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Towards a world without Facebook

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Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#41

Post by JKCalhoun »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #32

"wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve" I'm probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is exactly DRM for the individual. I don't want anything with DRM and I don't want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

> I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

It seems pretty simple to me. People oppose DRM because it is content they paid for and disallows their modifying, repurposing it, etc.

None of those things apply to content I have created. I have the original, non-DRM'ed content that is always editable, I am the owner fo the content....

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#42

Post by gerbilly »

cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

>"The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet"

I don't think people actually want the Internet, they want a walled garden.

Facebook is the new Compuserve, or AOL.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#43

Post by dasil003 »

The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them.

The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current cultural standard for ethics.

Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations, having come out of academia with their "don't be evil" slogan, but inevitably all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are relying on VC funding.

I'd love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#44

Post by Invictus0 »

I'm unconvinced that the US population cares enough about its data to get rid of Facebook anytime soon. The media goes berserk with every new breach, but even the Equifax debacle barely registered in the minds of most Americans. I don't see Cambridge Analytica as a tipping point, because most people are oblivious to the fact that people are deleting their accounts in the first place. Their infinite newsfeeds will be just as full of crap as ever.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#45

Post by egypturnash »

alkonaut wrote: post #29
beamatronic wrote: post #21

How about moving away from free services and demanding security, privacy, and customer support. Change our attitudes so we are not willing to be the product any more.

So basically we pay $1 a year instead of giving facebook all our our information? That might sound reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since 2008.

I run a Mastodon instance and I’ve had a few users ask me when I’m setting up a Patreon to help cover my costs because they want to start paying for it. YMMV.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#46

Post by jjguy »

For those of you who read this article and believe there may be a thread of a good idea within, go read Neuromancer.

Gibson had a vision of an Internet with decentralized social media, including decentralized code execution, 35 years ago, and we have not yet realized it - or anything remotely close.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#47

Post by tammer »

The blockchain is a potential solution. But deep down I have high expectations for IPFS — I think a workable, usable alternative for Facebook there could be the beginning of a real movement towards a decentralized Internet.

Also, for anyone in this space: the Facebook killer app is Events. I can share photos & statuses in myriad ways, but I truly only have one way to access a complete events calendar for my city, organizations & social groups.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#48

Post by alkonaut »

egypturnash wrote: post #45
alkonaut wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically we pay $1 a year instead of giving facebook all our our information? That might sound reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since 2008.

I run a Mastodon instance and I’ve had a few users ask me when I’m setting up a Patreon to help cover my costs because they want to start paying for it. YMMV.

Those users are mastodon users? Then they aren’t in the category I mean. I mean the 90% of Facebook users who will not have heard about #deletefacebook when it’s over for this time. And all those people are the reason I use Facebook.

That’s the key to this problem:

- making the product isn’t the problem. Technically it’s been done (e.g diaspora)

- attracting integrity-conscious users isn’t the problem. But they won’t drag the rest along easily.

How to attract a billion Facebook users that won’t even hear about the alternative?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#49

Post by tlb »

sweeds wrote: post #40
tlb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

The one main advantage that I'm aware of is that a distributed, decentralized database for a social network would mean that there is no one private company that gatekeeps, owns, and sells the personal data within. For all intents and purposes, Facebook's database is closed source. The community doesn't know exactly what this private company does with this data. We have to trust them with it. A blockchain database is…

It's not actually trustless, though. It's just less clear whom you're trusting.

With Bitcoin, the people you're trusting are miners, and they are highly incentivized to preserve the correct functioning of the system because they get paid in bitcoin and they want it to stay valuable.

With a federated social network blockchain, there'd have to be an incentive to preserve privacy greater than the incentive to do any other bad thing like manipulating elections.

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