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As far as I can tell, the Freedom Box is the server, so you would only go offline if you unplugged the wall wart containing the software. It also seems like there's a chance that you wouldn't go down if your internet went down, as long as you had enough of a concentration of Freedom Boxes nearby that your packets could be delivered via mesh to someone whose internet had not gone down, or directly.

This Freedom Box stuff is new to me, and I'm finding Moglen talking about it very difficult to parse. I'm going to try the speech at http://freedomboxfndn.mirocommunity.org/video/4/freedom-in-t...

If this allows my friends to get off facebook, and allows me to get back the sort of community of distant friends that I had when I was on facebook without the middlemen and any ominous privacy implications, I'm all for it. Also, I'd love to directly share content with non-technical people I know without the overhead of domain names and webhosting.

At the price point of <= $100 dollars in return for an actual physical product, I'm sure I could get most to all of my friends to use it. Myself, I'll just install the software to my HTPC (which has evolved into the central server for my house) for free, but I think that with a price point that low, my non computer-savvy friends would pay to get off of facebook in return for something they could touch, wasn't complicated, and couldn't be shut down at the whim of some corporate board.

Just my thoughts though. If you require a presence on the social web regardless of power cuts, then I guess it's a dealbreaker for you.

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Please don't get me wrong, I really like the idea, I just think that my non tech savvy friends will immediately dismiss the idea of "normality" we have come to assume with the facebook pages always being on.

The hard truth is many of the people I talk to use facebook primarily to look at other peoples pages, if you look at facebook chat now and see exactly how many are online, it at best makes about half of your friends invisible.

I think this is a better solution than facebook if feasible to implement

If all of that facebook-page-type-stuff was saved on the wart, then we wouldn't be prevented from browsing through it while they were personally offline with their computer powered down. I assume that would be the plan - but if I'm wrong, I would share your doubts about this catching on as a drop-in facebook replacement.

-edit-

To be clear, I'm imagining pictures, an activity stream, a presence server, and maybe a calendar and a blog sitting directly on the wart - independent of a separate computer to such an extent that a person wouldn't even have to own an actual desktop or laptop to use the appliance to its full extent, maybe just a cell phone app to update these things, or even updating them through public or other people's computers over the internet. If friendly neighbors left their freedomboxes open to your through traffic, it might not even necessitate a local internet connection.

Ok, sorry my original comment was incorrect, I meant "by me being offline" by the physical device being unplugged or say electricity lost. And yes the wall plug idea is nice and really I would love this to be a reality, but there will have to be some sort of breakthrough in this distributed nature.

Some sort of p2p hosting solution, not sure how it would work exactly.

Noticed from the Kickstarter page:

"Such boxes exist in the form of plug computers and mesh routers, tiny, inexpensive machines that can take the place of other electronics in your life, that draw so little power (often as little as 5W) that they can be run off of batteries or solar panels."

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/721744279/push-the-freed...