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We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

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Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#81

Post by godelski »

slim wrote: post #56
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…

Nationalise Social Networks

More "Facebook is not currently in a competitive market. Don't treat it like it is. When it goes back to a competitive market, treat it as such."

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#82

Post by watwut »

wmeredith wrote: post #51
blatherard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fact that exchanging a phone number or email is more formal is a feature, not a bug. Very few people's Facebook "friends" are actually so. That's why it's an annoying time sync.

They are not friends, but when you post "I am looking for a job" they will still respond if they know about one. They will also respond if you post "I am going to Barcelona for weekend anybody there"? Or sometimes they post invitation to interesting activity and you have general idea what is going on with their lives if you accidentally meet them.

Things like that.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#83

Post by anigbrowl »

X86BSD wrote: post #21
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…

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

It's more like Twitter than FB, and it works, but it has some problems. You can't stop someone from impersonating you unless you run your own instance (fine for tech people, useless for the average user), and while the feature is good there's no way to get list of trending hashtags, so finding people/topics is a pain.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#84

Post by anigbrowl »

ams6110 wrote: post #63
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).…

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

Yes, it's just a twitter clone where people 'toot' instead of 'tweet'. It's fine work but they don't seem to have any idea how to make it desirable for people to use.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#85

Post by crdoconnor »

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…

>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.

^^ Just world fallacy

In reality, the DoJ deal with Microsoft is probably partly what led to the second internet startup renaissance. MS were still bullies and they still inhibited innovation by squashing smaller competitors but it would have been a whole lot worse if Microsoft were not defanged by that deal.

Unfortunately anti-trust enforcement seems to have gone out of vogue these days (starting with Bush, but Obama was worse than useless in that respect as well).

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#87

Post by SyneRyder »

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

> It's considered retro and hip to just schedule social time and disconnect completely

2 years off Facebook here, and while I didn't do it to be hip or retro, once I quit I started to rediscover... snail mail. I've kept in touch with some of my Facebook friends who are far away via handwritten letters, and gifts. It's been awesome to get unexpected parcels in the mail full of random items & gifts, candy & CDs (!) from overseas etc, usually with stories behind why the items were chosen. We could have done that while still on Facebook too, of course, but there wasn't the impetus to do so.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#88

Post by simplehuman »

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.

cloudron.io is tackling this very problem. sandstorm was trying to solve this as well but the project is not active anymore.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#89

Post by anigbrowl »

watwut wrote: post #80
sr2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? Twitter is in no way essential.

It's not, but it's clearly highly useful and is the incumbent in the short public messaging market.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#90

Post by Eerie »

danellis wrote: post #73
Eerie wrote: post #31

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!

Why is keeping in touch with friends in one place online wasting time?

Facebook is not about keeping in touch with friends, it is about selling your views to advertisers by maximizing the time you spend on the site.

To keep in touch with friends you should use a fucking mail list.

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