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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#161

Post by blancheneige »

Juliate wrote: post #70
drivingmenuts wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

we're not talking about mainstream media here. ;)

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#162

Post by asdff »

ip26 wrote: post #149
wasdfff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow feeds that post from a variety of sources. I follow a HN rss, a couple multireddit RSS feeds, and even newsletters from nyt and la times will include stories from a variety of places. “Discover” hardly ever means, “check out what’s interesting,” usually it’s “check out this targeted ad”

Ah, but if I'm too broad, then I get a firehose of news. RSS gives you everything that comes down the pipe- unless you set up filters, I suppose

For reddit you can get a feed for the top posts only, and for HN you can set a score threshold. I even follow newsletters over rss (killthenewsletter), which if you subscribe to some daily digests you get exposed to stories from a variety of sources on many topics. I can still run through like 250 headlines in about 30 minutes, reading or saving what I like to pocket and skimming over the rest. There is definitely set up and optimization with RSS, getting the right mix of feeds that you want, but I don't see any targeted posts or advertising when I browse the internet now.

Its also really good for following journal articles in my field. Pubmed has active search RSS, for instance, and every journal pushes their new articles to RSS.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#163

Post by asdff »

schnevets wrote: post #144
wasdfff wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like newsletters? No need to reinvent the wheel.

Email/newsletters are a promising protocol, but you would have to rethink the UX to be more like a newsfeed, where a concise version of the message is shown once, and then automatically marked as read. I have noticed friends reverting back to RSVP e-mails via Paperless Post Flyer. I'm still not sure if one person in this social group is not on Facebook, causing the change, but it has been a welcome adjustment. If Fac…

>where a concise version of the message is shown once, and then automatically marked as read.

So like a rule to push it into your newsletter folder?

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#165

Post by asdff »

vonseel wrote: post #156
solatic wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Because they were obtuse to set up for 99% of people. Myspace basically made quick and easy personal pages for the masses, and everyone used it because it was quick and easy. If a company is able to do it right for the 99% of people who don't know what FTP is, then its got a shot.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#167

Post by asdff »

masterdrift wrote: post #153
zanny wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Several years ago facebook gutted a lot of RSS features. You used to be able to follow your notifications via RSS, but that went away when facebook realized people wouldn't stay on the site as long.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#168

Post by LastZactionHero »

I've made this suggestion on a few other threads, and I'll keep making it until it works ;)

Anyone want to start a modern webring?

- Self host your site

- Put in a JS snippet to link out to other sites

The idea being to drive some traffic to your site without being beholden to Medium/Facebook/whatever.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#169

Post by zild3d »

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 way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed

For many it's become more of an address book

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#170

Post by CodeCube »

NotAnEconomist wrote: post #140
darkarmani wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS is really just the content/transport method. For a decentralized FB, you would move the intelligence into your local client and it would like more like a web-of-trust network. 1. You connect to friends and you either manually assign or "grow" a bunch of weights to your amount of trust in them and your interest in various topics they might post. 2. You and your friends make posts and assign "topic" metadata to the…

I think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable: 1. Everyone makes a website. 2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes. 3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client: 3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes. 3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds. 3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" an…

> submit articles to content indexes

... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)

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