File sharing software as a model for a platform of community building

Could the forum of your future exist on your local machine?

[Webwork]

Using file sharing software as a model, which requires a certain level of trust, is it possible that the "forum" of the future will exist on the local PCs of every "member" of "that forum"?

Can anyone envision software that would enable the automatic updating of the PCs of "everyone on that forum's network" - such that all threads would be updated on every local machine upon sign-on?

Would such a model allow for the creation of spontaneous forums by assent? You become a node of my forum and all your contributions are added to my local copy of "the forum" by virtue of the permissions I've granted?

Is this likely in the future?

Yes, it's likely to be subject to exploits, just like music file sharing is, but perhaps - only perhaps - at some point in the future authentication processes will enable this type of openness.

So, will the forum of the future be locally hosted on multiple machines and everyone is a member based upon the granting of publishing rights to your local machine?

[Casethejoint]

'ow do, Webwork. Good question, good benefits: removal of central storage spaces and hosting costs; obliging users to share equal responsibility for the resources that power the system; screening out those not prepared to shoulder some of the burden of supporting the community (a more contentious point, I guess).

But every group has a mix of altruists and, erm, selfish-ists (why isn't this a word? :) Does "the forum of the future" sufficiently take that into account, I wonder? Sure, you get your altruists in p2p networks: "superpeers" if you will. But there's flexibility built into the system: I can access a vastly wider resource that that which they choose to store on my local machine (eg. related to my taste in music) and make available to the network. Wouldn't duplicating storage of a forum on local machines defeat these rationales?

[rogerd]

Just to be difficult ;), I'll suggest the opposite: web applications are moving more in the direction of "thin clients", with less functionality required for the user's PC. Why force users to store gigabytes of redundant data when it can be delivered on the fly over the web?

The driving forces include,
- increasing use of non-PC clients like PDAs, cell phones, etc.
- increasing availability of wireless internet
- elimination of all tech support issues related to local hardware & operating system

Even Microsoft is testing its "Live" applications delivered over the Web. I'm not convinced this will be a huge winner for MS, but they certainly see a need have that base covered.

So, my community of the future would place no demands at all on the users hardware - rather, it would offer specialized feeds, text message alerts, etc. to accommodate small-screen users on the go.

[Webwork]

Okay, Mr. Difficult ;), in my future control of social networks is wrested away from corporations.

In that future groups are self-organizing, without having to answer to anyone's rulemaking but the group. (Okay, we answer to the rules of civil society and whoever owns the data pipelines, and a few others.)

So, if we're not going to answer to corporate control of the social network who is going to set up, administer and pay for the hosted servers that will handle the heavy lifting in your scenario?

"Well, since it's our servers you must consume our advertisements, allow us to download spyware, . . ."

IF my loosely aggregated online community forum starts small might not the community opt, as it grows, to add a server?

IF, as this scenario unfolds, technology advances, might not the amount of available local storage, data compression, etc. enable localization of data storage and retrieval?

I am thinking that the versions of MySpace that we now see may go away.

Any serious technology wonks out there? Anyone see social networking, forums, "meeting places" becoming something that they are not now? Any way of taking the file sharing model into the social networking, online community, forum building world?

Wasn't there a day when forums were, in fact, hosted on people's home PCs?

[rogerd]

Well, technology will probably catch up with your scenario, Webwork. No doubt cell phones will have 100-gig hard drives and broadband internet, so dowloading a modest pile of content wouldn't pose the problem that it does today.

Overall, though, it seems like a pretty inefficient model. If every WebmasterWorld member had all the forum content on their multiple hard drives (home, office, cell phone...), you'd be consuming massive amounts of bandwidth and storage to achieve that redundancy.

It might solve the rogue bot problem, though. :)