No, we don't need More Alternatives to Facebook. We need Less Alternatives to Facebook. That is, Zero Alternatives to Facebook AND Zero Facebook.
Stop wasting your time!
We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
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Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#32The alternative increasingly is to simple delete facebook and live a more offline life. Starting to see it become more and more trendy nowadays, especially among teenagers. It's considered retro and hip to just schedule social time and disconnect completely
I think that Facebook is going to be like drinking, some people refrain and claim to be the better for it, most people enjoy drinking in moderation and then there are the 10% who get hooked.
I don't use Facebook as it allegedly does not make people happy if they spend forever on it. I believe it is as bad for your brain as a high sugar diet, no good for concentration spans.
Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#33http://scuttlebot.io/ is a distributed log file meant to be an application platform. It has some nice design choices and is worth looking at in the context of making a new social network.
Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#34This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized services...) I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services. The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own service…
I've just started using mastodon.social as a replacement for FB and like it just fine. Give it a look.
Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that.
Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#35Every time I see a sentence that starts with "we need..." I automatically think "shut up and build it, or you're just complaining." If it's a real need, then building it is a good idea, and will probably make you money. But 99.9% of the time, it's just a turn of phrase way to bitch about the way the world and human kind actually works. Yeah, if we had another Facebook the world would be better. And if I had wheels I'…
Your comment presupposes market failures aren't a thing -- they are, ergo, your reasoning doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Further, even if that wasn't the case, advertising what's wrong with Facebook is a valid way to try and make competitors more viable: by writing critical articles, people without the technical skills to make a new Facebook change the market conditions, making it easier for a Facebook competitor to become viable. So they're doing exactly what you suggest -- using their labor to increase the chances of success for an alternative. Free markets at work!
tl;dr: Your suggestion is wrong if you either do or don't believe free markets are the solution.
Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#36This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized services...) I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services. The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own service…
>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). We already have a model for this: email. You and I can use w…
Email is insecure and was overwhelmed by spam, driving people to use systems (such as Gmail) that are good at filtering spam.
Any distributed system will need to figure out how to deal with spam and abuse. That's hard to do without there being a dedicated team to deal with flagged messages.
Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#37http://scuttlebot.io/ is a distributed log file meant to be an application platform. It has some nice design choices and is worth looking at in the context of making a new social network.
Didn't know about that. Thank you – it looks like a well-put together project
Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#38Every time I see a sentence that starts with "we need..." I automatically think "shut up and build it, or you're just complaining." If it's a real need, then building it is a good idea, and will probably make you money. But 99.9% of the time, it's just a turn of phrase way to bitch about the way the world and human kind actually works. Yeah, if we had another Facebook the world would be better. And if I had wheels I'…
This is one of the dumbest and most self-defeating ways engineers shoot down, and exclude themselves from, important discussions.
Sometimes social problems actually require society to talk about them rather than run off and build yet another product.
Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've just started using mastodon.social as a replacement for FB and like it just fine. Give it a look.
Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that.
You can always copy twitter but you can't get the traction. You think TV companies will advertise your network 24/7? If you think Twitter should be utility either govs have to force some standards to every social network or nationalize it.
The people in the offices are too dumb to even grasp what servers are, let alone distributed services or why would standards be beneficial for the society. Maybe next generation knows better if we by then are not under the iron rule of few SV companies.
Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
#40Every time I see a sentence that starts with "we need..." I automatically think "shut up and build it, or you're just complaining." If it's a real need, then building it is a good idea, and will probably make you money. But 99.9% of the time, it's just a turn of phrase way to bitch about the way the world and human kind actually works. Yeah, if we had another Facebook the world would be better. And if I had wheels I'…
I've actually spent quite a bit of time working on a design document for an open source version of the Facebook platform. I got a fair bit of the architecture and requirements down for what I believed would make the project successful. Then I came to the slow realization that the world had categorically no use for a Facebook alternative. The features of Facebook are largely meaningless. What matters is the absolute s…
I think there is space for an alternative - keep in mind that that doesn't mean that they have to be hugely popular.
For example, some online communities I am a part of subsist mainly in chat rooms, or forums. Those communities are so tightly knit in many ways. While a lot of us are also friends on FB, our ties in these communities are still very strong.