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…
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This x1000 We would need some sort of aggregator. Currently, you could call Facebook an aggregator of personal websites. Of course all of the personal websites are also hosted there, but it technically is an aggregator of those webpages. Let's not forget most of the people that I am friends with on Facebook would never be able to create their own personal website without a lot of help which is what makes something li…
> We would need some sort of aggregator. It could be a protocol, independent of the browser. But the browser could support it inline, so you could just click a button to follow a content stream. It shouldn't be complex, it should be simple. Really simple. Syndication.
Open source social media dashboard? That way you could still use all the traditional social media apps without being reliant on any single one.
The author's thesis is fundamentally flawed. They say it isn't clear why everyone was so excited to have a Facebook, but that's exactly the answer - because everyone had a Facebook . One of the biggest appeals of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (which is arguable even more useless than FB), etc. is that every nobody has direct access to an audience of millions. They can scream their offensive, unoriginal, spontaneous, n…
Yeah the idea of everyone setting up a personal website with their real name and a recognisable photo of themselves is pretty laughable. Are people going to upload photos and implement an account system to restrict access too? That was Facebook's original raison d'etre (and the source of its name).
You don't need to implement anything. There are self-hosted CMSs and blog platforms that have been doing this for a long time.
I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a developer"-hard either.
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.
I think something like personal AI, like something out of a William Gibson novel could fix this issue.
>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…
> that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database But that's the point, isn't it? Personal websites isn't what will "solve the customer's problem", persé, but it is what will allow Facebook to no longer be irreplaceable, which is the real reason why people stay on the platform. The question isn't whether personal websites can repla…
You’d think that if personal websites were a valid substitute for Facebook, the whole thing would have never taken off in the first place. Personal websites didn’t see massive adoption the first time around, and we can safely doubt they ever will.
Except having a legitimate personal website is a challenge you can't automate away. Even if you managed to produce a rugged installer script for, say, Mastodon so you can one click deploy a working instance you still need to somehow A. get a domain and B. host it somewhere that will stay online for others to use. There is no real way to automate domain procurement. Most people don't leave a PC they own all the time t…
Wha? I leave my PCs on for years at a time. Except for natural disasters (storms, cut power lines) they operate 24X365. A personal website is pretty straightforward. I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.
> I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.
Said as a true developer who no longer realizes how hard some of the things we do are to the average person who can barely operate their computer or smart phone.
Think of all the things you have to learn in order to host your own site. I still have to explain the basics of what a domain name is to potential freelance customers, and why they need hosting in order to have a website online. This is knowledge that is not common outside of the developer ecosystem.
Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages. * It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues). * It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow everyone's updates. * It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to connect to. * It has group conversation. * It has event planning. Personal pages have…
> Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages. I'm going to argue on the following points based on observations. > - It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues). Almost nobody knows well about how to control who see what, and even when they do, hardly anyone changes it often. Almost everyone leaves it at something that may not be a…
As a counterpoint to your counterpoint, at least Facebook's default setting is friends and friends of friends (I believe, it's been a while since I've had mine on the default setting). By default a personal website is public, and it'd be pretty difficult to setup authentication and user accounts for the people you want to be able to see your content, keeping it secure and preventing it from leaking. That is a pretty huge difference. Not arguing Facebook has been perfect, obviously they've had huge blunders, but it is vastly simpler and more secure (most of the time) for the average person compared to them trying to do it themselves.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Dispora* yet: https://diasporafoundation.org/ I looked into it a while ago and it was a little cumbersome to set up, but I really like the idea.
"it was a little cumbersome to set up"
Hence it will never be popular. Sorry, that's just how it works. If you want non-technical people on the platform (i.e. the general public) it needs to just work right away.