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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#61

Post by aklemm »

mxuribe wrote: post #45
bwb wrote: post #36

This is so crazy, I love the idea but the world isn't going back to how it was in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I've been in web hosting for a long time and I love the idea of everyone creating their own little website. The truth is people don't have the skills or care enough to do something like that, FB, Quora, Twitter, all these services that are walled gardens work because they make it EASY to share/create and CO…

I agree with your comments except for (respectfully) the part about: "We need to just accept the new world..." I firmly think this all represents opportunity. Opportunity for technologists to develop open platforms that are NOT cumbersome to setup nor to host by the layperson, and that - at least over some time - are extremely inexpensive. Maybe i'm an optimist, but i firmly believe there will be an open platform - o…

My sentiments exactly. Well-said. I've experimented with distributed/decentralized social tools as they've come along since back to 2005 or so and even tried my hand at making "easy" interfaces to them. So far, it's all exciting but nothing has stuck in a way that looked mainstream to me. Nonetheless, I still have a lot of energy for it because I think something will come together.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#62

Post by aheckler »

jdhawk wrote: post #13
cpach wrote: post #4

I like this idea. Actually, earlier today I set up a private Wordpress site that I will use to share photos of my kids to my family and relatives. One reason I wanted to this is that my dad doesn’t use Facebook. I could have chosen iCloud, but I prefer to use something that I control myself and is not tied to certain hardware. The site is hosted on a VPS on Digitalocean which is very convenient and the price is reaso…

I've been looking for a solution to this for a while. How can I let my friends and family stay connected with photos videos & related metadata, but retain security and ownership? I thought NextCloud might be a good solution, but I'm still searching.

One of my coworkers wrote a blog post on how he used WordPress to do this:

https://chrishardie.com/2017/03/wordpress-private-website/

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#63

Post by MentallyRetired »

jasode wrote: post #11

>most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online. Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc). Recommending "personal websites" is talki…

Maybe we need some kind of open specification for "the living web" so companies like tripod/angelfire can support the spec.

Maybe where you would sign into your own site and it would have polled posts from all the sites you follow (probably with rss) into a single feed. Your site IP is your identity, so commenting etc would be done as your site e.g., `MentallyRetired.com says: Hey these are cool!`

I dont know, just shooting from the hip, but it seems a lot of these technologies are possible. I remember signing into places with my website.

But it needs to be EASY. As easy as Facebook. And backwards compatible to avoid breakage.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#65

Post by josefresco »

andai wrote: post #58
josefresco wrote: post #39

This conversation always devolves, or evolves into a discussion about RSS. I actually think there's an opportunity for the "website builders" namely WordPress, to create "consumer" app(s) that pull in feeds from WordPress powered blogs (with RSS) This consumer / consumption app would compete with Facebook/Twitter directly. WordPress powers a significant % of the web and combined with the market share of some of the o…

I love this idea. Although I think the fastest way to bootstrap that, ironically, would be to make it heavily dependent on Facebook: 1. login with Facebook (no signup needed) 2. share articles & post comments on Facebook 3. model the app after Facebook to hijack existing neural pathways

I hope you're kidding about 1 and 2 (although 3 kind of makes sense).

I'm not sure how they should handle authentication, or if it's even needed at all. Kids don't use email, and in order to differentiate from FB/TW, the less info you ask for on signup the better.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#66

Post by bluGill »

wmnwmn wrote: post #49

So, the driving force behind facebook is the newsfeed, which enables people to see everyone's updates without going one by one to each page. It's going to be hard to replicate this with personal sites, but maybe we don't want to anymore, now that we see the downsides of the addictive feed. Perhaps a person whose page you would not specifically visit once in a while, is a person who you aren't really friends with. But…

Things are more complex though. There are people I'm friends with on facebook that I wouldn't visit their web site. However facebook figures out when they have a kid, die, or otherwise some important event happens that I care about and makes sure I know about them. I care much more about random life events in my brother's life and so I see more of them (but I'd visit his web site) That is a valuable service that facebook has figured out.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#67

Post by ulfw »

bwb wrote: post #36

This is so crazy, I love the idea but the world isn't going back to how it was in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I've been in web hosting for a long time and I love the idea of everyone creating their own little website. The truth is people don't have the skills or care enough to do something like that, FB, Quora, Twitter, all these services that are walled gardens work because they make it EASY to share/create and CO…

This is basically what myspace used to be. People decided the well organised, in seperate data-pieces and better presented Facebook way was the preference. How little did they know that well organised data can lead to where we are now...

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#68

Post by pipnasti »

rock_hard wrote: post #44
jasode wrote: post #11

>most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online. Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc). Recommending "personal websites" is talki…

Can you back that claim about the majority of Facebook users not producing content with data please EDIT: Specifing the claim

I think it would be helpful to specify which claims need data.

> Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have.

I thinks this is mostly a valid argument. The burden of proof for whether the problem exists is on the person proposing the solution; Solutions require action, and the side that requires action needs proof.

I do think the claim that “most people use facebook like an rss feed” needs some data to back it up though. I personally use it that way, but that is andecdotal and I also have many friends who use facebook to promote their life, which is more along the lines of a personal website.

EDIT: Spelling

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#69

Post by veddox »

jf- wrote: post #28

We should replace facebook with a version of facebook where you get control over all your data in exchange for a subscription. Meaning that nobody, app developers or advertisers alike, gets access unless explicitly allowed, there's no tracking, and you can actually permanently delete things. The free tier would be as it is now.

Unfortunately, I suspect that FB makes a whole lot more money offering a free service than they ever would with a subscription model. And though I very much like the idea: if you look at email, you see how few people are actually prepared to pay for an online service...

(Email has the added advantage of being a public standard that anyone can implement - free or charged. Social media has no such universally accepted standard.)

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#70

Post by Juliate »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #32
debacle wrote: post #19

A rough timeline of the early 2000s: 1. Google creates the first noteworthy current gen search engine. 2. The web slowly starts moving towards a semantic platform with separate presentation. 3. Google creates the world's largest ad platform. 4. The semantic web inexplicably dies (see 3). 5. The web painfully and lossily becomes a series of dense monolithic networks. 6. People realize this might be a bad thing.

> 6. People realize this might be a bad thing. 6. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users are fine with it. Good or bad, monolithic networks save a lot of ordinary users the pain of having to learn. The reason they might not want to learn varies greatly, but I'll go out on a limb and say it's related to a lack of time and basic backgrounding, in equal measure. It's not always only abo…

> 6. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users are fine with it.

Right. Tell that to the people that slowly come to the realization that their politic decisions and destiny have been heavily influenced through tools that built on and benefited from this very centralization.

They are (and will be) very fine with it.

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