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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#251

Post by viraptor »

stcredzero wrote: post #183
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

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 That last phrase could add a lot of friction. you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose That would indeed replace Facebook…

There's already a lot of aggregators which are partially-social. For example theoldreader tells me that someone likes a specific post from RSS feed. Not sure if they have recommendations, but they could certainly generate them if they wanted.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#252

Post by vthriller »

jasode wrote: post #180
solatic wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database But that's the point, isn't it? Personal websites isn't what will "solve the customer's problem", persé, but it is what will allow Facebook to no longer be irreplaceable, which is the real reason why people stay on the platform. The question isn't whether personal websites can repla…

> Personal websites [...] is what will allow Facebook to no longer be irreplaceable, which is the real reason why people stay on the platform. No, you're making a common mistake of looking at the surface level of what Facebook shows to users (the so-called "webpage"). Therefore, the seemingly "obvious" solution to beat Facebook is -- Everybody Has Personal Websites. Since I've seen many smart techies and programmers…

> That "connection" is easiest and more scalable when it's based on real names

Is it though? People I know refer to their pages with short urls and nicknames all the time because nobody wants to scroll through bazillion of John Doe profiles in Facebook search.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#253

Post by miguelmota »

My old mother uses Facebook because it's extremely easy for her to upload photos, find people, and comment on other people's feed.

She's barely capable of managing logins. Granted there are millions of people just like her who don't really care about privacy (also due to ignorance) and will use a service simply because it's convenient and is good enough.

This is like saying people should do maintenance on their own cars because mechanics at the shop will be able to see your personal identifying information that you have in the car.

Posting content online and having sensitive private chats on a third party website is like leaving personal identifying information inside a locked car and expecting that it'll never get broken in to, either by hackers or by the manufacturer leaking the car keys.

Also many people with personal websites are starting to use Medium because it provides greater reach.

I'm all for decentralization and self-sovereignty and would love to see a world where everyone hosts their personal website but this idea is far-fetched because the masses are going to prefer free, fast, and convenient services that require little management and thinking.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#255

Post by cynoclast »

lol, no we shouldn't

It would leave 99.99% of people high and dry.

Facebook fills a niche that personal websites don't. Love it or hate it, your computer illiterate grandparents aren't going to create a personal website, and if they did, their grandchildren aren't going to visit it unless their parents make them.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#256

Post by stcredzero »

davidivadavid wrote: post #240
stcredzero wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good recommendations are like a convenient browser that comes with your OS. The problems come in when it's just one company that has the public locked in to their particular solution.

What problems?

IE 6

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#257

Post by grahamburger »

saucoide wrote: post #43
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…

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

That sounds a lot like ActivityPub / Mastodon.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#260

Post by WorldMaker »

oblio wrote: post #204
eppsilon wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely a new social network could use others' authentication providers (Facebook Connect, Google account, etc.) to get real names/numbers of users and their friends. Smartphone apps could use contacts from the phone itself. I don't think FB's social graph is as hard to replicate as its overall reach. Users think, "If everyone I know is already on FB or one of the other established networks, why use anything else? "

You're assuming getting users to give you that info is easy.

Right, Facebook themselves took roughly 10 years to build it, and they used a lot of psychological tricks to do it (first mover advantage, early FB was "exotic" and "invite only", late FB was an avalanche of FOMO and network effects, etc).

Similarly, the history of the White Pages and the Yellow Pages is a fascinating read and took decades for those books to be accepted. (Nowhere near as fast as they declined in the internet age.)

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