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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#71

Post by egypturnash »

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…

Wordpress has this. There’s a “Reader” tab in the official Wordpress app and a web page on Wordpress.com that does the same thing.

They don’t promote it. But it’s there.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#72

Post by amerkhalid »

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.

Same here. I am continuously searching for such solution.

Previously, I used self-hosted WordPress blog for sharing photos, password protection was great but got tired of administering stuff. Also I wanted to backup my photos on VPS, so I was uploading full-resolution photos which of course, was not very price efficient for backup.

Then I switched to SmugMug with unlimited space. This was great because I can upload photos directly from Lightroom Classic 6.0. Photos stay synced. And easy automatic backup but photos are slightly compressed when you upload via LR plugin.

Now I have "upgraded" to Lightroom CC, it comes with 1TB of storage. Your photos/videos are available on laptop, phone, and web. It comes with Adobe Portfolio which you can use to share. You can share privately too but I haven't tested that.

However, it is not a true backup service, if you accidentally delete a photo on phone, it is gone everywhere. And there is no recycle bin. So I keep local copies and run a cron job to copy them to NAS.

So this is not a self-hosted decentralized solution but it seems to be best option so far.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#73

Post by UncleEntity »

Why go back to the aughts when you can have a federated, distributed, blockchain based social platform?

Think I missed some buzzwords but you get the idea.

The main thing you need IMHO is discoverability -- finding the people you used to hang out with in college 20+ years ago is something fb is pretty good at. Probably even better these days, dunno, haven't logged in since '13 my friend told me a few years ago.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#74

Post by mxuribe »

bwb wrote: post #53
mxuribe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally agree, I just don't want people to think it is going back to what it was in the late 90s and getting trapped thinking that was some type of golden age. Going forward there is tremendous opportunity to do new things that give people the ability to express themselves online.

Yep, understood.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#76

Post by mxuribe »

UncleEntity wrote: post #73

Why go back to the aughts when you can have a federated, distributed, blockchain based social platform? Think I missed some buzzwords but you get the idea. The main thing you need IMHO is discoverability -- finding the people you used to hang out with in college 20+ years ago is something fb is pretty good at. Probably even better these days, dunno, haven't logged in since '13 my friend told me a few years ago.

Now that google has killed off their G+ social network, maybe they can focus on adding value by being the "discovery engine" for the fediverse. I mean, their original product was their search engine, so connecting disparate data silos is something that they're good at. It worked for website discovery all these years, why not for federated/distributed points of online presence? Mind you, it need not only be google, but can also be bing, or duckduckGo, etc.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#78

Post by snackematician »

saucoide wrote: post #43
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…

When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple

Maybe more of an email list than an RSS feed then? You can control who is a member of the list to receive content. It would be cool if social media could be done through email, sort of like Usenet.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#79

Post by otachack »

pmlnr wrote: post #15

Homepage. It's your home on the internet. It's good for you. Things to get started with: - https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages - http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well - https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m - https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near on…

This is great, thanks. Also have the below:

- https://gohugo.io/ Static site generator written with Go-lang - https://jekyllrb.com/ static site generator written with Ruby

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#80

Post by startupdiscuss »

ip26 wrote: post #60
saucoide wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple

The magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery. I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.

Is there discovery on Facebook?

Most people I add because I meet them in read life. Actually, 100% of the people I add on FB after I've met them in real life.

Maybe if there was a good search and easy add mechanism for people I've met, it would fulfill the discovery aspect. I agree with you, it does feel easier to find people on FB.

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