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Create a better social product to replace Facebook challenge

openbookchallenge.com

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Re: Create a better social product to replace Facebook challenge

#21
post #14

I'm curious to see what the next 'social networking site' is going to be, but I'm also wondering how much our expectations of 'social networking' have changed since Facebook entered the room and took over the conversation. (Took over, not changed) My chief complaint, personally about these sites is that I'll use it, just let me use it the way I want to in relative peace. That means: unless I subscribed to a specific…

Most people I know have switched to WhatsApp exactly for the reasons you mention. I'm not a very social person, yet I'm already in multiple chat groups: 'family', 'siblings', 'social groups', 'activity groups'. It's the same for almost everyone I know.

Feature-wise, I'd much prefer everyone switch to Telegram, but I wouldn't be surprised if these features come to WhatsApp soon. Main reason I think they haven't is that Facebook might still try to make their main product 'work', or perhaps some kind of anti-trust issues?

Re: Create a better social product to replace Facebook challenge

#22
post #2

Scuttlebutt for the win!

While I quite like Scuttlebutt, it suffers from the issue that you need to manually add a 'pub' before you can actually use it.

I suppose it's also a pretty big issue that one can't have multi-device accounts yet (which is being worked on, as I understand it).

Re: Create a better social product to replace Facebook challenge

#23
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building a better product isn't the issue, it's convincing people to use it. Calacanis should just fund one of the 100+ alternatives that already exist, but don't yet have a critical mass of users. Funding someone to write new software for something that not only could, but should be bootstrapped is unlikely to produce anything viable.

Or fund lobbying of (probably EU) politicians to write a law forcing Facebook to interoperate with the 100+ alternatives that already exist, using OAuth / OpenID Connect and W3C social networking standards. Once people can have all the benefit of Facebook (i.e. mutual visibility with Facebook users) without having their data stored on Facebook's servers, or their experience controlled by Facebook's UI, then Facebook…

Won’t this work the opposite way as well? Facebook will be free to ingest all of the data from the smaller social networks

Re: Create a better social product to replace Facebook challenge

#24
post #23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or fund lobbying of (probably EU) politicians to write a law forcing Facebook to interoperate with the 100+ alternatives that already exist, using OAuth / OpenID Connect and W3C social networking standards. Once people can have all the benefit of Facebook (i.e. mutual visibility with Facebook users) without having their data stored on Facebook's servers, or their experience controlled by Facebook's UI, then Facebook…

Won’t this work the opposite way as well? Facebook will be free to ingest all of the data from the smaller social networks

They're already free to do this in theory with social network sites that don't require logins to see people's data (i.e. Twitter clones), but hopefully the EU's GDPR would make it easy to bring a case against Facebook if they were using the ingested data for any purpose other than supporting their own users.

The competing social network would probably need to have a privacy policy saying that other sites can ingest their data only if the remote user's "friend request" is accepted by the local user, and the data can only be ingested for a set of prescribed purposes.

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