Towards a world without Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#71

Post by giancarlostoro » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

I think the way forward is to embrace ActivityPub and similar endeavours. I'm not sure how much of Diaspora wound up on ActivityPub[0] / ActivitySteams[1] but I feel as though the best path forward for projects like Diaspora is to reach out to W3C to see what could be standardized.

ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it was called) and similar open sourced twitter-like platforms, it doesn't necessarily mean we should be restricted to "micro" blogging by those platforms (besides, sharing pictures, and such is somewhat still valid "micro" blogging just look at Tumblr). If the limits are too much you could still at the very least send over a summary between hubs and if the person wants more info they can visit the originating site for the whole post.

I think the path forward is to use open and standardized formats / protocols. We have the technology... There's a couple of implementations for ActivityPub/ActivityStreams already[2], you could either join one and contribute or just start one yourself if none are in the language / license you prefer.

[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

[2]: https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implement...

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#72

Post by tsunamifury » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

bognition wrote: post #53

dasil003 wrote: post #43

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 eng…

> You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.

Both raised millions before being acquired, and likely would need to raise 100s of millions to start today. Facebooks has reached both network effect and economy of scale which is very hard to unseat.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#73

Post by Yoric » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

dralley wrote: post #57

sweeds wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a complete bastardization of the concept of "trust" as applies to distributed systems. You're not 'trusting' a single entity in that case because you're making literally all the information public for anyone to see, use, resell, etc. That's like saying we shouldn't have to trust Equifax, let's just make everyone's name, address, SSN, and credit history public on the internet to begin with.

There are plenty of distributed file systems that securely store confidential data on untrusted nodes by having well-design encryption. Is there a reason for which it would be worse with blockchains?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#74

Post by Yoric » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

sharpercoder wrote: post #54

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…

simpler is not directly needed, as Facebook already reaches the minimum viable simplicity for many functionalities. More compelling certainly would help. The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.

Which means that it could work on specific communities, right? Just as Facebook started from a single community.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#75

Post by danbruc » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

Tempest1981 wrote: post #65

danbruc wrote: post #51

Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price of all the things they buy. That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there w…

> if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze ... behavior. Couldn't they make even more profit by doing both? If they find the optimal balance? I pay for cable TV, and still see lots of ads, so I guess I'm cynical.

I thought about including this but decided against it. They could of course but I hope people would stay away from such an service. It is really sad that businesses are generally focused on maximizing their profits instead of providing the best service to their customers while making a reasonable profit. Economics 101 promised that competition would take care of that but that obviously has a few failure modes.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#76

Post by diogenescynic » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

Facebook badly needs a direct competitor. I wish there was social network with fewer features available, like what Facebook was in 2006-2007. Get rid of the newsfeed—it’s toxic and that’s the worst part of the experience. Make sharing related to specific groups— college friends, family, work friends, etc. I would prefer a social network with fewer features.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#77

Post by gbajson » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

eyeareque wrote: post #9

After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave. Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.

In my case there it's not a problem with a good friends, but that I will lose access to some interesting people, who publish/discuss interesting topics on FB.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#78

Post by Alex3917 » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #70

Alex3917 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whomever would run the database? No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. The reason is that having multiple entities each pursuing their own agenda makes it less likely that everyone will collude and run off with the money. It doesn't especially matter…

> No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. I'm curious, is that a law? From which country?

It's a U.S. law, not sure about other countries.

I believe it's the Bank Holding Company Act:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/bcreg20080922b1.pdf

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#79

Post by TaylorAlexander » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

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…

Facebook is the new AOL. It’s got everything old people need to be happy on the internet. It’s even the color blue!

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#80

Post by lumberjack » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 6:00 PM UTC

What happened to the Freedom Box? I think that is the only promising solution to online data tracking. Most problems could be solved if everyone had a small personal server so that developers could deploy online applications that store the data locally.