♲ Mike the Friendican
In 2010, all I heard about was how we should save the world from Facebook.

Here's how it went...

Build a decentralised social web. Provide all the same (or better) social tools, but without any central authority. With the data on private servers, it would be less susceptible to tracking and monitoring. Use strong encryption in transit so the messages can't be snooped.

Oh and while we're at it, build it into an ubiquitous platform using something like PHP/MySQL so it will run on most any hosted platform and could be as pervasive as Wordpress - and also easily extensible with themes and plugins.

Make it open source so anybody can hack it and improve on it. Give this to the world - for free. Nobody should ever own your personal communications.

Then - what would be really cool is if this network was federated, so you could interact with all your friends on Facebook and Twitter and Google. And perhaps the so-called "free web" so you could communicate with your friends on Identi.ca and Diaspora and have a way to chat with XMPP.  Maybe it could import RSS feeds and put email into your stream as well. Use open protocols wherever you can and develop a few new ones for the places where the standard protocols fall short. 

Wouldn't that be just totally freaking awesome? It would be a social network like no other. The killer app of the modern internet.


You know what?

We built exactly that... It's called Friendica.

You know what?

Except for a very small handful of enthusiastic geeks spread around the globe, nobody liked it.

Nobody wanted it.

We built what they said they wanted - but they obviously weren't telling us everything. Also it was curious that for the thousands of people across cyberspace who talked about wanting this, only about 20-30 people on the planet were actually trying to make it happen - all working on separate projects.

Very strange, don't you think?

So we started to look closely at actions, not words - to find out what it is people really wanted (but weren't talking about). We discovered some things in the process.

Then, one by one, the federated social web started to rebuild all the walls we broke down.  The large corporate services started shutting off API access and changing their policies to make a federated web impossible. The free web providers did their own wall building. They hid behind technical excuses, but basically they didn't want to be part of a federated web. It was fine if the federated web brought them new members, but if they lost members to another service and somebody didn't have to actually be a member of their service to be friends with their customers, this was bad and had to go. 

You would think that Friendica would be totally destroyed by a lack of interest/enthusiasm and the solid rejection of a federated and decentralised social platform that's built on Wordpress principles.

But we just shrugged it off. Because we completely believe we're doing the right thing. As somebody said - "Friendica is just ahead of its time".

So fast forward to 2012. The times have also changed and Friendica must adapt to the evolving world - with all its kingdoms and empires. Unfortunately we have to scrap the idea of a federated social web where all services can freely participate and interact. The world isn't ready for that. The idea will eventually take hold and grow (it's as inevitable as the sunrise), but not today.

We're doing something a bit different now. It's just as special, and built on the same foundations, but we've learned some things over the past couple of years. A lot of things. Now we're starting on stuff that's probably even further ahead of its time.

Stay tuned.
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