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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#231

Facebook is now many things, but when it started it was about identity: this is who I am, this is who I know, this is what I care about. As Facebook has expanded, it's become a mostly passive experience. This is a byproduct of Facebook's business model, which is to sell other people's time . Like any business, it's incentivized to maximized its inventory, which in this case is time spent on Facebook properties. Peopl…

I use and love Universe regularly, thanks Joe!

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#232
post #217
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Hey, I know where that's coming from!

Awhile ago I was digging through Pinterest on topics related to blogging, finance, online business, etc.

A lot of these pins target millennials and moms (wow, especially moms).

The point of most of these sites is affiliate marketing; they've got deals with hostgator, bluehost, godaddy, whatever, and get kickbacks when users sign up.

So all these pinboardss about blogs about blogging advocate for the VPS route because it's how they make cash.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#233

What I would rather see is something that works pretty much exactly like Facebook, but paid for, no advertisements, and total privacy. Aside from convincing people it's worth paying $25/year for the same functionality they currently get for "free" I think that's the closest to a viable option. If Facebook hadn't lost so much trust already, they could try to jump ahead in that game by offering this service themselves.…

I think there was a platform several years ago - maybe App.Net - that tried this but had to eventually close. Perhaps the climate nowadays might be more suited to support a pay model? Small though it might be, I'm sure there would be a portion of the population that would pay for this. The trick is in the marketing and in triggering the network effect.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#235
> There was no indication that something we’d been conditioned to do would be quickly weaponized against us.

In the early 90s, early web and internet, I knew people who protected their IRL identities from the net. "Flying under the radar."

I thought they were somewhere between paranoid and "excitable."

We should probably not ignore crazy people as hard as we do.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#236

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…

Some of the concepts you noted - specifically #1, #3, #3b, and #3c - form the basis of some of the stuff that the IndieWeb participants discuss/work on; see https://indieweb.org. In fact - and i think someone else might have already mentioned these guys - https://micro.blog already provides such a paid service. (There are free features of this service, but IIRC the paid parts fulfill some of the items you noted above.)

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#237
post #189
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of the major web services (Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire) required anyone to know FTP, and they weren't any more difficult to use than Wix or Wordpress, which target non-technical users today. Before the standard of "web development" became "learn the terminal, Git and some Linux, unit testing, install and learn Node, learn Docker or some other container, learn ssh, learn a framework and any of several languag…

The trouble is, all of those "easy" website building services are still much harder and more customizable than Facebook. If you remember MySpace, you'll also remember that a pretty signifiant minority of pages were horrifically ugly and did super-annoying things. It seems most people are either terrible at web design or have no interest in it, even if you give them a pile of dead-easy templates. Part of the reason most of my social media use went to Facebook earlier on was that the user pages all looked reasonably nice and didn't play terrible music or blink or whatever. You could still post ugly pictures or stupid walls of text, but there's a limit to how unpleasant you can make a Facebook page. Sometimes, less customizability is better.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#238

Should we? Heck, I'm feeling real nostalgic. Lets go back to land lines and 56K dial up modems while we are at it. The real question is who is this guy and why should we even consider what he says seriously? And why is this so heavily upvoted?

My guess is that people wish for a people networking protocol/facility that isn't corporately controlled, similar to how email is not.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#239
I think the biggest problem is authorization, you don't want random people on the Internet to be able to see your family photos. That's what Facebook solves. We need a decentralized ID system, something like a private/public key, that is easy to implement and even easier to use/login to a site with.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take good recommendations, thank you. I'm surprised so few people here have picked up on the fact that "filter bubble" is a rhetorical trick about as obvious as the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" dichotomy. People like getting good recommendations, and they'll always like them. "Filter bubbles" are here to stay.

Good recommendations are like a convenient browser that comes with your OS. The problems come in when it's just one company that has the public locked in to their particular solution.

What problems?
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