Another Alternative to Facebook: Openbook!
Recently we conducted an interview with Openbook, a network that promotes being more user-friendly and transparent than its biggest competitor: Facebook. We asked the young team a few questions to find out exactly how they wanted to implement their ideas.
From Christopher Böhm, acTVism Munich
CB: How did Openbook come about? Could you tell our readers a bit about the idea behind it and what led to the team that will make it all happen.
Shantanu Tarey (Openbook): Joel Hernandez, founder of Openbook, first had the idea for an open-source social network around 2 years ago. At the time he ran it by a couple of friends and was convinced by them that privacy was not something enough people cared about for this to work. However the data scandals of Cambridge Analytica in 2017, and rising privacy concerns among users was the breaking point where he decided to go ahead with it. He wanted to build a social network whose revenue model wasn’t based on advertisements and engagement driven economics but instead on honest and ethical values. Most of the current Openbook team are from an information security background who shared the same values and decided to join in on the mission. We are lucky to have a mix of ethical hackers, designers, software engineers, information security experts in our team in addition to the support of cryptography pioneer and creator of PGP, Phil Zimmerman.
CB: Openbook is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. It is the second Openbook
crowdfunding campaign. Could you explain why the first one failed and what encouraged you to try it a second time. What changed?
ST: Our first Kickstarter was definitely a learning experience. We realised we made some mistakes like having relatively high shipping costs for some rewards even within Europe which deterred many potential backers. We also got feedback that our revenue model wasn’t clear enough. (we later addressed this on our blog – https://medium.com/openbook-org/so-how-will-openbook-make-money-daf99589643d) When we realized the first campaign was not going to make it, we were looking at alternative funding grants etc. to keep going. The reason we chose a second Kickstarter was the immense messages of support from the backers who pledged on the first campaign. This included volunteers who helped translate our site into multiple languages, many who increased their pledge during the last days to make the first campaign successful, and many others who helped us spread the word and cheered us on. So we went back to the drawing table, refined our minimum viable product to a slightly more leaner version and lowered our funding goal on the second campaign to give our backers a chance to participate in the shaping of Openbook. Of course Europe also had much cheaper shipping costs this time.
CB: There are quite a few projects out there these days that try to be an alternative to
Facebook. Names of a few of them are Diaspora, Mastadon, Human Connection or Vero, where the first three are open-source. How intensely did you study your competition and what do you think is unique about the social network you are planning to build? Why do you think there will be demand for even another social network?
ST: Yes, we have a fairly good idea about existing competition. While we think the intention behind all of them is good there are key differentiators for Openbook that make us unique.
As for demand, we find many people just entirely quit social networks since they are fed up with privacy-policies/engagement driven algorithms of current networks as there are very few or no alternatives which are just as easy to use and enjoyable. If we can break the network effects of current social networks by providing better social experiences with an underlying blanket for privacy, I think there is definitely space for us in the market.
CB: What is the business model of Openbook and why did you choose it? What makes you think it will be successful?
ST: Our business model is based on a digital currency called Tip. It will be used on the platform to support content creators, subscribe to publishers, buy and sell goods between users and much more. We will make money by charging a % on each transaction. We believe e-commerce, consumption of news, entertainment and social networking will increasingly be done on a single platform. This is also evident from the way social platforms have evolved in the recent years. This provides us with an opportunity to enable these transactions for our users in a secure and private manner while providing an user experience they will love. It also means we don’t rely on user data for being profitable.
In general, we also think the demand for privacy will go up further in the next decade. Tech giants that rely on content creators and ad revenue (for eg. YouTube) already realise this and are also pushing for similar revenue models.
CB: How will Openbook protect the privacy of its users? Does a user have to take your word for it or can he make sure you hold what you promise?
ST: Openbook doesn’t rely on user data for its revenue, so we have no interest in collecting unnecessary data about our users. To protect our users privacy, All optional data sharing with third party apps will be disabled by default, and it is up to them if they want to give third party applications more of their data instead of the other way around. We will also have a very strict review process for third party apps to check how users’ data (that they choose to share) is being used by the application.
We will not track user activity or use algorithms to curate content based on user history. Since our code will be open-sourced, people do not have to take our word for it, they can actually look into our code and verify that we do what we say we do. Most of us come from an information security background, so we trust our team to implement this securely while making sure privacy is not compromised.
CB: Will Openbook utilize any algorithms to show its users content? If so, will there be an option to turn it off reliably?
ST: No, Openbook will not be using algorithms to curate content for users based on their activity history for example. We will allow users to choose themselves if they would like to “follow” certain friends/content creators/businesses etc and see posts from those sources.
CB: Will Openbook support private messaging and will it feature encryption?
ST: Yes and yes. However we might not have encryption on our very first MVP in case we are short on time. But end to end encryption is definitely on our roadmap.
CB: There are messenger solutions out there like XMPP or Matrix that strive for
interoperability which means that anybody can use that software and create their own
messenger app on top of it. The idea is that users can then communicate across various messenger apps because they use the same underlying protocol. Did you consider this strategy in the context of a social network and what was the result?
ST: We have not locked in on our choice for this since this is an implementation level detail. At this stage, we can say we will look into different protocols including these and see if they will be a good fit for the security and experience we want to provide our users.
CB: Other social networks like Diaspora follow the strategy of “decentralization”. This means anybody can host a server and choose to store their private data only on the server they run. Will Openbook support decentralization? Please shed some light on your decision.
ST: To focus on user experience and product innovation earlier versions of Openbook will be centralized. We will look hard into decentralization in later stages and are also keeping an eye on projects like Solid MIT (The one from Tim Berners Lee, https://solid.mit.edu/) which aims to decouple applications and users underlying data. This will prevent vendor lock in and put users in control of their data.
CB: Thank you for the interview.
Click here or on the picture below:
We want to build technology to serve people, not the other way around.
We do this by designing our products and services with humanity’s best qualities such as kindness, compassion, tolerance, charity, empathy and cooperation at their core.
Openbook is our first creation. A social network that is honest, respects and protects the privacy of its users, brings people together, is fun to use and does good for our planet and its inhabitants.
The project was successfully crowd-funded September 2018 through a Kickstarter Campaign.
We will release Openbook to the world March 2019.
Christopher Böhm studied physics at the University of Freiburg and specialized in particle physics. Furthermore, he is particularly interested in cryptography and data protection, but is also interested in pretty much everything to do with ones and zeros.
During the German election of 2017, he became motivated to influence the world for the better which led him to join acTVism Munich.
1 reply on “Another Alternative to Facebook: Openbook!”
Sehr informatives und interessantes Interview Das Projekt werde ich definitiv im Auge behalten grade in der Bewusstwerdungsphase sind Zensur freie Soziale Netzwerke die Die Privatsphare schützen mit die wichtigsten Werkzeuge die wir Menschen haben.
kommt zum Million Mask March 2018 5. November Weltweit
#MMM2018 http://www.millionmaskmarch.com/