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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#301

Post by hotmud »

asdff wrote: post #162
ip26 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

> [F]or HN you can set a score threshold…

How does one do that? I'm interested.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#302

Post by Juliate »

blancheneige wrote: post #161
Juliate wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. ;)

Facebook _is_ mainstream today, it's even more mainstream than newspapers and tv/radio news networks.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#303

Post by akirk »

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

I've been actually building something like this on the side with the Friends plugin for WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/ (source at https://github.com/akirk/friends)

It's based on the idea that you'd publish to your personal website either publicly or privately. The private posts can only be read by your friends (who own personal websites themselves and have established a friendship connection using a friend request).

The implementation is just a (not yet standardized) friend ship request REST protocol plus authenticated RSS feeds (using a secret key exchanged by the above process).

Since the whole decentralized social network idea is a chicken-and-egg game, I've constructed the plugin in a way so that it is useful to use by yourself: You can subscribe to RSS feeds, filter feeds with your own rules, and get full-content e-mail notifications for all or selected posts.

The plugin also implements Emoji-Likes on posts and allows recommending posts to your friends. It doesn't have an automatic recommendation engine (yet?).

Actually, there is no need to have this restricted to WordPress since it uses very much established technology, so it could interoperate with any other compatible platform. I just implemented it with WordPress for its ecosystem and that you can use existing mobile apps to read on it and share to it.

Overall the whole endeavor allows you to have your personal social network decentralized, ad- and spam-free since you select who you listen to.

The plugin is already well usable but it only progresses at side-project speed, so help is welcome (not only development work but also trying it out, posting about its features with screenshots/-casts, etc.)!

You can read more about some technical details at https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/03/decentralized-social-ne... and take a look at the presentation: https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/08/wordpress-meetup-presen...

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#304

Post by ___alt »

newscracker wrote: post #126
___alt wrote: post #52

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…

I agree that Facebook's implementation of those features is piss-poor and your analysis is on point. However you can't expect something to be a proper Facebook alternative with them missing.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#305

Post by magduf »

I'm surprised I'm not seeing a lot of comments simply recommending decentralized social networks as an obvious replacement for Facebook.

We've had these for a while. One of the most famous is probably Diaspora. Instead of having all your stuff on one centralized site so they can profit off it, everyone has their own Diaspora site/account, which can be hosted anywhere. You can have your own hosted site, or you can just have an account on an existing site, and you can easily move your account around if you don't like your provider or want to roll your own. That way, no one organization controls everything.

The problem, of course, is that this is too much work for most people, and most people are perfectly happy to give Mark Zuckerberg control of all their personal information because it's easier that way. So Diaspora has languished with almost no users, because the only way a social network survives is by having a "critical mass" of users. If all your friends aren't on there, you're not going to bother with it either. Facebook has that critical mass now, so it'll be virtually impossible to unseat them; the only way is if people simply stop being interested in social networks, or some other centralized service brings something to the table that everyone craves and FB misses the boat before it's too late (which is basically how FB unseated MySpace).

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#306

Post by magduf »

kristianc wrote: post #150
zymhan wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this sounds like the goals of Diaspora, which never gained tons of traction, but has been around for years. https://diasporafoundation.org/

Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy". Indeed, for many, the centralization of Facebook is a selling point, 'Freedom' might appeal to political activists / journalists but isn't of much interest to people who just want to find their friends rather than talk to 'happybunny123' and 'Privacy' has consistently shown…

Centralization isn't the selling point you're thinking of. You seem to think that somehow, being decentralized means Diaspora doesn't allow you to communicate with your friends or something. The whole way it works is that your friends can have accounts on entirely different Diaspora servers run by different organizations, and they can all talk to each other. It doesn't rely on everyone being on the same site, by design. That's the whole point of decentralization.

The reason it didn't "gain traction" (are we all managers here or something?) is that Facebook already had a huge critical mass of users, and once something has established itself as the incumbent, it's very difficult to get people to move to something else, especially for social networks where it entirely relies on all the other people you want to talk to being on that service. If all your friends are already on Facebook, and none of them on Diaspora, well it's pretty obvious which one you're going to invest your time in.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#307

Post by njn »

pmlnr wrote: post #273
QML wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just have a website like Medium that acts as an aggregator (of RSS feeds) instead of a platform? The issue I have to whether stick with RSS feeds, which seem like it's dying, or to use ActivityPub, which doesn't seem to be developed that heavily.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#308

Post by CM30 »

gurumeditations wrote: post #264
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #205

My time on Facebook has actually taught me that I want to know a lot LESS about people like casual friends, family, and business associates. I want to know as little as possible about their political opinions, their religious beliefs, their favorite sports teams, and other affinities that they have. I stopped using FB as a user entirely once I realized that it was diminishing my opinions of other people much more tha…

Related to this, I think as a whole, too much connectivity destroys societies. You talk about how you don’t want to know people’s personal beliefs, you just want to be able to get along with them to do business. This used to be the default for society, but this issue of knowing uncomfortable details about others (all sorts of things from political differences to crime and misconduct) shatters people’s trust in each o…

Yeah, this is basically the reason I feel social media sites are a bad idea. People by definition present different 'faces' to different audiences, and society stays stable because (for the most part) these different sides of people's personality aren't public for everyone to see. Social media shattering all this has definitely led to an increasingly polarised society with increasingly radical beliefs.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#309

Post by krausejj »

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.

we're working on this problem with mendoapp.com

but instead of following "feeds" you follow people, and it queues up links they've shared on twitter

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#310

Post by yoav »

I think we’re looking at the problem wrong.

Facebook solves for some social aspects of the web really well, and then layers on some toxic nonsense for profit.

We don’t need to replace Facebook. We need to regulate it, and replace its leadership and business model.

Just like private firefighters were transformed into a public service

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