen, and all of the decorative elements can be re-styled on the fly, and it is all done with css.

This is something we can build if we just keep in mind that we’re not design a single interface, or a single social network, we’re designing a flexible framework with some sensible defaults. Now, let’s see what we can make.

Posts in this series

Part 1 – The Idea: Freedom Box

Part 2 – Finding each other: Dynamic DNS Facebook

Part 3 – Talking amongst ourselves: Friend-to-Friend Network

Part 4 – Putting the pieces together: Freedom Box schematic

Part 5 – Making it easy: Look and Feel

Here are the two of them side by side. The guru plug is the smaller black one.

The Guruplug is an upgrade from the original Sheevaplug development kit in pretty much all respects. It has a more powerful processor, a much expanded array of ports, making it more capable, and is smaller in all dimensions.

The only thing that new Guruplug owners might miss from the older model is the full size SD card slot on the side. Given that this has been replaced by: 1) a microsd slot, 2) an additional USB port, which could easily take a SD card inside of a SB adapter, and 3) an eSATA (Gb/s) cable for connecting external hard drives at their native speeds, I don’t think many people will actually miss the old SD slot.

Now Martin just needs to get his so he can teach the Debian installer about the new hardware, and we’ll be able to put it through some paces.

I’ll be spending the meantime reading up on how to shape local network traffic so I can replace my router with my new Guruplug.

Connections in Context

Social networks, whether online or off, are made up of person-to-person connections. We each belong to many of these networks, and every one has it’s own shared history and set of expectations about what information is appropriate to communicate and with whom. As social animals we navigate these social contexts in all of our offline communications. We select which facts about a romantic date we should share with family members, or drinking buddies, or work colleagues, with a practiced familiarity born from years of inter-personal interaction.

That same easy information management is what we need for our digital communication tools. Existing tools do this poorly, if at all, because they tack information management on after the fact. We need to realize that social contexts are what make a "social network" different from any other computer network and start building an awareness of context into our communication tools from the ground up.

These then are your minimum requirements for a social network: 1) the ability to make person-to-person connections and 2) the ability to manage what information you communicate based on the social context of the personal connection.

Building for Flexibility

Once people can connect with each other and manage what information they communicate, they’re going to need some actual communication tools. Social networks are not communication tools, they enable communication in much the same way that roads enable travel by car but don’t actually do the driving for you.

Online, communication tools can take many forms. IM, Email, Wave, bittorrent, photo sharing, wikis, blogs, rss, these are all possible ways that people will want to communicate with their friends and family. Ideally our social networking tools will be flexible enough to allow any of these kinds of communications, or whatever new ones we come up with down the road.

If I could get one message out to the various groups making distributed social networking systems it would be this: remember that the communication tools you are building around will change. If your communication tools and your social network are too closely intertwined, you run the risk of losing both when people decide to switch to a cooler communications tool or when they want to join their friend’s social network rather than get their friends to switch to your tools.

One way to get network flexibility, as I mentioned in my last post, is to separate your social networking layer and your communication tools entirely. Make social network connections more like an ssh connection or a VPN with built in information management and let people run whatever they want over the network. Maybe instead you want to build a central communication tool with a flexible plug-in architecture. Perhaps you want to build a protocol for different communication tools to talk to each other and let the everyone else build to your specifications.

It is easy to think, when building a whole system for social networking, that your tools are the only tools people will use. It is important to remember that there are lots of people building these systems, using lots of architectures and writing in lots of languages. The more flexible your system, the better able it will be to benefit from the work going into these other tools by incorporating or cooperating with those tools rather than competing with them for a fragmented user base.

Network Effects

Fragmented user bases are a particular problem for social networks because social networks only work when you and your friends are in the same one. Currently ~0% of users are on a distributed social network. 100% should be, but getting from here to that Kantian paradise will be difficult. If you are going to try, you need a plan.

I met with the Disapora developers last week, before they had quite hit their summer fund raising goal, and their plan sounds very sensible. The idea is that your distributed social network system starts our for most people as a client for their existing social communication tools, whether those are social networks like Facebook or photo sharing sites like flickr. You manage everything as if your friends were on Diaspora with you but you can also continue communicating with your contacts who are using the old tools, sending status updates through Facebook and posting new pictures through flickr. You never have to choose whether to abandon your existing social connections in order to change your communication tools.

Once some of your friends do start using the new system, things change. When your two machines notice that they are both able to run a distributed social network, they stop sending your communications through the old centralized services and start communicating over direct encrypted connections. As more of your friends switch over, more of your communications become private.

It is a nice gradualist strategy that neatly inverts the network effect problem. We could all start running our own network and still talk to people on Facebook freely, but every person who moves to our network hides more communication from Facebook by joining. Facebook has no place in our network of trusted friends because they are neither trustworthy nor our friends. When we have tools for direct private communication, Facebook drop out of the picture.

However you feel about this particular plan, as I have loosely paraphrased it, every distributed network builder should have something like it at the core of their system design. We’ve had the capability for private darknets for a long time now and people have not flocked to them. We need tools that people will actually move to if this is going to work, and that requires a plan.

Help Your Friends

Facebook grew at the expense of it’s users privacy. If we build our system wisely, we can build a tool that not just salvages, but actively promotes the privacy of its users. We should do this for our own sake, but we should also do this for our friends. That’s the difference between our tools and theirs: we’re building for people we care about, not people we need to exploit in order to make a profit. That difference should be clear in every part of our system.

Posts in this series

Part 1 – The Idea: Freedom Box

Part 2 – Finding each other: Dynamic DNS Facebook

Part 3 – Talking amongst ourselves: Friend-to-Friend Network

Part 4 – Putting the pieces together: Freedom Box schematic

Part 5 – Making it easy: Look and Feel

Build less.

What we need is a tool for making connections with other people and a social firewall to manage what parts of the information you put in the system get sent to which people you know.  These are the pieces that hold a “social network” together and make it different from any other digital communication tool.  The rest, all the specific communication tools like email, IM, photo sharing, VoIP, etc, are being bundled together in a dozen permutations as we speak. People will continue building such systems indefinitely.  That is about all about using the network, not building it. Once you’ve assembled a social network it should no more care how we communicate over it than the internet does.

Most new social networks fail because the costs of switching and having to rebuild your social connections through the new tool outweigh whatever advantages that tool might have to offer. When we separate the communication tools from the underlying social network, we will gain the flexibility to experiment that we need without sacrificing our personal relationships to the alter of bleeding edge communication software.  So build that part first. If you get it right, you will become a part of everyone’s social software stack, not just the one in the Freedom Box.

(Dynamic) DNS is important

Every one of the interesting systems I learned about last weekend (Google’s webfinger, Mozilla’s Weave, GnuSipWitch, and GnuNet) is built around being able to find you through the public internet and every one relies on DNS for directions. For those of us who can’t rely on traditional DNS because our residential connections don’t have fixed public addresses, Dynamic DNS is our onramp to the social internet.

We need to think more about Dynamic DNS’s role in our social software stack. If we want people to try out all these new services we’re building, we’re going to need them to sign up with a dynamic dns service first, or we need to run our own and build our new services on top of it.

If users are going to be required to setup a Dynamic DNS account regardless of how we build our new tools, building them around the Dynamic DNS account reduces complexity for the user by centralizing account creation and management in one interface. It also simplifies deployment for our tools because we can make sure our Dynamic DNS service properly forwards whatever port or protocol our other tools use to the right place on users’ machines.

Whatever we decide about integration, we should keep in mind that most people are going to depend on someone’s Dynamic DNS service in order use our new social tools. The more successful our distributed social tools grow, the more likely it becomes that someone will try to control this central access point to the social web.

Practical And Ethical

Luis Villa gave a wonderful speech focusing on the second major theme of the weekend: building solutions that are both ethical and practical. It is not useful to rail against the the current system’s privacy problems when the only alternative we have to offer is withdrawing from all modern communication systems.

Luis compared it to the local food movement. People who are concerned with the dangers of pesticides and large corporate food manufacture aren’t told to go grow their own food. Conceptually it would be the ideal solution, but it is not a solution most of us have the space, time, or inclination to put into practice.

Instead, we can buy at Farmer’s markets, join a CSA or co-op, or look for certified organic foods at our existing stores. Wherever you live and however you shop, you can make practical choices to help deal with the dangers to our food system. We can make these choices because a generation of natural food advocates built the programs and distribution mechanisms that make them possible.

We can and should educate people about the dangers of our collective technological choices, but we will not succeed in reducing those dangers if our only solution is for people to “grow their own”. Next time we’ll look at how this idea can usefully shape the design of a Freedom Box.

Our Friends

A friend-to-friend, or f2f network is a secure network built around people you know. It has a lot in common with the VPNs (virtual private networks) companies use to connect remote offices and workers with their main corporate servers. Both are private because they are built around encrypted connections and both are very flexible because almost any service or network traffic can travel over them once a connection is made. Unlike VPNs, friend-to-friend networks are not designed to tie every member into an central office that provides the email, IM, or other communication service to network members. Members of f2f networks are friends, equal peers that are capable of running services on their own, as well as of benefiting from the services provided by their friends.

Our Capabilities

Just like actual networks of friends, f2f networks grow more capable as the network grows and as the individual members grow. When I was in High School, the combined hardware, software, and network connections of all my friends’ computers would not have been capable of much. Maybe we could have run an Instant Messaging service for each other. Today, larger and more public groups have built incredibly capable systems out of those same parts. Folding@Home has turned the spare processor cycles of participants into one of the world’s largest data processing machines. Skype, the peer-to-peer telephone network, is the world’s largest international telephone carrier, while the media files we share from our hard drives using various other peer-to-peer tools account for more web traffic than all the web servers combined.

We can do all that but we still feel like we have to rely on some third party for IM. Maybe the software we have is too hard to configure or use; we’ll look at those issues later. I just want to make clear that we have the technological capabilities to do things far more amazing than share photos and email each other. Those routine communications should be put where they most naturally belong, in our own hands and the hands of our friends.

In Our Hands

Our friends are responsible and responsive in a way that social network operators never will be. Consider the difference between when a friend broadcasts your secrets to the world and when a third party like Facebook does. If your friends start sharing your information, they face risks to their reputation, their own secrets, and the likelihood that people will share information with them in the future. We have social expectations that information shared by such a "gossip" is suspect and we have a feeling that a friend whose trust is betrayed deserves the benefit of the doubt.

We have this whole range of social systems to preserve the privacy of our communications with friends and we have built legal protections around them. When we communicate with each other directly, rights like the 4th amendment protect our letters from government search while the 5th amendment shields us against having to reveal any possibly illegal activities we may get up to with our friends. When you give your data to third parties these protections vanish and all the normal social structures are reversed.

The Alternative

You can’t shun Facebook just because they have broadcast your private information to the world, nor can you stop giving them that private information. Sharing everything with them is built into the network architecture. So when they broadcast your private information to the world, your only social response is to put up with it or leave your "social network" entirely. Your legal options are just as bad. The legal protections we built against government power simply don’t apply to information you voluntarily give third parties. In the hands of a third party, your information transforms into information about you, and information about you can be handed over to government or sold to someone else freely.

The only thing that governs how your information is used when you give it to a service like Facebook is the "privacy" policy you agreed to without reading it. No one reads those things, and with good reason. The basic privacy policy for an internet service says three things: 1) the service operator can do whatever they want with your data, 2) the operator is free to sell information about you to anyone it wishes, and 3) they can change the terms of the privacy policy at any time without your consent. That’s the real law of "social networks".

Our Choice

If that is all the protection we want for the communications in our lives, then we can do nothing. That’s the world we live in now. If we want back any of the social or legal controls over our information that we’re used to having in our daily lives, we must rebuild them. Building a f2f network is one of the most effective things we can do to regain control over our information, both in legal and practical terms. It is also one of the friendliest.

Inside the f2f network we share resources, we enable services for each other, and we stop providing our information to people who want to study us. When you leave a centralized communication tool, you make it harder for data brokers, private and government alike, to learn about your life. You also make it harder for them to learn about your friends and family by studying your interactions with them. Each person who leaves makes everyone a little bit safer. It’s what friends should do.

Posts in this series

Part 1 – The Idea: Freedom Box

Part 2 – Finding each other: Dynamic DNS Facebook

Part 3 – Talking amongst ourselves: Friend-to-Friend Network

Part 4 – Putting the pieces together: Freedom Box schematic

Part 5 – Making it easy: Look and Feel

Social networking tools are made up of mostly unremarkable parts like email, IM, and photo sharing, etc. The selling point is not that Facebook offers better email than Google, or better status updates than Twitter, few think they do. What motivates people to join a social network is the promise of getting in touch with friends who are otherwise hard to contact. Of course, the more people join believing they can find each other, the more people there are in the system and the better we actually are able to find each other. There is no magic to it; it is just a centralized directory fueled by the network effect. They require all your personal information, but the service does not need that to function. In fact, if the phone book had 400 million users and some pictures, it would work just as well. Which is great, because we can build that out of existing parts.

The Internet as Directory

The internet is build on a central directory called the Domain Name System or (DNS). DNS is what directs us from the memorable addresses we type, domain names like “churchkey.org”, to the actual IP address of the computers with information we want, like this blog. If the address of the machine behind a domain name changes, a simple DNS update points the old name at the new address and web traffic keeps moving without anyone noticing. If the machine you’re keeping your stuff on moves frequently, perhaps it is a laptop or on a cable internet connection where the IP address can change unexpectedly, you keep a little script called dynamic dns running on it that updates the directions automatically as you move. These tools enable us to find our stuff anywhere on the internet but they are built for finding machines, not people, so we need to extend them a little.

Making the Directory People-aware

A server running our new extension would be called something like a “friend finding service” or perhaps “FrienDNS”. People could create accounts with this FrienDNS server just as they do with dynamic dns servers, picking a user name and putting in directions on where to find the machine with their stuff, but this time they give the server a little more information about themselves as people. Not too much information, this is a centralized service after all, but just enough for people to recognize each other in a search and ask to “friend” or otherwise connect. Maybe that’s just a name, picture, and where you’re from; the kind of things you found in old college facebooks before the term got trademarked. Maybe you give more information than that to the business community FrienDNS service or to the dating one. You decide in each context how much information to give other people before agreeing to connect with them.

Managing “Friend” Requests

Once someone finds you and wants to connect, the FrienDNS service gets directions to your machine from the dynamic dns service underneath and sends the request over to you for approval, just like we expect social networks to do. In addition, I’m going to say we should have the friend finding service keep a unique token from us, some little bit of machine data we give it so that, when it sends us a connection request, we know it really came through the service. So when you get a request to connect with someone, you see who they are from their FrienDNS account information, which service they found you on, and a token from the service confirming that the request really did initiate there.

By requiring that people go through the friend finding service we get all of the SPAM and abusive member management aspects of social networking tools. If a particular user turns out to be a SPAM bot or the arm of some advertising agency, people can report that user back to the service for account deactivation. Since a loss of cooperation from the service means that you can’t get user’s tokens, and everyone will ignore connection requests that come sans-token, users need to play by the rules if they want to continue contacting new friends.

We can use the same system for screening potential connection requests. So, if you are using an online dating site built around FrienDNS, and you only want to receive contact from people you think you’ll like, we could build tools to check for whatever dating criteria you want before handing out your token. If you want to hook into your school’s email system and only give contact information to someone with an active @yourschool.edu email address, we can add tools for doing that too. Or, if we want to move in the other direction and run some services that have greater anonymity, there is no technical requirement for the token; it is just an example of the kind of simple things we can do to police friend requests for those contexts where we need to police them.

Saying “Hello”

Once you and your friend have agreed to connect, you exchange keys and establish an encrypted connection with each other. From this point on, the FrienDNS service has no idea what you are saying to each other. You only need to talk to it if one of your machines moves and you need updated directions on where to send your encrypted communication stream. You could even agree to go get your directions from some other system and simply ignore yesterday’s FrienDNS in favor of some new, more popular one. Once you have connected with each other, that’s it, you’re no longer dependent on the good graces or good behavior of any intermediary. Congratulations, you have replaced your intermediated “social network” with a network of direct friend-to-friend connections. We’ll look at what that means more next time.

Posts in this series

Part 1 – The Idea: Freedom Box

Part 2 – Finding each other: Dynamic DNS Facebook

Part 3 – Talking amongst ourselves: Friend-to-Friend Network

Part 4 – Putting the pieces together: Freedom Box schematic

Part 5 – Making it easy: Look and Feel

The Idea

We should all have good tools for digital socializing, but Facebook and similar programs are not them. These “social networking” tools all share a fatal flaw. While they claim to connect you with the people in your life, what they actually do is connect everyone in your life to the man in the center running the social network. All communication with your friends has to go through the network operator first. Once you tell him, he tells your friends for you. Or sometimes he tells too many people and you get upset. But what are you going to do, stop talking to the people in your life? This is like no social network on earth; it is more like a giant game of telephone where they hold all the strings. And it is systematically unsafe.

Rather than build our digital lives as part of their networks, we need to bring some of our real life social structures to the digital world. In real life we don’t talk to each other through a central intermediary. Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone in your family, or office, or town had to go through a single person in order to talk with each other? In real life we talk to each other directly, which works a lot better. Our digital tools could work like that too. Many, like the internet, were designed with exactly this kind of direct communication structure in mind. We got the centralized, intermediated tools that we have now mostly because the people designing them thought of us as children who could never learn to run our own.

That dismissal of our competence comes up regularly when you talk about moving away from centralized services, but it ignores us too quickly. It is just as possible for everyone to run their own web server as it is for everyone to know how to read, and both should be social goals in the 21st century. To think otherwise is to believe that we can never build tools well enough for people to learn them, no matter how many generations go past, and no matter how central a role those tools come to play in our lives. It is a belief that sells our engineers, our teachers, and our selves short, and one that will only fade as we learn how to run our own communication networks. The alternative is to stay childish and incapable, digitally speaking.

It is time to grow up and take the private communications of our lives back into our own hands. We have all of the individual tools we need, email, IM, photo sharing, etc, but putting them all together into the system we deserve will take a little assembly. Don’t worry if you are not a software developer and you feel like building digital tools is beyond you. If we decide we want tools for ourselves and are willing to lend some time and support, there are lots of great developers out there who will build them as Free Software for everyone to use, learn from, and share. In these next few posts we’ll outline what I think that new network looks like and how we might put it together.

Posts in this series

Part 1 – The Idea: Freedom Box

Part 2 – Finding each other: Dynamic DNS Facebook

Part 3 – Talking amongst ourselves: Friend-to-Friend Network

Part 4 – Putting the pieces together: Freedom Box schematic

Part 5 – Making it easy: Look and Feel