We should replace Facebook with personal websites • Hacker News Board

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#131

Post by Leader2light » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

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…

"The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed rather than a 1999 Geocities personal website."

Very true and Twitter is better for this in general. I keep a Twitter feed running at all times on 2nd monitor.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#132

Post by mcfunk » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

nvr219 wrote: post #38

Bring back LiveJournal!

My friends and I keep talking about this. The quality of the interactions on LiveJournal were so much more substantial.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#133

Post by paulddraper » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 6:00 PM UTC

ticmasta wrote: post #96

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 nefarious problem with FB is the illusion of recommendation/discovery. They're not trying to find new and interesting things for you the way say, the cultural aspects of HN performs this feat; they're trying to define your profile and then serve up more of the same to increase engagement or capture your entire sphere of awareness so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'

> they can manipulate and shape your perception.

That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#134

Post by paulddraper » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

kowdermeister wrote: post #88

pmlnr wrote: post #15

Homepage. It's your home on the internet. It's good for you. Things to get started with: - https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages - http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well - https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m - https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near on…

These are great, but what's the solution for those who don't even know what HTML is? They are the vast majority of FB users. I don't think anyone who taken web development a bit seriously have any problem to publish something online independently.

At some point of ease, you pretty much just have MySpace/Facebook.

And that's what I always think about these conversations... What separates hassle-free push button website creation and publishing from MySpace/Facebook?

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#135

Post by scarmig » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

jiveturkey wrote: post #124

bilbo0s wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content... And HN user "jsgo" wrote... > If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche... These are the sorts of common sense observations missing from so many "let's replace Facebook/Twitter/Whatever" debates. If we're serious about replacing FB/Snapchat/Twitter/Whatever then we need to consider realistic altern…

That said, if someone can strike now, it is possible to displace FB. Or at least put up enough competition to sadly/ironically get bought out by them.

Google Plus, now's your moment!

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#136

Post by yakshaving_jgt » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

dtougas wrote: post #116

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

Didn't you just describe Twitter?

Twitter could be great if you could truly tune-out the stuff you don't want to see.

For a long time I held onto my account, trying to mute anything part of SJW or communist discourse, but to no avail. Twitter shows you stuff you didn't sign up for anyway, I suppose to maximise engagement.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#137

Post by coldtea » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

>Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.

Only Facebook also provides a number of "friends" you "like" your posts (quotes intended). Those likes and "engagement" is superficial of course, but for most people posting on their own website would be a desert.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#138

Post by zymhan » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #127

So, what the author is saying is that we should make something just like Facebook, only: - Harder to find - Harder to update - More expensive to run - Prone to falling over / being hacked - Non-standardized - Doesn't provide instant feedback The reason why we post on Facebook is because it is much (as in an order of magnitude) better and much more convenient than having your own website. Most people do not have their…

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

https://diasporafoundation.org/

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#139

Post by zanny » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

mxuribe wrote: post #45

bwb wrote: post #36

This is so crazy, I love the idea but the world isn't going back to how it was in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I've been in web hosting for a long time and I love the idea of everyone creating their own little website. The truth is people don't have the skills or care enough to do something like that, FB, Quora, Twitter, all these services that are walled gardens work because they make it EASY to share/create and CO…

I agree with your comments except for (respectfully) the part about: "We need to just accept the new world..." I firmly think this all represents opportunity. Opportunity for technologists to develop open platforms that are NOT cumbersome to setup nor to host by the layperson, and that - at least over some time - are extremely inexpensive. Maybe i'm an optimist, but i firmly believe there will be an open platform - o…

Except having a legitimate personal website is a challenge you can't automate away. Even if you managed to produce a rugged installer script for, say, Mastodon so you can one click deploy a working instance you still need to somehow A. get a domain and B. host it somewhere that will stay online for others to use.

There is no real way to automate domain procurement.

Most people don't leave a PC they own all the time to run a website.

So you end up hosting it. But now its centralizing again. If everyone were hosting their own mastodon instances on the same cloud provider thats barely any different from that cloud provider being a Facebook with all the data access they have. Even with a federated site like that few simply have a computer to leave on all the time to have their own site, let alone asking your average person to setup dynamic dns records if they did.

The fundamental name system of the Internet is too manual to enable average people to have personal sites. And any solution involves centralization which defeats the exercise.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#140

Post by NotAnEconomist » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

darkarmani wrote: post #102

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.

RSS is really just the content/transport method. For a decentralized FB, you would move the intelligence into your local client and it would like more like a web-of-trust network. 1. You connect to friends and you either manually assign or "grow" a bunch of weights to your amount of trust in them and your interest in various topics they might post. 2. You and your friends make posts and assign "topic" metadata to the…

I think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable:

1. Everyone makes a website.

2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes.

3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client:

3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes.

3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds.

3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed".

4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented.

There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services.

It's what happened with blogs and RSS anyway.