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Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

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Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#351

Post by sjg007 »

dajt wrote: post #266
interfixus wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck posting some controversial point of view on Facebook or similar platforms. They'll axe you in the blink of an eye. It's real. It happens all the time. I have seen it again and again.

I may have a business one day that sells bits for model steam locos. Many people who are likely to be my customers belong to a facebook group, and probably don't use their PCs much except for facebook and e-mail. And if I needed to post a controversial point of view on my model steam loco business page, I've got bigger problems than facebook. I can't stand facebook, but for my purposes it is probably the cheapest, mo…

I think you could have a connector between your site and Facebook. Basically an app that would synchronize content. You should certainly start on Facebook, see if you have something valuable and then think about transferring to a self hosted solution. At that point you might find it worth it but maybe not.

Docker containers make sense because they are portable apps. You can choose where to deploy them, upgrade them, and store the data or what not.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#352

Post by hedora »

I use this to block surveillance, and bypass the big content aggregators. Think of it as full-text reader view for RSS feeds that don't support such things:

http://fivefilters.org/content-only/

Increasingly, I get my news from non-profits that do original research, or technolgists that are the primary source of the stories I read. They don't use advertising to fund their work, which eliminates the moral dilemmas around stealing content vs supporting our corporate surveillance state.

Also, RSS is the opposite of a walled garden.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#353

Post by piaste »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #320
sjg007 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website in a box (docker), put it wherever. This might be a good idea.

Yes. But by website in a box, it would have to be as dirt simple as signing up for FB. So, gramma goes to a web page, clicks the signup, the website deploys a docker image on a webhost and spins up a UI that is not unlike what she is already used to. Next, comment and "likes". You have to have a comment system that runs on there also. Gramma would invite others to her site by clicking invite. This would generate a sp…

There are some docker images on DockerHub which are very polished along those lines. OwnCloud for storage, Ghost for blogging. You run them with default settings and they open to a nice welcome page with a tutorial and a fully-functional setup.

With a docker UI like Kitematic, it's remarkably similar to an app store experience.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#354

Post by sumeno »

piaste wrote: post #349
sumeno wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Registering a domain name may as well be magic to a large portion of the population.

Is it more complicated than buying and owning a car? A house? More complicated than filing your taxes, managing retirement savings, having a wedding, choosing insurance? Learning the basics of something new, enough to get by, is part of being an adult, even if you won't ever be and have no interest in being an expert.

Given the number of bad financial decisions people make because they don't really understand those things I'm not sure that those comparisons are helping your case, but even so, for a lot of people it IS more complicated than those things because they are afraid of technology in a way that they aren't afraid of tangible things.

Solving 99% of technical problems requires nothing more than Google and following instructions in the first result, but people still can't handle it. Most people haven't given running a website enough thought that they would even know what to look for. A good portion don't even really understand URLs enough to type facebook.com into the address bar instead of Googling Facebook and clicking the first result.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#355

Post by sumeno »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #241
ajb wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I know people with zero tech knowledge who have done it. Anyone able to register a trademark. Art director, actors etc.

Right, and it's not like you couldn't ask a technical friend to get it done.

I'm not an advocate for anything that results in even more people bugging me to do "computer stuff" for them

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#356

Post by markshead »

will_brown wrote: post #204
doke01 wrote: post #60

Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is…

I have been attempting this for sometime with: http://hyperlinkserver.com/webdesigning/tomorrow/ I have had multiple developers quit and don't have the $80k budget quoted by Gigster. Concept: in the same way you might register a username/handle on ig/twitter a user registers a new domain (or "connects" a domain the user already owns). Using Enom API we also offer "branded" email and private registration, and in the b…

I'd be happy to talk with you about what you are doing with the API. I don't know if my company would have time to write it for you, but I'd be happy to talk through it with you and offer some suggestions.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#357

Post by awinter-py »

for better or for worse, advertising (or some kind of information) is necessary for running a business.

Web ads are working less well than in the past, but they still work. The companies that have a high-visibility 'start page' (news orgs in 1990, yahoo in 1997, G & FB today) are going to have a lot of power.

Create a compelling start page, get 30% of the world to use it once a day, and your problem will have been solved.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#358

Post by krausejj »

Keep using email and open messaging formats, ideally tied to an ID you own. How many people actually have their own website? Probably a minority. Everyone has an email address. If this gets subsumed by FB Messenger, Slack, and Snap, we lose the open web.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#359

Post by sam_goody »

Use Firefox. Develop on Firefox, and then adjust for Chrome if needed. Encourage friends to use FF. Google tracks every domain you visit and how long you visit it even with all the adblockers in the world (under the pretext that you might be searching for the domain instead of going there). You have no idea how much data they are collecting on every minute of your use (the local license in my non-U.S. version has some weird clauses, don't know about the U.S.) and all that info is damaging. FF is now faster than Chrome on every metric, so you don't lose anything for yourself or your users when they switch (though it is wise to make a new profile if you have a old version) If they are not targeted as the main platform, they will be gone. By keeping another browser alive, Google cannot force all of their crazy ideas and dreams in the guise of forwarding the internet. Develop for FF, encourage its use, and that definitely will help you and the free internet.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#360

Post by sumeno »

mondoshawan wrote: post #326
sumeno wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Registering a domain name may as well be magic to a large portion of the population.

So what can we do to make this simpler? Make the technology easier to understand?

You could provide a one stop shop for sharing information with the people you care about that is easy enough to use that even people who are afraid of technology can handle it... also everyone they know needs to already be on it... but then you just created Facebook.

The ease of use is only one part of the problem, the other part is that you are trying to solve a problem that a lot of people who use Facebook just don't care about. Facebook fills their need and they really don't care about walled gardens or open internet or whatever else the HN crowd views as a dire issue.

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