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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#211

Post by [deleted] »

CodeCube wrote: post #170
NotAnEconomist wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

[deleted]

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#212

Post by naravara »

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

>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

Up until you get to "different clients" you're basically describing classic Google Reader.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#213

Post by NotAnEconomist »

stcredzero wrote: post #187
CodeCube wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> submit articles to content indexes ... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)

... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;) Like they did with email. Then you have companies come with robust AI tech and filter the spam, and also give good recommendations. A few of those companies come to dominate the market ... aaaaaand, there it goes; we're back to the situation we have now with Facebook and Google.

That's the point:

The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.

The situation you're calling out is exactly the point.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#214

Post by josephcohen »

kowdermeister wrote: post #88
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.

Going to throw our hat in the ring here. We built Universe (http://apple.co/Universe) for precisely this reason: to enable everyone to build their place on the internet, without touching code, all from a phone.

You can see some of the sites created with it here: http://showcase.onuniverse.com

Here's more about us: http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-design-doe...

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#215

Post by anticensor »

toight wrote: post #145

The problem with Fakebook is that it perpetuates unnatural outsized social networks because Zuckerburg worked out at its formation that this is 1 very addictive and 2 highly profitable. Clone Facebook. Limit it to Family + 50 friends max which actually seems to many. The numbers arbitrary. I think 150 social relationships is the max a human can handle. The digital social network would resemble the real social network…

Humans can handle 150 friends and around 1000 acquintances maximum.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#216

Post by bscphil »

Spitballing a bit here. Why do they have to be websites? That is to say, why do they have to be on the "web", HTML over HTTP, at all? This seems like the default way to do things to us now, but if you think about it, what most of us fundamentally want with a social media site like Facebook (not Twitter, that's different) is just to communicate and keep up with our friends and family. That's why people flock to any app that gets mindshare: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, that allows them to do these things.

What does an alternative look like? Something like a shared Discord for friends and family to use, divided into groups or "servers". (That was the key insight of Google+, that people don't have one online presence for their family, close friends, coworkers, acquaintances, etc. It failed for other reasons.) The extra feature you need is just a shared searchable history to find media, albums of photos, etc.

I think the points the article makes are valid, but better understood as a criticism of Twitter. It effectively asks, if what we want is to post stuff online for other people to read, why not use the open web for that rather than [centralized service]. Thing is, people are already working on alternatives to this and not everyone needs to use the same thing for it to be successful. ActivityPub, websites using RSS for synchronization, Neocities, etc etc. So my response is that there are two sorts of things we use social media for, and there's no reason to try to do them both with one site.

I think I'm going to look into open Discord alternatives, and try to get some family and friends interested. Worst case, it will be an interesting experiment I'll learn something from.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#217

Post by dvtrn »

klez wrote: post #154
IshKebab wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a developer"-hard either.

Tangent:

I've now talked four friends who wanted to start blogging out of spending money on AWS instances and VPS providers because they were convinced this was the path they absolutely had to take just to start writing things using WordPress. These are not technical people.

Which makes me wonder where that impression is coming from. Surely it couldn't have been Wordpress.com because the site goes out of their way to show how easy it is to sign up and start blogging on their platform, but I've long wondered why they were all so eager to avoid taking the simplest path to their goals since none of them were above spending money to realize their goals of having a blog.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#218

Post by Freezerburnt »

ams6110 wrote: post #160
Freezerburnt wrote: post #18

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.

Well, it's not easy to set up your own "pod", but it's easy to join someone else's pod. You could set one up for your family or company or at whatever level you want.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#219

Post by stcredzero »

NotAnEconomist wrote: post #213
stcredzero wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;) Like they did with email. Then you have companies come with robust AI tech and filter the spam, and also give good recommendations. A few of those companies come to dominate the market ... aaaaaand, there it goes; we're back to the situation we have now with Facebook and Google.

That's the point: The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks. The situation you're calling out is exactly the point.

The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.

That's also my point.

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