The article made the point about federation algo, and I think that's the most important: proper federation/decentralization IS the product. As of yet it is an unsolved problem in their camp (and many others). This isn't to take anything away from them, because its a Big Problem, but if they can't solve that, a slightly polished CRUD social networking app is just fluff.
The product is the protocol, not the app. That's the only potentially innovative thing they are doing. Sorry guys, aspects are a product made for privacy concerned software devs - normies don't care.
great comment, I had only one quibble or expansion on what you said:
> Sorry guys, aspects are a product made for privacy concerned software devs - normies don't care.
I'd argue that normals care about this too. Teens might want to keep their friend/school/personal stuff private from their family/friends-of-family/adults-they-know stuff. And adults often want to keep their "adult adult" stuff hidden or distinct from their family and/or coworkers. The whole "my mom wants to friend me on Facebook, ew!" or "my boss wants to friend me on Facebook, noooo!" factor.
Agreed 100%, but this feature alone isn't worth leaving facebook due to network effect. That may change, but if you have to boil it down to a black and white, it still leans far to the side of "not worth it to switch." Also, should this change, I find it highly unlikely facebook would find itself unable to pivot. Regardless of what you think of fb (I personally hate it) you really can't deny they have a world class engineering team that has a finger on the social pulse more than any other company right now.
I have tried building apps around these kinds of features, they don't really work (you end up building a new interface to email awfully quickly).
The article made the point about federation algo, and I think that's the most important: proper federation/decentralization IS the product. As of yet it is an unsolved problem in their camp (and many others). This isn't to take anything away from them, because its a Big Problem, but if they can't solve that, a slightly polished CRUD social networking app is just fluff.
The product is the protocol, not the app. That's the only potentially innovative thing they are doing. Sorry guys, aspects are a product made for privacy concerned software devs - normies don't care.