To decentralize something, you need the right software and protocols.
Email is decentralized. Imagine if you needed to connect to email.com in order to communicate with the person next door?
That is the reality for people on a cruise ship, in villages around the world, etc. where the connection is bad. What's the reason the signal has to travel to Facebook's headquarters and back in order to share photos? Economies of scale, and the profit motive.
Money was recently decentralized with bitcoin.
But social is still not decentralized effectively. You can see this because e.g. GitHub is centralized even though the underlying technology, git, is not. That's because all the profiles, stars, followers/watchers, security, hasn't been done yet in a way that can automatically reconstruct the social graph and enforce privacy across many domains.
Well, that's what we're been working on for the last four years. It's now up to version 0.8:
I don't agree that email is decentralized.[1] It's interoperable and universal, but that's not the same thing. You can use a single address for mail from arbitrary sources, and all email addresses, regardless of client or mailserver, can talk to each other. But once you've chosen a mailserver for any given address, you've put all of your eggs in that one basket. Now, it's easier to switch clients, but let's be realistic, when's the last time you did that? And both the list of popular mailservers (http://www.mailradar.com/mailstat/) and clients (https://emailclientmarketshare.com/) is quite short.
Honest feedback: as far as I can tell from a quick onceover, qbix is just an aggregator for existing services. That doesn't really solve the problem, and arguably, by positioning yourself as a single point of failure for negotiations between different APIs (facebook, email, sms, etc), you're actually creating a system that is substantially more centralized, not less. And you're covered by a patent (or at least an application), so potential competitors can't interoperate without a licensing agreement. If you're trying to be a decentralized, universal platform, you've just shot yourself in the foot.
Disclaimer: I'm working on a similar problem, but I'm doing it as an abstraction layer between transport (TCP/IP, bluetooth mesh, anything with a reliable bytestream) and application. That allows you to do some really cool things, like communicating between people (or services or whatever), regardless of device or physical network topology. https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse
[1] That isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I think that email is a great example of a very successful hybrid (both centralized and decentralized) system -- it allows users to choose between centralized providers with minimal switching cost. Centralization with zero node lock isn't necessarily bad.
I'm not sure what you mean by "aggregator for existing services". Qbix is a social app platform. Let's say New York University wants to install the Qbix platform for its community. People can sign up and make accounts. Then, let's say other organizations, such as Columbia University also run a network. People sign up there as well. You want a system which seamlessly and transparently handles all the social integrations. If I have an account with NYU and then sign up on Columbia's social network, I should be able to find my friends (but only the ones that want to be found) automatically and see their user names because they are in my contact list. Columbia would host various "social apps" on this platform, which would all have a common way to deal with users, data, privacy etc. Let's say one of those apps is Chess, and another is Presentations. I can invite friends to play chess on the Columbia servers or edit a presentation hosted there. If we want, any one of us can start our own network and invite friends. And they wouldn't have to tell each other, "I am XYZ123 on the Columbia network", it would just all link up. Privacy, contacts, etc. it would all work across all the domains. That's what I'm talking about.
Where do you see such a system? It took us four years to build this platform. But it liberates your accounts from the silos since you can create an account anywhere and choose to tell some people that XYZ123 on Columbia is ABC456 on NYC -- and not tell others. Everything would be personalized according to who is logged in where and viewing what. And it would "just work". So app developers for Chess and Presentations could simply implement the part responsible for playing chess or editing/viewing presentations, and the rest would all be standard -- user signup, forgot password, invites, privacy, history, contacts, social, etc.
PS: By the way, your project seems really cool, we should link up. Ultimately we are missing the network layer for our stuff, but what we'd really like to do is have our platform also power apps on local networks, e.g. cruise ships or ad hoc mesh networking. We are deferring that to a couple years down the line, but that's where we want to be.
Email is decentralized. Imagine if you needed to connect to email.com in order to communicate with the person next door?
That is the reality for people on a cruise ship, in villages around the world, etc. where the connection is bad. What's the reason the signal has to travel to Facebook's headquarters and back in order to share photos? Economies of scale, and the profit motive.
Money was recently decentralized with bitcoin.
But social is still not decentralized effectively. You can see this because e.g. GitHub is centralized even though the underlying technology, git, is not. That's because all the profiles, stars, followers/watchers, security, hasn't been done yet in a way that can automatically reconstruct the social graph and enforce privacy across many domains.
Well, that's what we're been working on for the last four years. It's now up to version 0.8:
http://platform.qbix.com
Feedback welcome!