What would it take for a new social network to take users off facebook in 2017?
Integrate with Facebook. Don't force people to choose one system or another. Then people will diffuse across the barrier.
Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
51–60 of 444 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#52I'm a resident in a "neighborhood activist collective" and I made a self-hosted web site for the house. Now it's expanding into a web app that's a tool for the organization (planning, etc). It's also being set up for similar houses in the same city, and we plan to make it into a kind of federated small-scale "social network" built around our own principles and premises.
Another aspect of the project comes from a "house terminal" that I set up here, basically an offline Raspberry Pi running GNU/Linux and a custom chat/guestbook program that runs as a "kiosk". This terminal will morph into a kind of in-house only access to the federated network with real time communications etc.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#53> What projects or companies are you working on to combat filter bubbles, walled gardens, emotional manipulation,
I walled it myself by making a small social network for close friends.
Sure, it's probably a big bubble but at least I don't emotionally manipulate my friends by showing them ads or changing the order of their posts.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#54Seems like the first thing we need is organization. Even if the effort is spent on diversified efforts, having an organization of like-minded people agreeing on overall objectives and prioritizing would probably be the starting point. Is that organization SocialWG? Something else? I have no idea, but I would be open to participate.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#55I'm working on a project to separate data from presentation. Too much data is overly wrapped with presentation (e.g. HTML) so we are forced into using a certain display method (popular commercial web browser). A related problem is that human readable data is often unnecessarily encoded into binary machine data. If we weren't wasting so much space on presentation, we could have just served the human-readable data. In…
> Too much data is overly wrapped with presentation (HTML) The design of HTML5 and associated web tech separates semantics (HTML) from presentation (notionally CSS, but this bleeds over into JS) and behavior (JS).
HTML does a fine job with semantics but the reality is that most of it is used for presentation. HTML says what text is but not what it means, so reading a plain unrendered HTML document is a rough experience that doesn't add much usefulness for humans.
The vast majority of internet data can be relayed through something as simple and readable as markdown and/or YAML, and still convey enough useful semantics.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#56My biggest gripe with the "modern internet" is e-mail. MS and Google dominate the e-mail scene, and they are making it ever more unpleasant to run your own mailserver. They will frequently blackhole mails, without bounces, warnings or any recourse. I'm not sure what can be done about that, but it's certainly becoming an up hill battle.
I try and get everyone I know to use (and pay for) Fastmail. It has a great interface. Great calendar. Awesome spam filter. Etc... It costs $30/year to send messages around the globe. That seems like a steal to me.
Ultimately, email clients are services that have maintenance and development costs - if you're not paying for it, someone is selling your information to fund the service.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#57What would it take for a new social network to take users off facebook in 2017?
The real problem would be network effects. Nobody uses a new social network, because nobody they know uses it. To get people off of Facebook, you'd have to find a way around that.
Yep. You need a niche. Like yik yak, but not.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder though if you could create a compelling product that would keep the customer from ever knowing they "own" a server. I've thought about a service where I effectively would run one big "load balancer" front end that would route a customer's traffic entirely to prefab cloud servers that I would spin up & configure via tools like Terraform and Ansible on the back end. I wanted to load those mainly with privac…
If users do not see a visible distinction between your app portal and Facebook, why would they pay you instead of using FB for free? Is it enough to claim privacy in order to make a sale? I really doubt it.
You could be right, but it isn't that far-fetched. Consider:
* A lot of users would be in the pennies-per-month level, charged by standard Amazon usage prices
* Owning your own data is a big deal - it's not uncommon for people to pay for backups, which would essentially be an included service
* It's not unreasonable to imagine a company of Amazon's size and competence doing a very good job of this, and including novel features that FB/IG/etc can't match
* It could also be a loss-leader to get people to own servers for other purposes, e.g. hosting a vanity domain
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might want to read about urbit [ https://www.urbit.org/ ]. I think it might be similar to your thinking.
I'm familiar with Urbit, and intrigued by it, and a big company deciding to try a project inside it is inarguably the best thing that could happen to Urbit; but I'm not very bullish on that happening, for a variety of reasons.
I think that's an excellent way to view that project. Maybe something down the line can use some of Urbit's ideas.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#60Make 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 xxx@gmail.com. Your site is yoursite.com and your email is youremail.com. Your login to the sites you build are email addresses, not tied to social media providers. The closed internet providers are enhancements to your sites. They do not take the place of your site. If you follow this philosophy, you are supporting the open internet. Own your .com. Don't let others own you by taking that from you.