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

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

#61

Post by sillysaurus3 » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 9:58 PM UTC

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…

Looks like there's a typo in your first sentence. I could sort of figure out what you meant, but it took a bit of digging.

EDIT: Never mind, I was straight-up wrong. Sorry!

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

#62

Post by the_common_man » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 9:59 PM UTC

mundo wrote: post #25

Here's a thought I've been turning over for a little while now. It occurs to me that all extant social media apps have, at a high level, exactly the same requirements: 1. Allow users to upload some data to cloud storage 2. Make that data discoverable to certain other users 3. Show everyone ads Whether FB, Twitter, etc were to be dislodged by another app that is essentially the same app is not terribly interesting. So…

Highly recommend cloudron.io. They are trying work a SaaS style deployment angle for people running their own server.

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

#63

Post by asselinpaul » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:00 PM UTC

https://status.im/ is doing something interesting in this space too.

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

#64

Post by shea256 » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:01 PM UTC

In my view a big way to fix these problems is to allow for multiple clients to compete on the same underlying social network protocols. Semi-decentralized (federated) social networks like Mastodon have done great work here. Even better would be completely decentralized equivalents of Twitter, Facebook, etc. There are several impressive projects working on enabling these decentralized apps. One such project is IPFS. Another is one I'm working on called Blockstack.

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

#65

Post by bogomipz » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

bhhaskin wrote: post #20

I think the solution is pretty simple. Keep building things. Make person websites and build communities. Don't host everything on major hosting providers like Google or Amazon. Don't rely on Facebook or Google for login or integrations. They only have so much power because we let them. It's more often than not the easier solution. Use tools like GPG, IRC, Email and encourage your friends and family to do the same. Th…

>"Don't rely on Facebook or Google for login or integrations."

I think this is a really important point. When I see services that give me a choice of either 1)logging in with Google or 2) logging in with FB, I don't do either. I simply elect to not use that service.

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

#66

Post by slyzmud » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

I think there is something even worse than walled gardens and those are the closed platforms apple, Google and Amazon are creating.

One thing is creating websites where they control the content users can see. But the web is still "open", even if facebook bans my content I can still create another website and share it with everybody (probably nobody will ever see it, but that's another problem). The real problem is the new tendency of app stores (Apple Store, Google play, Alexa skills...) If Google/Facebook/Amazon decide to block my content, I have no way to reach other users.

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

#67

Post by grizzles » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:05 PM UTC

The UI bit is really important. To do it well would be to make a pixel perfect open source clone of Facebook that works over a distributed protocol like scuttlebot. theacebook.org is the closest ui attempt that I've seen.

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

#68

Post by haburka » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:05 PM UTC

bhhaskin wrote: post #20

I think the solution is pretty simple. Keep building things. Make person websites and build communities. Don't host everything on major hosting providers like Google or Amazon. Don't rely on Facebook or Google for login or integrations. They only have so much power because we let them. It's more often than not the easier solution. Use tools like GPG, IRC, Email and encourage your friends and family to do the same. Th…

What's wrong with hosting on Google/Amazon? I understand that there is a paranoia of them taking control of your servers or stealing all of your data, but that is almost certainly not going to happen. I think the real issue is that they're monopolizing services that non developers use.

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

#69

Post by aanm1988 » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:08 PM UTC

I honestly think it's already too late. A bunch of tech people complaining isn't going to do anything against dominant companies worth hundreds of billions each.

The solution is probably to actually get the government to view things like Google's near monopoly on search as harmful, even if they aren't actually being explicitly harmful to consumers.

Behaviour like AMP eliminating URLs in favour of showing google, internet.org, pushing chrome via their other offerings, etc... is pretty questionable IMO.

The other problem is that people don't want to leave facebook. They are perfectly happy scrolling through their feed and just reading whatever pops up.

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

#70

Post by SeaDude » Thu, Jun 08, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

Have you ever warwalked or wardrove your neighborhood? What is the # of AP's / mile? Think of all that NAT not being used.

Where are the specs for the Outernet Protocol: a NAT to NAT DNS system that doesnt rely on gatekeepers/ISP access. Use the 198.162.xxx.xxx addresses on all of our existing routers for neighborhood scale networking. Build trust by proximity by allowing only known neighbors to connect. Could be very interesting. Especially when Joe mirrors Wikipedia and Samantha mirrors Archive.org and Jan has a realtime mirror of some good Reddit feeds.

Automate the mirroring the internet. Scrape every last bit, in real time, without the ads and crap. Make it available to those trusted folks in your proximity.