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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#311

Post by stcredzero »

viraptor wrote: post #251
stcredzero wrote: post #183

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 That last phrase could add a lot of friction. you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose That would indeed replace Facebook…

There's already a lot of aggregators which are partially-social. For example theoldreader tells me that someone likes a specific post from RSS feed. Not sure if they have recommendations, but they could certainly generate them if they wanted.

One thing that could be really cool, would be the UI of RSS readers applied to social media. Like, you could have the ads and recommendations in their own branch of the tree.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#312

Post by aldermeer »

dasil003 wrote: post #266
davidivadavid wrote: post #188

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.

Sure, we all want good recommendations, but how do we define "good"? I see some obvious problems with the way tech recommendations are playing out that have nothing to do with the filter bubble issue. First, we are outsourcing recommendations to profit-driven corporations. At best, the recommendations I want to see will be mixed with the ones advertisers want me to see. Revenue expectations of social media companies…

Google News claims to include other sources in a story's feed, to expose the readership to other points of view. That sounds like a great way to burst the "social media bubble".

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#313

Post by JetSpiegel »

hotmud wrote: post #301
asdff wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss

Shameless plug: Binaries here: https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#314

Post by JetSpiegel »

max76 wrote: post #83
ip26 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe someone should create an RSS feed that curates other RSS feeds and forwards them to their recipients. I'm not sure how to monetize this, but it would add some discovery to rss.

It's hard to compete with HN and Reddit...

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#315

Post by JetSpiegel »

masterdrift wrote: post #199
asdff wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there no possible workaround? Zapier supports custom RSS feeds from popular social media sites, so it's definitely not impossible.

There's https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge, but it's a PHP app, run it on a disposable VPS.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#317

Post by yesenadam »

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…

Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content.

Is that true? I would have thought it's mostly used for chatting with people they know, or commenting on things people have shared. But I'm just guessing.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#318

Post by cakeface »

hinkley wrote: post #130
ip26 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way I grew my feed was to look around any time an article in my feed linked to another site. The thing is though we want to talk about the stories and ask questions. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? Comment forums on a million sites don’t work. In the early days of the web someone had the idea that you should be able to run your own group commentary without the site aurhor’s permission. You’d register fo…

There are some w3c tools around open annotations that might be a good fit for this.
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