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We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

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Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#61

Post by adventured »

godelski wrote: post #47

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 monopo…

The big reason many other networks failed, is because no one else was on them? Prove that as the cause, as opposed to them sucking as the reason. MySpace & Friendster were already very substantial when Facebook came along and destroyed them, because they were horrible services.

The better question is, why would you need or want to regulate it as a natural monopoly? Specifically: to accomplish what?

Let me give you some examples.

1) To force FB to open up, allowing other social networks to openly ride on its network / social data (the broadband one pipe lots of delivery companies premise). Ok, now you're begging for a radical increase in abuse of personal data. And you're going to need some new (or expanded existing) bureaucracy agency to manage it all, which will open up new government abuses without a doubt (happens every time; and said agency will radically slow down innovation, which also happens every single time). Some obnoxious SNEA - Social Network Enforcement Agency - will get created, and that'll be the end of any innovation in social media; if you give the Feds an inch of new power, they'll take a thousand miles.

Besides, you can already replicate your social network onto other platforms by allowing FB apps to access your list of friends. Most people don't care because there simply are not that many highly compelling social concepts to explore that are worth the effort to maintain/use. There will never be large numbers of compelling social offerings; there inherently can't be as people have finite time, the hurdle to acquire it is very high. It's work/effort to maintain these networks for the end user, they do not want to have to upkeep it all.

2) To enforce higher standards on privacy. Well, we can already pass legislation to do that comprehensively across all media platforms, if it makes sense. It'd be ridiculous to regulate one platform for that purpose.

3) To limit various corporate abuses by FB (Instagram/Snapchat, ala Internet Explorer/Netscape). Well, we already have anti-trust laws for that and thousands of other laws & regulations and numerous giant three letter enforcement agencies.

Meanwhile, while the argument is being made for regulating Facebook as a natural monopoly, the next technology paradigm is being born somewhere to make them far less relevant. That process has been repeating itself for 60 years or so now, requiring very little actual regulation by the government.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#62

Post by digi_owl »

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…

Except that gmail is an ever bigger influence on email...

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#63

Post by ams6110 »

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).…

The name Mastodon is bad. Doesn't say anything about what the site does. Compare Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat....

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#64

Post by digi_owl »

adventured wrote: post #61
godelski wrote: post #47

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 monopo…

The big reason many other networks failed, is because no one else was on them? Prove that as the cause, as opposed to them sucking as the reason. MySpace & Friendster were already very substantial when Facebook came along and destroyed them, because they were horrible services. The better question is, why would you need or want to regulate it as a natural monopoly? Specifically: to accomplish what? Let me give you so…

May also be a generational thing.

Facebook is pretty much where myspace was back in the day on the "hype cycle", where every aunt tillie and whatsnot is on there. Thus you see fewer and fewer young people being active on there, because they used to see Facebook as somewhere they could talk among themselves without parents and whatsnot peeking.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#65

Post by Chathamization »

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).…

> 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).

Google hasn't had a great track record with these things in general. The problem with a lot of Facebook alternatives is that they make a somewhat better Facebook and then hope everyone will switch over. Of course that's going to fail. Sites that succeed have reasons for people to use them even if there aren't mass migrations.

We know that people have a need for social sites other than Facebook. Slack's been successful, so has Discourse. Heck, meetup.com is still going even though by a naive understanding of things Facebook should have subsumed it (it has a much smaller base, and you need to pay something like $140 a year if you want to start a group). A Facebook alternative will eventually catch on, but it's not going to be a site that starts out by trying to mimic Facebook with a few extra bells and whistles attached.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#66

Post by danellis »

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 sometimes consider it, but I would miss keeping in touch with friends from around the world and, truthfully, I'm not good at keeping in touch with people by email. Facebook lets me drop in for a few minutes at a time and see what people are up to.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#67

Post by anigbrowl »

wmeredith wrote: post #50
skybrian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you miss out on the social discovery aspect which is a key part of social networking. You're just avoiding the problem of where to go by cutting off your own legs.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#68

Post by evdev »

From my perspective, problems with facebook:

1) Anti-privacy, megalomaniacal nature of network.

2) Social cost of having removed the normal ways we moderate each other's behavior. E.g. when someone is a narcissistic bore, you talk to them less and less at the barbecues and eventually events start happening they're not invited to. Facebook takes the people most willing to ignore social boundaries and customs and puts them center stage.

3) Opportunity costs of not having mechanisms to form more naturally-moderated social groups, but with a wider pool of potential people than are in your physical social graph. This has always been the dream of the social internet.

4) "Fake news", specifically the moral hazard of providing an environment that plays to the "worst" tendencies of media consumption. This is obviously dependent on our values, and how patronizing we're willing to be. But the hazard is a real issue especially when your network attracts people under one pretense--hang out with your friends/kids/grandkids--and then has this non-advertised effect of sticking you in a media echo chamber. This unlike when people choose to go out and fight their echo chamber in a way that's fairly important.

5) Like 3) but now for "good" media consumption, or a Healthy Democratic Civil Discourse, or whatever. I'm glib because this is on the razor's edge of smuggling in whatever values we daydream about imposing on the world.

A lot of us can come up with the David-and-Goliath dream of a distributed network, but I think it's interesting that this is probably neutral-at-best for 4), which is the issue du jour. One could easily see things getting worse and articles being published with the thesis that people need to be de-balkanized for the sake of civic discourse.

Also, the REAL contrarian take here is that things are close to optimal. People are succeeding at 3) and by extension 2), just in niche special interest groups that aren't salient to us in the steady state. The "problem" is that many of us lack the conviction or self-direction to quit media behaviors we don't like. Meanwhile 4) and 5) are really about the bankruptcy of modern ideologies, etc. etc.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#69

Post by piaste »

digi_owl wrote: post #62
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…

Except that gmail is an ever bigger influence on email...

How do you mean? Whatever EEE-type strategy they may be pursuing, you can still switch from GMail to another provider and keep corresponding with the same email users without any effort. This is not true for modern social media.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#70

Post by codingdave »

blatherard wrote: post #42
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 le…

I have had similar experiences, more than once, but it wasn't awkward. Most of the time, people just say OK, and go on with their life. A couple times, we talked about it, and they commented that they wouldn't be able to get in touch with me again. We talked about whether being connected on Facebook vs. never talking again really would amount to much of a difference in the long run, and agreed that it really would not.

At the end of the day, a Facebook connection from someone that you otherwise don't communicate with, or run into in the real world isn't important. So those conversations are only awkward if you make them so.

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