Talk:FAQ
From The Socknet
Is it possible to make money in social networks?
Who knows. The proprietary ones sometimes make money. Maybe dividing up the users will actually increase ad-clicks or something. Why did you ask the hardest question first?
Is the Socknet team trying to make money?
No. There are better ways to make money. We just like using the Internet and think there's a future to it. If only the whole thing could be easily personalized and controlled by the users...
Do I have to install anything on my computer?
No. The Socknet is a network of websites. You just have to pick one to be your Socknet provider. A lot like email.
That is, unless you want to run a Socknet provider. Then you have to either install an existing Socknet provider software or write your own.
Is the Socknet decentralized?
Yes.
Decentralization is a way to avoid giving complete control of a system to one entity.
In some decentralized systems, such as email and the Socknet, anyone can create a new section of the system and begin interacting with other sections. In email these independant sections are email providers, in the Socknet they are websites.
Right now there is only one Socknet provider, but anyone else could create one without prior notice, so the Socknet could be said to be "potentially decentralized".
Don't confuse "decentralized" with "peer-to-peer".
Why isn't the Socknet peer-to-peer?
The Internet has grown up around a structure called the world wide web. This structure has proven easy to use and fairly stable.
Peer-to-peer technologies, which are hosted on the computers of their users, are typically unstable, but they are useful for goals which do not require stability.
The foundation of the problem is that your information needs to be accessible 99% of the time in order for the Socknet to work. And that's not likely to be the case if the software is hosted on your laptop, for example. Or if you only use the computer at the library. Or if you want to use the Socknet on your phone and your laptop (a whole mess of extra data to synchronize).
This solution does the greatest good in the easiest way using many technologies that already exist.
If this is supposed to be the last social network, what was the first social network?
Email. Then Usenet.
Can a Socknet enabled service store its data on the user's profile?
Some of it. If the data is relatively small and conducive to being stored as text or in a JSON object structure, then yes, Socknet providers can store this data. This is a lot like browser cookies.
If the data is large, such as photos, then it is not possible to store them on the user's profile. The important thing to realize is that a photo website's job is to store photos and allow access to them in a timely fashion. If the photos were stored on the user's profile, this would slow down the process and restrict the potential applications that the photo site could use them for.
Ultimately, the Socknet's objective is not to keep all the user's data at his "homebase", but to give a structure so that any one of many specialized services can store that data and any other service can access it, subject to the user's wishes.
Do we really need another social network?
No. We need a last social network. The Socknet's objective is to combine separate centralized social networks into a single decentralized social network.
If not all the social networks join in, there's nothing we can do about it.
