 To introduce Karatarina Nokun, she is a private C activist and she worked for the Federation of German Consumer Organization and also for the German Working Group on Data Retention. She was on the board of the German Pirate Party and nowadays she is working for CAMPECT as a campaigner for digital rights. CAMPECT is an online petition platform here in Germany but also she is an economist and she did some research on why it is so difficult for decentralized social networks to compete with Facebook. So it's the perfect talk for the mission statement of this congress, Karatarina Nokun. Yeah, thank you very much for this awesome introduction and first of all I need to excuse myself I catch the cold so just imagine that I'm shouting at you all the time because I can't. Yeah, why did I do some research on the topic of Facebook and diaspora? You know I really hate Facebook, I'm doing my time at the Federal Consumer Organization of Germany. We suit Facebook a lot, we also suit Google a lot and when I studied economics, friends of me asked me, yeah, let's find a Facebook group and there we can exchange exams and that's so cool, that's so awesome and I said, yeah, well no, I don't have a Facebook account and I don't want to. When I asked, I mean it worked out fine, we opened a group on weriseup.net so we exchanged our exams there but still I asked myself why can't I convince more people to join diaspora or other networks and that's why I did this research project. So let's talk about Skated Communities and the Internet. The Internet is based on, yeah, large parts on three protocols so everything is okay, isn't it? Oh, okay, everything is okay. Okay. Yeah and in the beginning of the Internet there were many, many nodes and they were connected to one another as equals and today the Internet is a giant web which is interconnected with more and more aspects of our lives but what started as a playground for nerds and scientists is not only today a powerful economic driving force that changes a lot of aspects of how economics work, how politics work and how public debates work but it also changed in a way I really dislike. The main topic of this Congress is Skated Communities and I think it's a very important issue to address that above this open layer of the Internet of above this open protocol gated close islands of gated communities emerged and we see clear that there is a trend for concentration in the hands of just a few platform owners. So what can we do about it? I think social networks are an important benchmark for this trend and as an economist I have a clear word for what is happening right now in many areas on the web, it's market failure because there is no real competition possible with Facebook, there is no real competition possible with other large platforms and that's why this talk will try to explain why we should care that Facebook has become the de facto social network provider for large parts of the world and how this came about and most importantly what lessons we can draw from certain dynamics on the market for market entry options for decentralized social networks. So first of all why should we care some numbers? If Facebook was a state it would be it would have more inhabitants than Europe, China or the Americas and every fifth human being on this planet logs in on Facebook at least once per month that's an incredible number and the reason for the success of social networks as an idea is because it connects to a very basic human need for us because we are social creatures so I think addressing this human need that we are social that we want to exchange to share with one another is an incredible cool powerful idea and social networks most importantly add context to content it makes a difference if a friend of mine shares an article about Star Wars how stupid the new Star Wars movie is when some journalist just writes an article about it yeah and social networks are so important for us because the web is filled with information about everything and social networks allow us to filter this information through social ties and it's not only the place where we can spread birthday messages happy birthday I thought about you because Facebook remind me I should do so but Facebook is also the place where we can found groups where we can not only exchange exchange maybe exams for economics classes but where we can call for action and organized protests and back then when I studied in Hamburg there was a point where I registered on Facebook on our fake name it was I was called Maria Muster Frau and this Maria Muster Frau founded different events on Facebook for demonstration against the Akta Treaty Akta it's a it was a treaty yeah it's had a lot to do with copyrights and also in some areas with privacy issues and yeah we called for action on the web and 50 15,000 people came to our demonstration in Hamburg so basically I think social networks are very very powerful idea to enhance democracy freedom of speech but unfortunately I don't think that the structure of Facebook as the de facto social network provider of the world is the best way to provide this idea to the people so we had a lot on TV on the newspapers about the Facebook revolution how the Facebook revolution would empower democracy and so on and freedom of speech and in fact for generations media institutions such as TV channels or newspapers were the gatekeepers for public debates if you wanted to influence public debates you needed to get past these gatekeepers it is true that the internet or social media allowed to implement setting a topic from bottom up and that is a very powerful idea but the tale of the power of Facebook as an enabler or catalyst for freedom of speech I think it's really a tale it's a very simplified story because the inconvenient truth is that today if you want to influence public debates you have new gatekeepers and Facebook is one of the most important gatekeepers of our time take for instance secret algorithms which filter information that is revealed to us not on the basis which information we want to see but on assumed click and interaction rates based on economic incentives because they want to make money out of this interaction um Facebook thereby creates virtual filter bubbles around us it's not only that we can filter information through our social ties but Facebook sits in the middle as bottleneck for information and control whether or not this is really provided to us and most importantly Facebook decides which content is allowed on its network and which content is spent take for instance the case of nudity or take the instant or for instance the example of violence Facebook is much much more liberal to depict violence on its network than nudity for example when you have a mother feeding a child this um Facebook is more likely to be banned than someone beating someone else up and if you ask Kurdish activists on the topic what they think about freedom of speech on Facebook they will tell you a pretty different tale than we see on the media when they talk um yeah about the Facebook revolution because during the last years there were several cases where president Erdogan the Turkish prime minister um addressed Facebook um because he wanted to have some profiles of activists or parties banned and Facebook complied um and talking about social network it's not about not only about freedom of speech um one of the most important topic I think is also the issue of privacy and for me privacy the decisive privacy struggles are not whether or not someone sees our selfies on Facebook because I guess most people want that other people see their selfies on Facebook for me the decisive struggles are rather about our browser history that Facebook collects through like buttons it's about connection information it's about our search queries and the right to register on a fake name because what I did back then when I organized demonstration in Hamburg that was clearly illegal we are not allowed to register on a fake name and what would have happened if Facebook decided one day or two days before the demonstration was launched or maybe before that um let's delete this account let's delete this event we would have a problem and based on the information on which profiles we click our provider knows with whom we are in love and whether or not we moved on after a breakup that are pretty important information about us and we should not we should never forget that the information that is stored in order to sell us cars and diamonds and fancy stuff can also be used in order to target activists and in the wrong hands the start data on activists is um pretty dangerous so as we see there is a clear conflict between shareholder value and public interest and I do not have a problem with social network as I told you I love the idea but I do have a problem when we put corporations in this in a position to exploit this very sensitive part of our lives yeah but fortunately there is an alternative in 2010 four young students from the US launched a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter and they asked for 10 000 US dollars in order to change their internships and summer jobs for the opportunity to work full-time on a decentralized open source alternative for social networks and the reaction was really stunning because they asked for 10 000 and what they got in the end after 39 days was 20 times more than they asked for it was 200 000 and what was the goal of the diaspora um the founders wanted to give the users first of all a better bargaining position against the dominant social media or social network provider they wanted to give users more control over their data and they wanted to want to implement a structure for social networks that provides a better control against censorship and control of governments so what does it mean a decentralized social network um to talk about the issue of centralization or decentralization is important because a lot of the power structure between users and the platform owners can be foreseen somehow through the technical infrastructure that is implemented and you can say that there are three basic kinds of different network structures which be centralized decentralized and distributed and the centralized design which is represented for instance by facebook there is one network platform owner in the middle like a spider in the web collecting all the data he's the bottleneck you can't go besides this bottleneck in order to communicate with other members of the platform in contrast to that a fully distributed system um would be like what is a peer-to-peer system where every user is at the same time a node of a network so again it's a network of equals but unfortunately it's a bit tricky to provide a distributed social network on large scale because as you can imagine you would need encryption on a large scale because otherwise every other member of the network would have the potential to access your private data and there are some projects researching on that but in 2010 when diaspora was founded the idea was to start with a decentralized structure and the most important feature of such a decentralized structure is that you don't have one server where every like every interaction is going through but you have different servers and because it's open source everyone is free to set up their own server or you as a user can maybe choose i trust person x and she's running a diaspora pod and i join or i don't trust anyone and i set up my own pod and talking about freedom of speech or government pressure one interesting feature is that it's much much more difficult to censor or to control data flows from government level in the decentralized or distributed system because if there is a server under pressure you just can move to another server this slide um shows yeah what's the state of diaspora right now we have now the while we live in the year 2015 um some years past since this um yeah this idea was announced and here you see the top 10 active diaspora servers or they are also called pods and um first of all we see that in the last years um there was a development or yeah a trend that's more and more servers are located in germany the biggest um server ones or the most active server ones was um joined diaspora.com which was the first server um that's called for like registration for anyone and today most servers are in in germany and um looking at the number of registered users you see that but on top 10 um diaspora pods um together have around about half a million users so anyone who's telling you diaspora is dead you can tell diaspora is not dead it's pretty alive and um there are around about between 20 and 30 000 people who log into the uh diaspora network or connected networks at least once per month and this number is rather increasing over the last years so we see that diaspora has a relatively small but stable user base but in the end um when we look at the yeah what was announced we we see that it's clearly failed its goal to overcome facebook or to over for facebook as the de facto social network of the world um so we need to ask ourselves what why didn't this happen and in it it said that code is law and in economics it said that the market structures are telling you a lot about which outcome is most likely to come out of a situation on the market that means that market structure are a powerful tool that can provide some explanations why we live in such a decade of gated communities and why decentralized alternatives struggle so hard to overcome facebook and others and talking about um market structures or features of certain markets the most important features feature on the market for send for social networks is of course the network effect so what's the network effect imagine you get a very tempting offer for a mobile contract and it offers really everything you were craving for um different features a new mobile for free and very very low competitive price but there's just one twist with this offer the operator tells you well um you can accept this offer but um the problem is you can only communicate with other members of our network everyone else will be banned from calling you or being called would you accept such an offer would you join a gated community i don't think so i wouldn't and this example um shows really what the network effect is all about the global network effect means um simply that the more users join a network the more connections are available and therefore the more attractive it becomes for other people to join so more people join more people join more people join and therefore it's a structure that really um empowers the growth of monopolies or big platforms and um through this bandwagon effect with positive feedback loops um you can clearly see that monopolies are enforced but talking about social networks the global effect is really not so important i think because when i think about social networks or communication platforms i really don't care about the market share in china or in brazil or in the us i care about the market share among my among my friends i care about on which platform i can reach my family or my business contacts and that's true for a lot of people i mean most people communicate intensely um always with a very small subset of people and that is how the local network effect works if everyone here in this room um or if everyone um i'm friends with rather to say would switch to an alternative platform i would follow always because i want to reach these people and interestingly the success of facebook was not so much um about the global network effect this effect came later first of all it was about the local network effect because when facebook emerged um they had a certain strategy for growth um first of all facebook was in the first months or year only available for harvard students you even needed a valid harvard university address in order to register everyone else was banned from the network so imagine this situation you are new at the university and most likely you moved to harvard you don't know anyone there but you make new friends and all these new friends are on this platform so you know you will meet people you want to meet there so you join and only after having um reached a critical mass in harvard facebook expanded to other ivy league colleges these are very prestigious um colleges in the us and you can be really lucky if you are accepted at one of these colleges and again you needed a valid university address in order to register and everyone else was banned and only after they reached a critical mass there they expanded and allowed any university student to log in then they expanded again um and allowed any school or any member of a school to join then they chose several institutions which were also allowed to join and only after they reached a critical mass in every um of these communities they opened for the general public and that is how social networks are also different kinds of networks which are based on communication how they grow um and this strategy is successful because people who joined early on facebook knew that they would find meaningful connections they are not anyone as i told you you don't care about the market share in china you care about the market share maybe on the ccc congress or maybe at your local hacker space or maybe at your school or university or at work or at your soccer club soccer club club well and um um facebook was not the only network but that understood how important these local network effects are and in order to grow um you often have you often find invite only structures searchable friends or friends list or invite applications or these fancy upload functions for your address book yeah it's all about the local network effect it's all about local growth but unfortunately it's not only the global and the local network effect that benefits facebook it's also the indirect network effect or also called cross-sided network effect and um one example what does it mean indirect network effect one network effect again um facebook um opens its platform uh for app developers um any app developer is free to join facebook of course you have some restrictions but you don't need to pay money in order to place your app on facebook and why does facebook act in such a way because the more apps you have the more interaction you have the more people are likely to join and the more people join the more apps you have the more people will join so you have um a likelihood that um more apps can contribute to growth and maybe you don't um you don't care about apps i know pretty much people from my time at university that were so addicted to farmville uh yeah or can you crush or whatever but um this farmville thing really ruled at university when you look at the laptops um another interesting cross-sided network effect is um for instance an example where you tried when you um succeed to attract more advertisers and these more advertisers pay you more money use this money in order to provide better services to your users and maybe more users join because of this this attracts more advertisers and so on so um this is another effect that um leads to an increase in growth um for the largest platform or for large platforms and on top of that you still of course have economies of scale like in many different other markets economies of scale basically mean um the marginal costs for every additional additional user just decreases and of course this doesn't make competition any easier and at this point it is to understand talking about facebook as a gated community how it came about that it is in fact today a gated community because um it wouldn't if facebook would provide for example open standards and the ability to interconnect between different networks imagine a situation where you just could join diaspora and you still could contact all your contacts from facebook how much more people would then switch from facebook to diaspora i think i think this number would be pretty high and um when you maybe some some of you may think this is um like a total naive dream of open standards and social networks but i guess every one of you has an email address and do you care which provider your communication partner chooses i mean you don't need to care because it's an open protocol as long as this person uses the email technology you can communicate with and the issues of whether or not um a communication platform shuts shuts down and uses proprietary standards and maybe implements um incompatibility incompatibility on purpose is because that standards have the power to change the reference point for the network effect as i told you with an example of of email the relevant number concerning the local and the global network effect with email is not the number who's on gmail or the number of people who use this game x or t online whatever there is um but the relevant number is really who uses this technology and that is why there are very high incentives once you became a big player because of the global network effect the local network effect the indirect network effect just to close your gates and shut your competitors out and and it won't get better in fact it will get worse um for example we see a lot of companies that in the beginning provides pretty open standards or invites application writers to write mobile applications such as twitter but at some point they always close down once uh facebook shares what was compatible with java and uh google the google chat was compatible with java with x mpp too but at some point they just decided to close down and if you compete as a with a gated community this means also something else it means that a new feature won't help you that much when you try to get users to switch because um maybe for example there will imagine a new social network with a fancy feature and everyone says oh i like this feature but at the same point at the same time a lot of people will say yeah i like this feature but still it's more important to communicate with all of my friends this gives you time of course people are more likely to switch but you have time to adapt as a monopolist as a um big platform in order to copy these features or maybe to buy the whole company like facebook does frequently and it becomes more likely with um the possibility just to close up your community and make gated community out of it that the first mover on the market will will take it all the first company or the first platform that uh manages to get the critical mass and shuts down um is most likely to become the de facto platform provider for all of the users but unfortunately this uh these are not all the economic effects that make it less likely that people uh leave facebook there are still the switching costs and the login effects um imagine you want to leave from facebook um you have all your photos there you have all your contacts there you have interaction data and maybe you can move some of your photos but it's incredibly annoying when you don't have data portability in place and there are some data which are really lost you can't take them with you and that is why switching is so hard and the longer you are a member of such a platform which doesn't allow you allow you just to take your stuff when you move out the more you become locked in and the problem about this situation is once the operator knows that you won't be very likely someone who's just switches he will care less he will care less when you comply about um complain about the new terms of services he will care less when you complain about privacy issues or the advertisement policy or whatever he will just don't give a shit and the problem is uh once you have a gated community of course wants to monetize it and um the less likely users can make a credible threat to leave in case they don't like the business model or like the way how their data or that they themselves are treated um the more you can just take out of this network because people will start to tolerate things they would never tolerate under other conditions in the case of email I would just switch my email provider in the case of facebook most people won't switch the social network and the business model of facebook we are not the consumers that's very important to keep in mind we are the product being sold and advertisers pay for the really really scarce resource on the internet it's access to the users it's our attention and um this um here's some data on how much worth um or how much revenue is generated per users per user and you see that when you are from the us or canada your data per month per year is worth approximately eight dollars so you pay such an amount of money for getting a service that costs the provider approximately some pennies because of economies of scale so that's why gaiters communities are everywhere it's a gold mine and the problem is talking about platforms such as facebook um we are not talking anymore about just social networks because it's a platform and platform platforms that have the network effect and lock in on their side try often to transfer their dominant market position from one market to another market and one common strategy is bundling bundling appears when um you get you only can get a certain service as a bundle of services and you can't just get a single service without the whole bundle some examples concerning facebook um why do you need jabber when you have a facebook chat that can't even communicate with jabber or do you really need skype when you have google hangouts um on your google plus account or for example would you still upload videos on youtube or vimeo when you want to spread them via facebook and you know that facebook systematically downgrades every video that isn't uploaded on their service and this strategy has um devastating results it's um causing that the gates or the borders of the gated communities are constantly expanding that means larger and larger parts of the internet are becoming parts of some gated community and um facebook and others even have managed to kill net neutrality in various countries in order to expand their borders to the level of internet access the fight about net neutrality is nothing else the fight about net neutrality is about gated communities that try to expand their borders to a level where they don't they don't belong and they had no power since now until now and um it is sad to see but for many people like for many people i met on university back then when i studied here facebook is the internet because facebook provides everything they basically need everything but freedom and privacy and choice i admit this uh was a pretty depressing overview of our market structures so let's see what do we know with uh what do we do with this knowledge and um what has it to do with diaspora the alternative social network first of all um let me say one thing i know it is a convenient dream that one day the next big social network or the next big uh free software project will come and rescue us all from the dominance of platform owners but competing with such giant platforms like google facebook or apple or microsoft it's not very likely that this will happen overnight and um i love heroes i love superheroes i love comics but um unfortunately this is not realistic in such a situation um we need to work hard in order to accomplish that and the cool feature will not change this um because the history showed that every time um diaspora tries to implement a new feature in order to compete with facebook we had the situation that other um other social networks instantly copied this feature for example um how many of you i don't know how many of you are on facebook but um but you know uh today you can differentiate on facebook between friends close friend business contacts and so on um this is a relatively new feature um and first interestingly uh face um diaspora implemented uh such a differentiation of um contact levels um and called it aspects and then google plus came and announced yeah we have something better we have circles and it was basically the same principle and then facebook of course copied it so we need to face this inconvenient truth um facebook and others will always have a bigger staff more money and the larger user base and they will use it against us so if you are dreaming that maybe there will come a new feature or a new tool and all the teens are like hell yeah i want to use this fuck facebook my parents are on facebook this happened before do you know instagram do you know whatsapp do you know who bought it facebook so we need to really think in order to um to win this fight or at least to keep struggling what are our killer features what are the killer features of um open source decentralized social networks i just told you open source decentralized non-corporate privacy aware facebook will not copy that so you know i got really curious because um i knew that my um colleagues from uh university are not on diaspora so i really um yeah got curious who is on diaspora who are these 20 up to 30 000 users who log in per month and this is an analysis of the most used hashtags on geraspora geraspora is right now the most active diaspora pot yeah what kind of community do you think is on diaspora uh top hashtags such as linux gnu hacker news yeah from my point of view this is very awesome and i think yeah this is a community i would like to join um so in fact um when we when we remember what is important for social networks in order to grow it's the local network effect and in fact we already managed to attract a very very specific group and this group is not very likely to switch because do you think your local hacker space would maybe switch from diaspora to facebook because facebook is so awesome i don't think so and um there will be also some new features um i can probably announce because some of the developers just told me i should do um which can even make the um the network more attractive for groups like hacker spaces or whatever um there will be there will be a chat extension soon which is compatible with uh xmpp or based on xmpp so you that you can add all your java contacts in there and for me it's pretty convenient because i use java over time at work so guess what will be open all the time at work diaspora oh he is sitting someone for my work okay um yeah um because it's so super efficient and other features are planned as well there are other features planned as well there shall be um a group feature soon which is not very very easy to implement because in a decentralized network it's a bit tricky but they're planning to do it and they're also thinking about adding events which is pretty awesome for example when you want to coordinate in your local hacker space in your group and uh you have on on your chat an idea for an event bang you can set it up on diaspora so um is this a gated community for for hackers i don't think so because um it's open it uses open protocols and i am sure or i know that there are a lot of other groups we can address with um such a network in order to join because this is how social networks expand group by group by group so what other groups could like these features um what groups could for example dislike corporate power what what kind of activists could dislike nsa backdoors or what kind of public institution or even companies could feel a bit uncomfortable to put all their um data on an us server and there are some companies or institutions who really are craving for a social solution on servers they can host by themselves and so i think it's a winning strategy to address this group also to ask what kind of features do you want and this is what the diaspora community did they ask their users what do you want and they said java we want java so they implemented java and this is how we really can grow step by step through local network effects and um there have been interesting corporations with um the diaspora networks or other networks that have a decentralized nature already for example the most active german diaspora pot geraspora is right now um funded in some parts by a german newspaper the donau courier and the donau courier interestingly the donau courier uh one day asked um they had this idea yeah we once maybe to experiment a bit with decentralized alternatives we like this idea and but they didn't want to set up a server on their own so they decided to give regular funding and they are still giving regular funding or there were requests of different groups or even um there was a request from youth workers which were interested to use such a network for communication with their clients because obviously you don't want any data connecting concerning youth work um hosted on facebook and um there are these requests they are happening and i think um this is very promising to work on this basic in order to expand group by group and we should not forget um there are certain winners of opportunity which might convince more people um that diaspora is really uh an awesome idea and with killer features are really worth trying it um there have been such winners of opportunity um for example there was a time or there was a constant time of um the of um prime minister Erdogan um who is banning various social media platforms in turkey and every time he does um the the geraspora uh sees an increased traffic from turkish subnets and um another interesting effect is that every time um facebook announces changes in the terms of service again there is a peak and um these winners of opportunity unfortunately i have to say this they will be more frequent in the future um unfortunately it happened before and it will happen again and once you will have a big leak of data from facebook and this can happen anytime um maybe more people will be convinced to um try and decentralize alternative and it's also important um as these examples show for example from turkey that we need these alternatives right now they are right now people who need such an alternative not on the hacker spaces and therefore i'm very very very happy that we are trying to provide such an alternative right now yeah but um competing with a large platform as facebook is right now we need also to um see that this is a task we never can manage alone we can't compete with such a network without allies at our sites which have also superpowers like we have and um one of the most interesting developments of the last year is that diaspora is in fact not alone anymore diaspora um is part of the so-called federation and the federation um consists of different decentralized social networks such as diaspora friendica or red matrix and they are interconnect as they speak the same protocol so it doesn't matter whether my friends um are of friendica on red matrix or on diaspora i can communicate with them and therefore by pooling their users together they change the reference points of the network effect and if you are considering to um to launch a new social network on your own you are free to do and if you join the federation you already have a user base and this is this is a very very exciting and powerful idea because um the networks inside the federation are quite different diaspora is for example has a very clean easy design for users and um some people really like that and um the other networks have other strengths for example friendica is really an interconnection machine um one of the guys who's uh working on the development team he's really looking for any loop pool he can loophole he can get into other networks in order to establish an interconnection even if the operator doesn't want to and that's awesome and um for example friendica already speaks email protocol and java and red matrix on the other hand um this is a fork i mean um red matrix and friendica share large parts of the same code but uh red matrix has a very very very strong emphasis on privacy and they are experimenting with uh apps and um open id and different features which the other networks don't provide so i think um such a federation or such a bundling of your power such a looking for allies is a very powerful um thing to do not only for you as a network but also for your users as a user i can vote by feet just if i don't like diaspora then i just join friendica but i still have all my contacts from my local hacker space and that's awesome and in the long run when we see look at um how this works this is really a small version of how the concept of social networks could look like if we just had open protocols and that's also very important also for the political struggle for open protocols to provide that such a thing works but competing with um large platforms like facebook you are not only competing with a social network you are competing with an alternative ecosystem so we need really to think how to build an ecosystem on our own and um every time there is a new idea or a new feature facebook would like to implement they just copy it or they buy it and the big strength of the free software movement is that we don't need monetary incentives to work together um because we share similar goals so instead of trying to provide all the features by yourself the really winning strategy is just to stay open just to talk to other projects in order to find maybe shared protocols or maybe find ways how you can integrate your your work into another work and how you can benefit from one another one example um when i bought this crappy android phone um there was a pre-installed google plus app on it it's disgusting yeah i know but um i really but i really like the idea of um maybe one one day i will be able to buy um a free operating system without any connections to google and i would really love to have my diaspora or frenica or whatever app pre-installed or maybe an app to connect anything inside the federation and um so we need also to bundle i mean facebook does it we also need to do it and um some first steps are made for example there are some projects for homemade clouds where you just can buy your plug and play device and uh you will be able to get it soon with a pre-installed version of a diaspora pot so it won't be the hackers anymore who have their own pot but maybe the uh left activists uh who's protesting against neoliberal politics and that's cool and um there's another example that um corporation really can work um when you take for instance uh firefox firefox is the most uh used browser at least in germany and um firefox has a feature you can have included share buttons inside firefox and um you can not only choose between uh facebook and twitter and others but you can also choose to use diaspora and this kind of cooperation is something we clearly need more in order to overcome gated communities such as facebook so you know i'm an economist so i was trained to believe in the idea of free markets and fair competition and so on um it's a bit uh it's a bit like studying um dark magic but uh in fact really i believe that um competition is at least in some areas um something that makes sense but at some points you need to see when a market just fails so hard that it doesn't deliver the best possible solution and i don't think it's the best possible solution if you can't really choose if there's no competition and there is no competition with facebook so it's the reason why diaspora and the other struggle so hard is not because their idea isn't great or their technology is not the better one maybe but it is the openness of the web that is threatened systematically um when monopolies use the network effect in order to create more and more gated communities and expand the borders of these gated communities more and more and the inconvenient truth is also i mean i presented some ideas how we can overcome this but it will remain hard as long as the structures are like they are right now and i read one very interesting article um and the where the journalists asked the inventor of the protocol for email attachments what would happen if this idea of email was invented today and he replied in this environment if somebody invented email whoever managed to get critical mass first would become the world's de facto email provider imagine such such a world i mean it's disgusting but right now we have such a situation in the area of social network here we are facebook has become the world's de facto social network provider in large large parts of the world every fifth human being on this planet logs in on facebook at least once per month and it has this position not because it's better than other but only because of market dynamics and because it was lucky there is no real competition and this is market failure and when tim bernersley invented the internet protocol that freed us from the gated communities of compu serve and others he gave it just away he didn't say yeah i want to i have this business model it's super cool it's based on targeted advertisement and i will build a gated community around my internet he gave it away for free and because people like him gave protocols on new ideas away for free and opened it we had this incredible development where we had so much innovation so much creativity through these open structures but this is not how market regulation should work i mean market regulation should not rely upon that someone who has the next cool big idea that can change the world for better um will just be a cool person so finally um some people argue when we talk about social networks and the dominance of facebook that this is only a trend it would go away one day over team switch to another network facebook will be gone and i remember hearing similar things about the internet as such it's only a trend it will go away um but i don't think so and i also don't think so about social networks social networks because social networks are very very powerful idea they are super awesome and maybe facebook declines one day because all the teens realize that their parents are on facebook as well but what will be next if the next big thing is also a gated community nothing has changed so in order to change things we not only need to provide alternatives such as the federation diaspora friendica and so on um we need to support them because um maybe you are looking for friends where should you go maybe you find interesting people on diaspora and they really deserve our support as users as donators as developers or as allies and you you should never forget that programming free software and building a alternative ecosystems to what we see outside in the gated community work is also a political act it's not only writing software it's writing an alternative code for how we want the world to be and there is an alternative to patent wars there is an alternative to gated communities and business models that only are based on exploiting our privacy and such projects represent the visions of a better world and that's why i would like to support them and but we also need to address in order to win this fight um that these alternatives don't face fair competition this is market failure on a large scales and that is why we need to fight for open standards and in order to change the market structures that will create gated communities over and over again we need to force facebook we need to force them and not just kindly ask mr. suckerberg would you please be so kind to consider to tear down this wall this will not work we need to talk about political solutions and we need to address this as a need for market regulation in order that the better solution can win thank you yeah tear down this wall yeah ronald reagan at its best uh at least mr. suckerberg is watching the stream or öttinger is watching the steam you know what to do so can we now to the questions and answers uh microphones on the left on the right and also are there any questions from the internet yes i have two questions from the internet okay we will start with the internet because i'm sure you are here after the talk that people can ask you so okay dear internet uh what is the relation of yasbra and canoe social or pump by or are there plans to merge the protocols yeah i think there um for for this question you would really need to ask the developers um but i can ask this room uh hey diaspora developers are you here yeah there do you want to say something about this please just when you go to the microphone other words it's not here in this stream yeah a warm applause to um danis schubert so no there are no actual plans to merge protocols but there are discussions on defining a new protocol that supports all social networks together so yeah is there another question um is there another question from the internet uh yes is there a way to import from facebook to diaspora to import data yeah this is a interesting um thing for example um yeah i had this in my presentation but because of out of time reasons i deleted it um there is um fortunately this new eu uh privacy law the privacy regulation with which will also force uh platforms such as facebook to provide um like a data dump of um your data you can take with you but um i'm still a bit not very convinced how this will work out um whether or not all the data is included it would be very convenient if you just had one like uh one data dump and you could just download it and upload it but um we will we need to wait and see how this will develop okay i'm sorry to hear but at least we are out of time now uh all questions after words with katarina give her another warm applause for this fabulous talk