SAFEBook will be a social network based on the maidsafe infrastructure. The main goal is to allow people to share stuff with their friends without also sharing it with third parties.
Wouldn’t it be more efficient to adapt a decentralized socnet that already exists like Frienica or Diaspora?
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" The main goal is to allow people to share stuff with their friends without also sharing it with third parties." 
Nowdays the second part of the goal is getting more and more important. People are decreasing their sharing because of it…
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@physics so are you working on it?
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I want to help build this networking platform.
I suggest that we choose a better name for it; we have enough time for that.
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That could be a bigger task than design, code and test put together 
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integration with other decentralized socnets would be good
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Maybe? As you noticed I left the description pretty open because I think the first thing that needs to happen is that we all need to look into what the best option is going forward. Obviously there would be some pretty big benefits to starting with something that’s already established like Diaspora, but it can also be a pretty fast way to paint yourself into a corner. I’m no expert on MaidSafe yet but it seems the best architecture for something like “SAFEBook” might be very different from anything else out there.
Exactly. I’m one of those people. I uninstalled the Facebook app from my phone because of this but now I don’t really feel connected to my friends … MaidSafe to the rescue 
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@DavidT yes … in the sense that starting this discussion is the first step 
I hope that everyone can share their ideas and brainstorm here so we can come up with a general design, then move on to a whitepaper, then start working on actually coding it.
@Julian - Great! Yes SAFEBook probably won’t be the final name, but I did like that it was kind of provocative in challenging the 800 lb gorilla
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@Blindsite2k Sounds like a great idea, and I’m sure it would speed up adoption!
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Maybe we should just think about what a social network does. Instead of building “a social network” simply allow users to have social network features. Instant messaging, build contact lists, post messages to those contacts and receive them from their contacts in a stream, search via hashtags, post pictures, etc, etc. People use social media differently. What if we downloaded different features depending on what we used social media for. Pintrest compared to twitter for example. Or Diaspora compared to facebook, or zanga games compared to wordpress. Consider each feature as an app or plugin for an app. Then users simply mix and match and use whatever social features they want to design their own social network. They could even design different social network profiles for different things they do.
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That’s a good point. I think the default should be for it to be “like Faceb$$k” since that’s what many people are used to. Like you said each unique component could be an app, and then there could be different apps which were basically collections of the various pieces necessary to make a Pintere$t, In$tagram, etc. like experience for the user (this would be a “multiapp”). Advanced users could brew their own but “average” users could choose a “flavor” (In$tagram flavored, Pintere$t flavored, etc) they’re familiar with. A given user may have several different flavors of multiapp and not necessarily know that they are all based on the same core pieces. They could also choose to share a photo, for example, on their Pintere$t flavored multiapp and on their In$tagram flavored multiapp, or choose to share it only on one app.
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Something else that could really help adoption would be a component that was able to take a Faceb$$k export dump ( https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467 ) and import it into SAFEBook.
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not just import facebook but other socnets as well. Many socnets let you export your data (although strangely not a lot let you import your data). I think import and export are equally important, as well as keeping exporting formats as federated as possible.
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Social networks have a very hard problem of migrations (as google found out). Even people that wan’t to change networks can’t really do it, because their move only makes sense when the whole network (or a big part of it) had already migrated… So the question is how to move the network, how to import all the social networks into a better infrastructure…
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@nathias this may be a non-problem because people won’t be coming to SAFE as an alternative social net. I suspect taking the piecemeal approach means that people will not need to make a big jump when they do start to use the social aspects. New users won’t be coming for the social networking, as was the case with G+, and which is what stops people jumping from fb to D* so we’ll get lots of users, and gradually they’ll start to use the social stuff on SAFE instead of switching back to fb etc.
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@happybeing that was also the case with google. They made all the very useful services and added social networking, but it didn’t suffice (well ok, it depends on what the goal is). The optimal solution would be to move the established social networks that exist on closed-source-evil-NSA-spying-infrastructure and somehow move it, if thats even possible.
A social network where you’d log in, link your fb, g+, twitter and whatnot and import the whole thing … not just contacts, but existing content.
You can download your facebook data. The issue is importing / translating that data into something our SAFE socnet can understand.
@nathias I realise that Google tried to make us use G+ by tying it into its other services, but I don’t see that as equivalent to our situation. People actually resented being forced to use G+ when the existing service (YouTube) switched to mandating it. This won’t be our situation at all. Users will be in total control of who they connect to and how, so they won’t be being coerced, or having their data collated across services by any third party.
What I envisage is:
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Lots of people sign up to SAFE as users and/or farmers
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These users begin to network with each other for various shared interests (privacy, building apps, evangelising SAFE, forming special interest groups etc.)
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As social apps become available on SAFE, these users will be doing more and more networking on SAFE, as well as on the other social platforms they currently use. They will do this because: a) it is a pain switching to another platform, or one they dislike because it is insecure, and b) because the people they are communicating with are on SAFE
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If the SAFE networking is more attractive (because of privacy, flexibility, relevant social connections), as it will be for a significant number of these users, they will spend less time outside and increasing time on outside networks.
Meanwhile, SAFE is going viral, and very large numbers of people are becoming users and/or farmers
- People realise that most/all their friends are on SAFE, so they start to send messages and share things using the SAFE features instead of swapping out to less desirable (insecure, privacy violating) and just because of the hassle of switching out of SAFE with all its cool functionality, fantastic apps, farming opportunities, and security/privacy benefits.
I dont’ see this as comparable to Google’s attempt to patch gmail, YouTube and search apps together and coerce them into becoming social on Google+ by mandating a G+ account.
I joined Google+ in the beta period and watched it from the start (having also seen their abysmal earlier efforts to do the same thing with Buzz). I was comparing the G+ community with Diaspora* which was growing at the same time, and which I had also joined very early on.
The difference was stark. G+ was, from the very early days until I left a few months ago, mainly a content dissemination platform, with relatively little real community or special interest discussions when I made comparissons with either facebook or Diaspora. Most discussion happened on the comment threads of users with very large numbers of followers. It felt top heavy, and the quality of discussion was terrible IMO. I never liked it as a social network. By comparisson, D* was (and still is) a brilliant community with lots of useful stuff, great people and high quality discussions.
Diaspora is where I heard about MaidSafe, and is the only place that I know for sure others have come from to join MaidSafe as a result of my evangelising (which I have done on twitter, facebook as well as Diaspora).
The difference IMO between G+ and the other networks, even facebook has I think realised the imporance of this, is that the community is not primary on G+, whereas it is on facebook and Diaspora, and it will be in this respect on SAFE.
SAFE will be primarily about users, and the communities they create. Social networking will develop orgainically, as @Blindsite2k pointed out. So I don’t believe we need to build a social platform, we will support the community be providing tools that they want to use to communicate and network, and if SAFE succeeds, it will eventually dominate in social networking as in many other things. The difference is that SAFE has no controlling entity under pressure to exploit or manipulate users of the platform. App builders will catch onto this too because those are the apps that will succeed.
SAFE will be a user centric place - apps that recognise this will dominate, so others will catch on. We are, well I am, still struggling to realise what a big change this will be. It will affect what is possible, and how it is done.
So while I think the G+ example is already not a good comparisson, I think this latter point and @Blindsite2k’s point about putting together small simple social features rather than building a competitive social networking platform gives SAFE a massive advantage compared even to something like facebook. The difference is that SAFE is the platform and it is created purely to serve and protect users. And if it is as good as most people here think, that alone will be enough to see it grow and dominate (or at least provide very widely used alternatives) to existing platforms (such as facebook) that it seems hard to imagine competing against. Hoorah!
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