111–120 of 171 posts
To me, the alternative to Facebook has been around for a long time: email. The people I keep in touch with online all have email accounts. Sending email to one, a few, or all of them is easy.
Usenet was imperfect but great in many respects. I harbor a lot of resentment towards the people who wrecked it.
Google tried and failed. There are alternatives in other countries.. V Kontakte and odnoklassniki for Russia, WeChat and Qzone for China, though other countries other than those two are using what Americans use. There are a few other things like Snapchat and Kik that teenagers are using. Basically, if you think about the time you were a teenager: your parents are old. If they are using Facebook, than Facebook must no…
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…
Which reminds me. Why are all these decentralised/federated services focusing so much on trying to replace Twitter?
I mean, maybe it's a silly question, but replacing Facebook, Instagram, Reddit or any other number of services would be just as valid a goal. Why is every one of these systems seemingly going for the microblogging market in particular?
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.
Moderation ends up becoming an awkward balancing act between not completely restricting freedom of speech and stopping trolls/bullies flaming the hell out of anyone they disagree with while simultaneous trying to make it scale. Which is perhaps even harder than determining between what's free speech and what's a threat/harassment.
If someone can come up with a social network that doesn't discriminate between people from different backgrounds/with different political stances while filtering out actual trolls and which manages to do this on a large scale without a huge team of human moderators, then they'll likely pose a massive threat to the existing sites in the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Seems contextual whether that's good or bad: one theory of sleep is that we lose consciousness so that we don't go out and get ourselves killed in low visibility conditions.
It's like saying 'why worry about these problems, just don't don't use the the internet at all.' I still like paper books and other things and usually spend a day a week off the internet but that doesn't help anyone who's trying to solve an internet problem, does it?
There's lots of alternatives to Facebook. Facebook is for people who don't care about alternatives.
No it isn't. I've had accounts on numerous alternative social networks and none of them are much good as general platforms because there aren't enough other people using them, or using them often enough. Stop pretending network effects don't exist or that your social media usage habits must be true for everyone else.
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…
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.
Looks pretty active.