APP.NET
Still p(r)aying for your independence?
As a composer, mainly performing live visual arts, i need to keep up with social and creative networking. However, the platforms providing best multiplication have wellknown and serious drawbacks. When i had a first glance on APP.NET a few weeks ago, it didn't seem to qualify for closing the gap.
One longstanding demand is user data to be held decentral. A photo, taken somewhere in the wild, where should it be uploaded to? Of course right to the photographer's living room - and nowhere else! Sure she'll want to share it with her followers around the globe - but #iknowyouknow her router could easily do this job - and a lot more! This is exactly where all these life streams really want to be hosted and published from. Fair distribution of hardware and energy cost granted.
I scale my NAS as i need to - and so does my neighbour, my company, my university, my party. Non-nerds should seek the smallest entity around that supplies for an account, not the biggest. That's why standards are so important: switching the provider needs piping content using a universal protocol. What will you do with all those exported blobs of your life that you can never ever concatenate again? Data transport instead of data export.
And, finally: When we unplug, we unplug. That doesn't apply for the whole device only, but is to become a modular option. A big step forward in all those discussions about the right to be forgotten and depublishing.
These are the paradigms that will prevail.
And that is the software we still miss. I guess the founders of APP.NET understand well that the amount of effort adherent to registering with another social network is growing with every new competitor. Updating profiles, distributing status updates, checking timelines and getting used to the features eats up precious time.
We have really seen some approaches come and go by now, and over the time were able to make some observations:
