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We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

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Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#91

Post by jansho »

inimino wrote: post #38
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #12

Every 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.

Most people who say "We need to.." are also users who are very well aware of the problem, but may not be able to solve it themselves, or don't know what the solution looks like, or like a PG essay just inviting action.

But by collectively trying to identify the nitty gritty details of the problem, hopefully that will prepare the spec for engineers and makers to build from. So yes, we need to listen!

Edit: Just realised that previous reference to PG was a bit too casual so have adjusted

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#92

Post by crdoconnor »

tdb7893 wrote: post #49
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

>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.

We need a well designed pretty home server that's as easy to set up and use as a smartphone. That's all, really.

The killer app would be ultra fast backup from your phone and laptop over a local network that subsequently drips over the internet (encrypted) to a friend or family member's home server.

Then, just put an app store on top. An ecosystem around that would spring up with all sorts of stuff that would sometimes be worse and sometimes be way, way, better than the centralized web. Any facebook equivalent would probably be way better.

I kind of wish this was what Mozilla was getting in on - it's way more disruptive than building Yet Another Smartphone/Desktop OS.

Most of the software to do all of this is actually already there, it just a matter of putting it together in an easy to use way and putting some lipgloss and snazzy marketing on it (not necessarily an easy task but very doable all the same).

It's worth remembering that smartphones were pretty uncool, nerdy and uninteresting to 'normal' people in 2006.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#93

Post by mseebach »

intopieces wrote: post #23
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #12

Every 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'…

"Need," in the "greater good for society" sense, is often disconnected from profitability. Shut up and build it? There have been several attempts at undercutting Facebook in the last decade and they failed. Their failure is not evidence of Facebook's divinity, of a mandate to rule all social networks. To assert as much is to claim that consumers are rational actors through and through, which is not true.

The road to hell is littered with "solutions" "for the greater good" foisted upon a population that did not actually want it.

Facebook is popular by and large because the people that use Facebook like Facebook.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#94

Post by WCityMike »

My perfect Facebook would be crosspollinating Facebook and the structure of a RSS reader. I want to be able to skim through EVERY update on EVERY page and person I follow, star/flag the ones I'm interested in, and then read the ones I'm interested in. Because of its popularity, Facebook has all the content I'm interested in within its walled garden -- but its browsing experience sucks. IMO.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#95

Post by anigbrowl »

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 did that for 5 years but I ended up being really lonely because it's hard to find people with similar interests and tastes.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#97

Post by anigbrowl »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #12

Every 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'…

What an immature and offensive attitude. People are trying to express their demand and invest some imaginative effort in describing the sort of service they'd like - not least because they may not know how to go about building such a thing - and you're coming along saying 'supply your own demand or STFU.' Maybe you should take your own advice.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#98

Post by skewart »

marmaduke wrote: post #72
Sir_Substance wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of email headers you could backwards shoe-horn into serving the purpose of allowing clients to recognize the difference between a life update and a traditional mail, or you could create a new one. You could then make it standard behavior to handle emails with that header via a social client if one is available, and otherwise discard/hide them.

my question is, how to keep a standard email from being completely overwhelmed by traffic of the social network, assuming it isn't aware of the headers? Or, you'd just have to tell users to set up a suitable filter? I think we already see some of these things to some extent like Github pull requests having a lot of usability via email.

I'm assuming that people participating in this network are all using a new kind of email client designed to work with these feeds.

On the receiver or "follower" side of things the client would filter emails coming from addresses you follow into a separate social feed box. All your other emails (e.g. from other random people, or the notification that the shoes you just bought online have been shipped) would be displayed in your standard, traditional inbox. Your list of actual, non-social-update emails would never be polluted by all the noise from your social update feed.

On the sender or "poster" side of things when you post something it would just send emails to your list of followers. Presumably all these people are using clients that are designed to filter the emails into either the social feed or the standard inbox. So you'd never end up spamming people with photos of your lunch on a Greek island with people who haven't signed up to see it.

Of course, it could get tricky if, say, alice@example.com is following bob@example.com and bob wants to send alice a plain old email that isn't part of his social feed. Using headers, as suggested above, could be great. Or maybe the social feed would be set up as a mailing list, and posts would go through a reflector address. Or else, maybe people would just set up a new email address from which to send posts to their network?

Or, maybe I'm misunderstanding your question?

I dunno. I haven't thought through everything, but I'm pretty confident that existing email infrastructure has all the raw material you'd need to build a workable social network.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#99

Post by zeta0134 »

jstanley wrote: post #28
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 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 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--h…

I've been working with IPFS a lot more recently thanks to their efforts to snapshot Wikipedia to get around censorship in Turkey. This immediately made me realize the advantages of learning the system, and once you wrap your head around content-based addressing, everything makes sense after that.

https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/

I think the biggest thing they're going to struggle with for adoption is their addressing system, which is brilliant from a technology point of view, but impossible to memorize for regular humans. Some sort of naming system (or, ideally, several such systems) needs to emerge I think, before the network will be properly usable by casual folks.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#100

Post by dgudkov »

Many people miss the fact that Facebook as a product is not about the website and related services. It's your social connections that are the product for you (and for Facebook itself). The technology is just a wrapper and is secondary in this case. In order to create a viable alternative to Facebook one should find a way to create a new kind of social good attractive to many (which is much harder when Facebook already exists). So it's more about social good engineering rather than coding.
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