> Personally, I think the future of "social networks" will, in a sense, go back in time once again where it will be peer to peer, encrypted end to end.
Except, people like to use Facebook as a broadcast medium, and the message size is likely to get prohibitively large if you're encrypting to a lot of people.
> and the message size is likely to get prohibitively large if you're encrypting to a lot of people
Do you have any evidence of this strange claim?
Encrypting a message to lots of recipients in an efficient way has been solved for email (via OpenPGP / GPG) a long time ago.
It is a positive side effect of the hybrid algorithms which combine symmetric with asymmetric algorithms, originally introduced to reduce computation time for classic (single-recipient) asymmetric cryptography.
You obviously know more about this than I do, so it's likely that you're right and I'm wrong. But: To me, it seems unlikely that encrypting a message to thousands of recipients (a fairly normal use case for FB) isn't going to massively increase the message size. It sounds like you're going to have to include encrypted key data for each of those recipients, and while I can believe there might be surprisingly efficient ways of doing that, I have a hard time believing it's not going to lead to extremely large status update messages.
I guess I was thinking more along the lines of the actual network it sits on will help, too. Like CJDNS, an added protective layer for privacy, at least.
Public key encryption generated automatically for each user using the freedom box (I think I watched a video of someone explaining their concept of this for the freedom box).
In the end, I don't know. I'm only starting to get involved.
Personally, I think the future of "social networks" will, in a sense, go back in time once again where it will be peer to peer, encrypted end to end.
I think the guys working on the Freedom Box are trying to crack the riddle.