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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#31
Just my guess, but I bet that from this point on, few people (in the developed world) will race to sign up for a new social network. Why? Given the societal and personal costs (and benefits) that we've seen with previous social networks, a lot of lay people are re-evaluating the utility that such services provide them. In many cases, the answer is to keep your current social network, but increasingly disengage from it. Sometimes people find that they actually prefer to be less frequently "connected" to people in their lives, whether family/friends or casual acquaintances, especially given some of the caustic personality traits often displayed on social networks.

Also, many of today's recent non-FB social network successes (Whatsapp, etc) were launched before the general perception of social networking, and internet services in general, became increasingly skeptical. Outside of tech, or people with very narrow interest verticals not served by mainstream social networks, I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.

Curiously, if true, this plays both the the detriment and benefit of established social networks: their primary, most profitable users are not likely to flee, but they are also likely to be less engaged.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#32
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is a social network

is it? i mean there were online boards and forums that had this comments/replies structure, joel on software anyone?. well minus the points. but those were never called social networks...

I wouldn't have called it a social network - there's really no graph of user connections, unless you want to consider a graph of directional has-replied-to or has-upvoted links, but that's pushing it.

But if another technology added an embedded HN clone, they would call it "social networking features", probably...

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#34

I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents. You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.

Sounds good in theory, but that is so far removed from what 99% of social media users do. Nobody wants to rent/buy boxes, handle routers, etc. ; most users are on mobile, on the go.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#35
post #7

I’m all for finding alternatives to the ad-based models that plague social media (and the web, in general), but how will people without bank accounts use such a system?

Free social networks (as in free beer) only accept users who don't have a bank accounts because the networks expect them to have one in the near future. Otherwise, there would be no reason for advertisers pay the social networks for the cost of these "free riders". Everybody ends up being monetized, that's the plan.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#36
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't a social network. It's centered around topics (articles, Show/Ask HN, ...) rather than individuals. There's no way for me to follow or contact a particular user.

>There's no way for me to follow . . . a particular user So this is not good enough for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=maxaf Is that because there is no way to get notified by email when a new comment is made by the user?

It's not the same as following in the traditional "use the follow to populate a timeline or feed" sense. I don't come to HN wondering "what did my peeps comment today?", rather I come to glance at particular stories, and perhaps read the comments.

The "engagement" aspect of HN is in the quality of items that make it to the front page, and in the comments. It's not in the slow drip-drip-drip of near-real-time notification regarding the activities of specific users.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#37
post #29

This just makes me think why do I need a social network. I never did anything remotely useful on Facebook/Instagram(Although, Twitter is useful). Why would I want to use this?

Now one can follow celebrities on instagram, facebook with their daily updates:)

Okay point taken.

Although, The "celebrities"(I am more interested in following Engineers, Computer Scientists. These guys are my "celebrities") I would want to follow are not on facebook/instagram(Or they don't share anything I'd be interested in on those platforms).

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#38
post #31

Just my guess, but I bet that from this point on, few people (in the developed world) will race to sign up for a new social network. Why? Given the societal and personal costs (and benefits) that we've seen with previous social networks, a lot of lay people are re-evaluating the utility that such services provide them. In many cases, the answer is to keep your current social network, but increasingly disengage from i…

The likes of TikTok would disprove this guess, but given the age profile, your theory may still hold true if age-range-bound.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#39
post #28

This just makes me think why do I need a social network. I never did anything remotely useful on Facebook/Instagram(Although, Twitter is useful). Why would I want to use this?

keeping in touch with family & friends - email, MMS, etc don't work.

This is pretty much the only thing I use FB for, and even here it's not that much. It lets me keep tabs on people I rarely communicate with, and gives me a way to easily communicate with them if I want to say "hi" after a year of no communication. For people I'm not that close with (not enough to exchange phone numbers), it lets me keep a list of these mere acquaintances.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#40

I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents. You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.

That’s essentially what a Mastadon instance is. If it’s hosted at home or on someone’s cloud account - the difference is only in connectivity speed. I’m extremely hopefully, perhaps naively, that a new internet isn’t going to be based on blockchain or owning data or any foundational change - it will be based on the ability for people to host their own server-side software again. The App Stores democratized client side apps, but they forced a huge centralization into platforms.

What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste.

Perhaps I’m being naive, but it feels like a tooling problem, not a social or political or economic one. Anyways, I’ve quit my job at Stripe and just finished YCS19 with the goal of closing the gap between Facebook/Mastadon, Medium/yourBlog, Minecraft.com and a docker image...

And you’re totally correct about renting home server “boxes” too - except most house holds already have plenty of compute and connectivity - it’s just that installing / managing server software is completely out of reach to most people (and some developers!). It doesn’t need to be grandmas running router software - just the family nerd able to create on the internet again - and reliable enough software you’d actually invite grandma to signup!

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