Flutterby™! : Violet Blue on Tribe, redux

The Tribe.net 2257 Extended Dance Remix is an essay on how Tribe.net's new 2257 compliance push is destroying a lot of community, but it's also a good look at why "social networking" websites, indeed any centralized attempt at "social networking", must fail. At some point on the net we have to offer up portions of our identity to third parties, if to no one else then to the domain registrars (although I believe that there will be solutions to this, I've got some ideas for an architecture that I'd like to see implemented), but to offer up large portions of the content we create and, more importantly, the relationships we build, to faceless VC funded companies is foolish at best.

So here's the challenge: If you use one of these services, figure out what it would take to implement technologies like FOAF and whatever else to decentralize that process so you can protect yourself. If you have a favorite cause that uses these technologies, do your best to educate that community so that it can be decentralized. And encourage everyone you interact with online to start discussions about identity systems that users own, so that you don't get a whole lot of your online identity tied up in a service that can change things on a whim.