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We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

technologyreview.com

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Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#41

Post by angry-hacker »

djsumdog wrote: post #25
cJ0th wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There obviously are bad news that no one should consume (i.e. "fake news") but I'd argue there is no such thing as good news in the sense that every one should read them to become informed. To enable the public to make informed decisions every individual should come to face with a random selection of sources on a daily basis so that echo chambers get reduced and a problem-solving mentality can come into being. The pr…

I liked the old term for "fake news." Before 2016 we just called it "news." What seems like a free press in the US and the world is heavily controlled by less than a dozen conglomerates. They often game the system, mixing propaganda with news to create a narrative. Just look at all the pro-Monsanto comments on Hackernews and the recent court revelations that Monsanto had a big marketing program to post pro-company co…

HN has always been pro generit food, it's your bias talking. Just like someone who thinks 'this' site is too left or too right.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#42

Post by blatherard »

65827 wrote: post #8

The 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

Here's one bit of anecdata in response. I've tried to disconnect from social media and get out in the real world. I took an improv class in NYC with about 15 other people, a range of ages & backgrounds. On the last day of the class, a number of the students were asking around for Facebook profiles to keep in touch. When asked, I replied that I didn't have a Facebook account anymore and it was...awkward, to say the least. Like, giving someone an email or a phone number seems much more formal and/or like more of a commitment, I think. Anyway, I came out of it feeling a little disillusioned about the viability of an offline social life. Though this was a group of mid-20 to 40-something people, without the teens you mention.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#43

Post by Existenceblinks »

glenstein wrote: post #30
X86BSD wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just started using mastodon.social as a replacement for FB and like it just fine. Give it a look.

I think it's more of a replacement for twitter. And I am genuinely excited about Mastodon, with ~600k users and 1400 instances, I think something special is happening there. I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed).…

We need 1 instance for every individual, that's the problem. Non techies who already have privilege to access internet should be able to instantiate their own instances very easily.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#44

Post by skewart »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #24
kem wrote: post #13

This 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…

> We already have a model for this: email.

Come to think of it, you could build a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter clone on top of email pretty easily. All it would take is a slightly reimagined client. Just whitelist addresses of people you "follow" and display their emails in a separate, more visually rich feed (e.g. automatically downloading and displaying images). Make the UI/UX of "posting" an email to your feed feel more like composing a social media post (e.g. "post a photo" instead of "add an attachment"). You could have a separate inbox for emails from people you weren't following/connected to, which would be just a traditional email inbox.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#46

Post by glenstein »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #43
glenstein wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more of a replacement for twitter. And I am genuinely excited about Mastodon, with ~600k users and 1400 instances, I think something special is happening there. I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed).…

We need 1 instance for every individual, that's the problem. Non techies who already have privilege to access internet should be able to instantiate their own instances very easily.

I'm all for it if we can get there, but I think a wide range of individual, federated instances is a good step in that direction, and even that would be a huge achievement.

I think something like Opera Unite had the potential to be a single instance per person if that ever caught on.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#47

Post by godelski »

It seems to me that a social network is one of those natural monopolies. It works so well because so many people use it. Remember the big reason many social network alternatives failed, no one else was on them.

There are some things (very few in fact) that just work better as monopolies. But that just means you need to regulate it differently. And there's an interesting discussion, how best to regulate natural monopolies.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#48

Post by Existenceblinks »

65827 wrote: post #8

The 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 deactivated it for more than a year and don't even have time giving a shit to permanently delete it because IIRC there were no a dead simple way to do it currently.

I'm not sure where's life going but at least the old problem space has gone. New problem space more worth it.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#49

Post by tdb7893 »

kem wrote: post #13

This 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…

People here seem to always want their social media to be decentralized but I doubt that would happen unless you could convince the standard consumer that it's actually better, and I think that's a hard argument to make to them. When I talk to people about what their solution looks like it tends to sacrifice usability, which no consumer wants to sacrifice

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#50

Post by wmeredith »

skybrian wrote: post #36
Sir_Substance wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Eh, if you set up your social email client like Twitter, you only get messages from those people you follow. Done.
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