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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#141

Post by fredsted »

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.

You don't need to know HTML to make a Web site with a CMS like WordPress.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#142

Post by acomjean »

bwb wrote: post #53
mxuribe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally agree, I just don't want people to think it is going back to what it was in the late 90s and getting trapped thinking that was some type of golden age. Going forward there is tremendous opportunity to do new things that give people the ability to express themselves online.

The thing about social media which is slightly different from everyone having their own site (tripod, geocities ..) is that its more interactive.

There is some messaging built into the "new social" that wasn't as available back then (we didn't all have smart phones, and internet was charged by the hour.). There wasn't as much content either which did make it slightly more manageable to surf through the pages you wanted.

polite and interesting exchange though.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#143

Post by JoeAltmaier »

zanny wrote: post #139
mxuribe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Wha? I leave my PCs on for years at a time. Except for natural disasters (storms, cut power lines) they operate 24X365. A personal website is pretty straightforward.

I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#144

Post by schnevets »

wasdfff wrote: post #120
snackematician wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe more of an email list than an RSS feed then? You can control who is a member of the list to receive content. It would be cool if social media could be done through email, sort of like Usenet.

You mean like newsletters? No need to reinvent the wheel.

Email/newsletters are a promising protocol, but you would have to rethink the UX to be more like a newsfeed, where a concise version of the message is shown once, and then automatically marked as read.

I have noticed friends reverting back to RSVP e-mails via Paperless Post Flyer. I'm still not sure if one person in this social group is not on Facebook, causing the change, but it has been a welcome adjustment. If Facebook Events can be replaced by an e-mail approach, I don't see why other products can't follow suit.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#145

Post by toight »

The problem with Fakebook is that it perpetuates unnatural outsized social networks because Zuckerburg worked out at its formation that this is 1 very addictive and 2 highly profitable.

Clone Facebook. Limit it to Family + 50 friends max which actually seems to many. The numbers arbitrary. I think 150 social relationships is the max a human can handle.

The digital social network would resemble the real social network and some form of human decency and dignity would re-emerge.

Constrict the size of individuals digital social networks to what they evolved to be able to handle and watch online behaviour and content improve.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#148

Post by circlesguy »

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…

I'd like to plug https://circles.app/

We are open to opensourcing Circles. What if anyone could start their own Facebook-equivalent site using opensource? What if we could splinter FB into 10,000 sites?

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#149

Post by ip26 »

wasdfff wrote: post #115
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.

Follow feeds that post from a variety of sources. I follow a HN rss, a couple multireddit RSS feeds, and even newsletters from nyt and la times will include stories from a variety of places. “Discover” hardly ever means, “check out what’s interesting,” usually it’s “check out this targeted ad”

Ah, but if I'm too broad, then I get a firehose of news. RSS gives you everything that comes down the pipe- unless you set up filters, I suppose

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#150

Post by kristianc »

zymhan wrote: post #138
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/

Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy".

Indeed, for many, the centralization of Facebook is a selling point, 'Freedom' might appeal to political activists / journalists but isn't of much interest to people who just want to find their friends rather than talk to 'happybunny123' and 'Privacy' has consistently shown itself to be something people are 'meh' about in deeds.

I've got nothing against Diaspora per se, but it's for geeks and privacy nuts. https://diasporafoundation.org/ suggests that one of the things I might want to "Join the Conversation" about is "Linux".

For the broader population, when you offer very few of the same benefits and introduce additional costs, it's not a surprise it doesn't gain traction.

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