Alec Muffett Profile picture
Oct 5, 2018 7 tweets 5 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Re: @timberners_lee's #Solid / @SolidMit

Hi @robertscammell!

More interesting that Facebook, I used to work on TheMine!Project*, a highly influential, much-plagiarised & ultimately unsuccessful stab at personal information stores, from 2006-2011.

*themineproject.org
If you want to know my opinion of how @timberners_lee's #Solid will impact "tech giants", watch this video (actually, x3) from 2010; the bulletpoints are:

- facebook killers, aren't
- there's plenty of room for alternatives
- first it must grow

The media loves zero-sum, david/goliath stories, and thereby often causes doom ("ello") & even tragically suicidal levels of stress ("diaspora*") to people who are foolish enough to pitch themselves/their platforms as the antithesis of "social media giantism; so do please beware.
Frankly: #Solid / @SolidMit will gain or not-gain a userbase upon its own merits, and my experience with @themineproject suggests that it will do so both on its own merits, and without reference to "killing Facebook".

They are two different things. Stop comparing them.
@threadreaderapp unroll please.
ps: if I had to make a bet, the event that would kill #Solid / @SolidMit fastest would be if it gets subsumed by/conflated with the "identity" community; the internet does not actually need yet another identity solution, and attempts to thrust one upon it are generally resisted.
The only folk who demand that the internet "needs" a clean and well-though-out, tidy and well-organised "identity" solution, are folk who are offended that it has gotten this far without one. This goes double for anything mentioning #blockchain.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Alec Muffett

Alec Muffett Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @AlecMuffett

Sep 4, 2018
Australia: "The Assistance and Access Bill 2018" - the people of Australia have SIX DAYS in which to register their feelings on encryption back doors: homeaffairs.gov.au/about/consulta… #straya #endtoend
A Bill for an Act to amend the law relating to telecommunications, computer access warrants and search warrants, and for other purposes #otherPurposes
A technical capability notice may require the provider to do acts or things by way of giving help to ASIO or an interception agency in relation to…
Read 13 tweets
Aug 5, 2018
Hey! You remember that piece where I was randomly asked to respond in a 2…3 hour window, about "fixing" Facebook? Well, it's out, and I've found it!
And, of course, like every other Associated Press piece, it is broadly republished in many newspapers, under mostly-the-same-headlines:
You get the same copy at CTV in Canada:
Read 11 tweets
Jul 30, 2018
<pops open bonnet of car>
Mark: "There you go, there's the engine. 4 cylinder petrol engine"
@CommonsCMS: "Where are the horses?"
Mark: "Horses?"
CMS: "We heard it's a 100 Horsepower engine."
Mark: "That's just a metaphor…?"
.@CommonsCMS: "No, we know there are horses. That engine is a black box. You're not being transparent about where the horses are."
Mark: "But that's not how cars really work…"
CMS: "Everyone knows that cars are driven by horsepower. We want to see the horses." #algorithms
Author's Note: this may sound like whimsy, but it's only a few years since I had the following conversation with a member of a London-based "civil society" campaigning organisation:
Read 9 tweets
Jul 27, 2018
HEREWITH: a _different_ argument about why it's easier to put a man on the moon than to have backdoorable cryptography at scale. This fine article got posted by Techdirt a couple days ago…
And it has received reasonable praise, commentary, and dad-jokes from the usual crypto suspects:
And it quotes the highly respectable @mattblaze who as-ever properly demolishes the argument on its own terms of groundless aspiration:
Read 15 tweets
Jul 9, 2018
While we're on the topic of scale: every so often I have the misfortune of having to listen to some politician or former civil servant* demanding that people "NEED TO LEARN THE VALUE OF THEIR PERSONAL DATA, GODDAMNIT!".

*eg: ex-GCHQ
This one can be quite quick:
- Facebook
- About 2 Billion users
- Annual revenue 2017: $40.653 Billion

prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
Here's simple division as a rough guide: your data is worth about $20

About $20 per annum per user.

Let's implausibly assume that you're a heavy user, and are worth double that, so that you're actually worth $40; that means your value to Facebook would be (40/12) = $3.33/month.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 7, 2018
Regards #Article13, I wrote up a little command-line false-positive emulator; it tests 10 million events with a test (for copyrighted material, abusive material, whatever) that is 99.5% accurate, with a rate of 1-in-10,000 items actually being bad.
For that scenario - all of which inputs are tuneable - you can see that we'd typically be making about 50,000 people very upset, by miscategorising them as copyright thieves or perpetrators of abuse:
But let's vary the stats: @neilturkewitz is pushing a 2017 post by very respected fellow geek and expert @paulvixie in which Paul speaks encouragingly about a 1-to-2% error rate; let's split the difference, use 1.5% errors, ie: 98.5% accuracy: circleid.com/posts/20170420…
Read 23 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(