Towards a world without Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#131

Post by 2aa07e2 » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

somethingsimple wrote: post #58

2aa07e2 wrote: post #52

The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently. Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against dele…

What extension is that?

Social Book Post Manager [1]

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#132

Post by whataretensors » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

avip wrote: post #129

whataretensors wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would it work with just a regular database? You'd set up another centralized honey pot that these psychopaths actively look for. > How would a blockchain make it better? Besides censorship protection, the platform could reward users to make itself better. Lots of things become possible when you have control over the reward system and don't just extract the value to the top. > What coalition of people will run t…

"Any sufficiently uncensored user-content platform is indistinguishable from a porn site"

A user can run a custom curator. Alternatively sites could be developed that give access to the network and do their own filtering.

There are other choices besides authoritarian censorship, despite the popularity these days.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#133

Post by wellboy » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

TimJRobinson wrote: post #93

wellboy wrote: post #67

The tech that is proposed in the article sounds a lot like Nano's block lattice, where everyone has their own blockchain. You could even potentially use it to run this social network by just increasing transaction data size.

Yes! After reading the Nano whitepaper a few months ago I realized it could be a protocol for a general, free, scaleable social network. I've been prototyping and designing it for the past few months. You don't need to increase the transaction data size, just make the transactions pointers to the data which lives somewhere else like IPFS or S3, keep the chains small. However a week ago I discovered scuttlebutt.nz who…

Ha very cool. Though who pays for storing the data then?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#134

Post by wrinkl3 » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #88

adrianN wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOL had pretty much the same moat, so there is hope that Facebook can be dethroned.

Back then, there was room in the world for Facebook to dig its own decently sized moat before it had to meet AOL head to head. Nowadays, that’s harder, certainly in the West. Because of that, I think it’s likely that, if a company manages to dethrone Facebook, it will come from China, where the government is willing to act as a kind of incubator. So, IMO, rather than seeing Facebook dethroned, the more likely outcome…

I don't know much about the Arab countries, but Russia is perfectly happy with its own state-approved versions of Facebook (Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki).

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#135

Post by msangi » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

I find it curios that the article is calling the 'blockchain people' to save the world from Facebook when the blockchain is a public ledger.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#136

Post by dralley » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #73

dralley wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a complete bastardization of the concept of "trust" as applies to distributed systems. You're not 'trusting' a single entity in that case because you're making literally all the information public for anyone to see, use, resell, etc. That's like saying we shouldn't have to trust Equifax, let's just make everyone's name, address, SSN, and credit history public on the internet to begin with.

There are plenty of distributed file systems that securely store confidential data on untrusted nodes by having well-design encryption. Is there a reason for which it would be worse with blockchains?

The whole point of social media is making that information available to people, though.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#137

Post by NicoJuicy » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

blockchain solution x won't help much, because the hard part is not the tech.

It's attracting enough users to survive.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#138

Post by zanny » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:40 PM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #96

For me the trinity is facebook, twitter, and slack, so I've started figuring out how to replace them all at once. So far riot/matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and discord, at least for my purposes. I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook messenger. So riot/matrix could reduce my…

I don't get what the difference between Facebook and Twitter even is supposed to be. One for people you know and one for people you don't? You can solve that in something like Mastodon by just having two independent content feeds (and you can already set that up).

It probably used to be character limit, but again Twitter has already doubled theirs and Mastodon's is already 500 characters.

That and the main developer of Mastodon is working on media features to make it work better as an Instagram replacement as well.

The real secret sauce is that the Fediverse and AcitivtyPub means if you want a Facebook like experience you can use Diaspora and still friend / share / communicate with people on a Mastodon instance. Different programs can emerge as fews into this data graph but its still the same fundamental primitives (soon to be a web standard) data types.

Speaking of Riot, I'm hopeful the developers will look into integrating it better into said fediverse. It should probably at least support some means for Mastodon hosts to easily spin up a Matrix server at their Mastodon domain with no friction and the same account database. It will probably take Matrix protocol revisions to make that work, though.

Probably one of the important killer but missing features of Matrix will be the ability to integrate into websites the way Facebook messenger does, so you can have the social media site with the popup chat frames.

The only missing feature in my mind after all that is something akin to Facebook / reddit comment threads / disquis / discourse. So that non-social media sites can integrate social media comment sections into their media that either autogenerate threads, repost to a Mastodon instance / on Diaspora and let Fediverse commentors just comment right there on the page.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#139

Post by skinnymuch » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 9:49 PM UTC

diogenescynic wrote: post #76

Facebook badly needs a direct competitor. I wish there was social network with fewer features available, like what Facebook was in 2006-2007. Get rid of the newsfeed—it’s toxic and that’s the worst part of the experience. Make sharing related to specific groups— college friends, family, work friends, etc. I would prefer a social network with fewer features.

Facebook has lists or do you mean it should be more intrinsic to the social network like Google Plus was?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#140

Post by jasonkostempski » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 10:06 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #41

jasonkostempski wrote: post #32

"wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve" I'm probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is exactly DRM for the individual. I don't want anything with DRM and I don't want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

> I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this. It seems pretty simple to me. People oppose DRM because it is content they paid for and disallows their modifying, repurposing it, etc. None of those things apply to content I have created. I have the original, non-DRM'ed content that is always editable, I am the owner fo the content....

So if your proud mom wants to share everything her kid is up to with everyone, including Zuckerberg (because he gave her a way to automate reposting your feed for her directly to Facebook), you don't want a way to prevent that?