When will we stop using Facebook?

What will be the next big thing in social networks? What are your thoughts?

Local neighbors network? No-interface social networks? Peer-to-peer? Anonymous social networks? Video based (YouTube/Twitch)? Messanger-only? No central news-feed?

I hate Facebook, but I don't plan to stop using it anytime soon. Well - I don't hate everything about it, but I hate everything they're trying to do, so I agree with this article. But "hate"ing a company is odd, so I guess I really mean "I want to have nothing to do with".

I'll switch when there's a dominating replacement. All I want, for the rest of my life, is:

- a way to see updates from friends and acquaintances and people I've fallen out of contact with, and post mine for them.

- a way to search for and 'add' people I meet.

- a way to chat with those people (including in groups)

- all of those things, without social baggage that constrains it to 'only teenagers' or 'only colleagues and classmates' etc.

- and in a network that contains most people I meet, or doesn't have social baggage that prevents most people from being willing to join it.

To me it's an enriched version of what I get by having lots of contacts in my phone or email address book: exactly a list of people, plus the additional fact that I feel physically near them in some sense (and I think this is a concrete emotional thing. My family and friends don't feel too far away when I get to see snippets of their life streamed into mine).

Everything else - groups, events, pokes, company pages, apps, games, friend suggestions, wall posts, public about-me sections, places, reviews, ads, etc... I don't care about any of it. Maybe something that trims off all this fat would be innocuous enough to actually find adoption. I could see it living in some peer-to-peer structure too, but it has to still be absolutely trivial for anyone to join.

That's quite a disappointing future the author is painting there. The best I can hope for is that future "hot startups" will prefer to sell themselves to any other company but Facebook when Facebook comes knocking on their door with a bag of cash. Otherwise I'll continue to express my distaste for such an acquisition, just like I did with Oculus and Whatsapp and will try avoiding them in the future. Vote with your wallet as they say.

In other words - the Internet. You don't need to do all those things in a single place, or even in multiple places, but all owned by the same company.

The fact that people want to use Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Whatsapp is proof many people don't want a single service for everything. It's just unfortunate that Facebook happens to have acquired many of those.

Maybe https://diasporafoundation.org is what you are looking for?