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We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

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Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#121

Post by type0 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #92
tdb7893 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

> We need a well designed pretty home server that's as easy to set up

What do you do about all those people whose ISPs don't allow them to run public facing server on residential connection?

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#122

Post by gvurrdon »

ams6110 wrote: post #45

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.

Email mostly works for me, particularly for friends and family. The problem is that many people prioritise Facebook over email and frequently forget to reply, or don't send email in the first place as they assume that everyone has seen their Facebook post. So, outside friends and family, not having a Facebook account tends to mean not getting information.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#123

Post by jancsika »

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

To be specific-- the current choice is between well-understood, scalable, battle-tested centralized designs and half-baked, work-in-progress, decentralized designs that don't work very well.

Example-- building a centralized Facebook replacement is doable. Some idealistic developer can sit down one summer, break the problem into little pieces and iterate on it. If enough other developers and investors get interested, they can throw money at it to make it scale and attract a non-trivial userbase.

Building a decentralized Facebook replacement is simply not doable. An idealistic developer can sit down one summer, break the problem into little pieces but not all of them have viable solutions. I.e., how do you do discoverability? And more importantly, how do you do discoverability in a way that justifies the expense of decentralizing-- e.g., how do I query an untrusted node and receive an answer without that node knowing what I was searching for? The only extant solution I've seen on that is from Gnunet. And it doesn't do stemming or partial matches, so it's quite brittle and untested.

I think it's important to keep reminding people to describe the current decentralization efforts as an open research problem. Otherwise people get it in their heads that decentralization always has a particular set of inescapable costs, and not all of them are inescapable.

Edit: clarification

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#124

Post by type0 »

CM30 wrote: post #113
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…

This might be why a federated system like Mastodon or GNU Social could win out over a fully decentralised one like torrents. Because for a lot of people, the individual services that act as network nodes could work like Facebook/Twitter does now whereas more technically advanced users could host their own nodes instead. Which reminds me. Why are all these decentralised/federated services focusing so much on trying to…

> Why is every one of these systems seemingly going for the microblogging market in particular?

Because OStatus is tailored for microblogging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#125

Post by type0 »

simplehuman wrote: post #88
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.

Cloudron is great but how do you get non-nerds over the fear of running VPS?

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#127

Post by ue_ »

jancsika wrote: post #123
tdb7893 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To be specific-- the current choice is between well-understood, scalable, battle-tested centralized designs and half-baked, work-in-progress, decentralized designs that don't work very well. Example-- building a centralized Facebook replacement is doable. Some idealistic developer can sit down one summer, break the problem into little pieces and iterate on it. If enough other developers and investors get interested,…

Mastodon, which is decentralised, looks like it's gaining traction, and I find it very easy to use.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#128

Post by davnicwil »

Shameless plug, but very relevant since it is literally built to be an alternative to the current mainstream social networks: I'm hacking on https://postbelt.com - a privacy-first, ad-free, text-only, discussion-focused social network.

Check it out if it sounds interesting :-)

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#130

Post by skewart »

zeta0134 wrote: post #101
marmaduke wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you keep rich messages from polluting the traditional inbox? I mean, I'd want to keep my existing address and use it as regular email, too

I think Facebook and Twitter work presicely because they take the free form content mode of an email (often a rich text document) and severely restrict it to a handful of more readily digestable options. On any of the platform, there's only so many ways you can format a post. Facebook for example lets you do plain text, dress it up a bit, or attach some piece of content with optional text (a photo, video, or site emb…

> Choice can be overwhelming, and for better or worse, the lack of freedom in Facebook's post editor makes it much easier for folks around the globe to pick up and use. Email won't ever have that, and that's okay!

I agree that restrictions are often liberating, and likely played a role in the success of the big social networks. But I disagree about email not being able to have the same kind of restrictions. It absolutely can. All you need is an email client that controls what you can put in the email body when you're composing an email. Most email clients allow pretty free-form messages - from plain text to hundreds of lines of HTML. But they don't _have_ to.

By the same token, there's nothing in HTTP or any other internet protocol that restricts the content of a Facebook post. Those limits are imposed by Facebook's clients (and presumably APIs).

Email has a widely understood delivery protocol and identities. That's really all you need to let people publish and subscribe to each other. The rest is just UI and marketing. (Which, of course, is no small feat!)

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