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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#81

Post by bilbo0s »

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…

>the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content...

And HN user "jsgo" wrote...

>If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche...

These are the sorts of common sense observations missing from so many "let's replace Facebook/Twitter/Whatever" debates. If we're serious about replacing FB/Snapchat/Twitter/Whatever then we need to consider realistic alternatives. Using the Mastodon-like distributed media and personal website ideas to get rid of Facebook/Twitter is like using the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front to get rid of the Romans. You just have to ignore a lot of reality to assume it would ever work.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#82

Post by malcolmgreaves »

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…

I feel that most people are stuck with Facebook because of messenger and events. Core FB functionality is still its social network and ease of interconnecting everyone's personal social graphs.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#83

Post by max76 »

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.

Maybe someone should create an RSS feed that curates other RSS feeds and forwards them to their recipients.

I'm not sure how to monetize this, but it would add some discovery to rss.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#84

Post by Kye »

egypturnash wrote: post #71
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.

The commercial WordPress product from the company behind the open source project has this. The open source project does not.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#85

Post by ip26 »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #80
ip26 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, discovery of news & sources. Your friends who know about are a great news source/filter. Whereas with RSS there's not a good method to find new news you care about.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#86

Post by saucoide »

snackematician wrote: post #78
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

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.

Yes, but ideally it would be 2-ways, and there is still the problem with discovery, more in general i just think there shouldn't be social media sites, "social media" should be a protocol

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#87

Post by coliveira »

The reason personal websites are not used anymore is that there is no traffic. The big advantage of posting on FB is that everyone is going to the same site and you know the people who are subscribed to your posts. Individual websites have the problem of discoverability. Google solved part of that problem with its search engine, but FB gave the ultimate solution by giving everyone a way to publish directly on their own web site.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#88

Post by kowdermeister »

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…

These are great, but what's the solution for those who don't even know what HTML is? They are the vast majority of FB users.

I don't think anyone who taken web development a bit seriously have any problem to publish something online independently.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#89

Post by ryandrake »

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.

Recommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble. These mis-features are exactly what we should be moving away from!

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#90

Post by mikehollinger »

One of the pros of Facebook is the ability to share content with a restricted set of people, and find content easily (the feed). For example - I’m ok with my friends and family seeing my vacation photos, but don’t generally want all of you (no offense, but we need boundaries!) paging through them.

There’s got to be something more in between. I got excited by the various distributed social networks but have yet to see any of them in any non-techie context.

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