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Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#251

Post by tyingq »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #97
emptybottle wrote: post #70

To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...

If I was the co-founder of one of the top websites in the world that had to pivot from my shitty news organization into what looks like a shitty version of Diaspora, I’m not so sure I’d be thrilled with “thousands.” You need network effects for social network rivals to take off. That isn’t to say there won’t be a Facebook successor (there almost certainly will be one — the big challenge for Facebook is if it has a pi…

Isn't he controlling the throttle with limited "free" signups and the pricing to go around it? A assume he must be happy since he's controlling the growth rate. It's not clear how fast it would be growing without a throttle on "free".

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#252

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #97
emptybottle wrote: post #70

To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...

If I was the co-founder of one of the top websites in the world that had to pivot from my shitty news organization into what looks like a shitty version of Diaspora, I’m not so sure I’d be thrilled with “thousands.” You need network effects for social network rivals to take off. That isn’t to say there won’t be a Facebook successor (there almost certainly will be one — the big challenge for Facebook is if it has a pi…

> (calling Mastadon a failure is unfair, but its not Twitter and won’t ever be),

Likewise Facebook isn't Myspace and never will be. Does this mean Facebook is a failure?

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#253

Post by g4d »

jonathathan wrote: post #137
thrownaway954 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The title should have said "more than half a million people". then it would have sounded better.

It's not true though..? 160k is not more than half a million

Maybe the above was sarcasm?

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#254

Post by kalleboo »

mehhh wrote: post #199
ReverseCold wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usefulness of a general "social network" is how many people it has. If I can't find almost everyone I know on it, and they are on a different platform (Facebook) it's easier for me to just use the other platform. People feel like they need it to keep in touch with others they don't see often (or even just others in general). I personally don't have any major social media accounts, just small ones like HN - but I…

Are general social networks actually useful though? In mature markets, you have a huge chunk of people that have logged off Facebook permanently. What matters is the people I want to interact with, and in Seattle they are on Mastodon. Not everyone needs to be on it, and frankly if close to everyone were on it you'd potentially drive away a good subset of users. That being said, by design I can retain my feed of frien…

> Are general social networks actually useful though

I'm not a big Facebook user, but my parents have been caught up in the bush fires currently raging in Australia and got cut off from power and internet (no power for satellite internet, and the mobile mast ran out of backup power), and finding a local Facebook group created to discuss the fires was fantastically helpful, I got in touch with their rural route mailman and people in the local village and found a bunch of good local news sources.

In comparison there was nearly nothing on Twitter (one Sydney reporter who was tweeting from her dispatch for two or three days). Main-stream news sites were utterly useless with no detail in their reports. Without Facebook I would have had drastically less information and more worry.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#255

Post by 113 »

fizilicious wrote: post #204
bonoboTP wrote: post #49

What a horrible name. How do I even pronounce it? "Double-u-tee social"? Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, especially for non-native English speakers.

A bit tangent, but as a non-native English speaker, I always get frustrated that single W is pronounced "double you" and single Y is "why". In my non-native English tongue I would pronounced the name as something like "Weh-Teh Social"

"Wet Social" sounds like something very different.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#256

Post by MiroF »

bamboozled wrote: post #245
MiroF wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the problem with FB that Wales is trying to solve is the incentive structure created by advertising and the associated data privacy issues. Usage of IG leaves that dynamic essentially intact.

Yup, I don't really have an issue with the advertisement model as is with IG because it's been a fantastic incentive for me not to look at it :) However, Wales' mission is noble and I hope he does well!

The insights they glean from your IG activity is then translated into the ads that you see all over the web - not just restricted to the ones on IG.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#257

Post by lasagnaphil »

viraptor wrote: post #248
Semiapies wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is going to be an anti-selling point for a lot of people.

It depends how well the blocking features will be advertised. "Lots of extremists have converged at xxx.social. You can block them all in one go." sounds better to me than what's happening in Twitter.

Agreed, federated instance is a way better solution than Twitter blocklists. In fact, I think Mastodon was designed to combat such extremists from day one, so even with the alt-right’s foray into the fediverse things will go at least better than Twitter.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#258

Post by lasagnaphil »

metalliqaz wrote: post #145
mongol wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I think it is a social network. They come in many shapes and forms. I think a forum is a social network too.

HN doesn't even have direct messages, though.

I don’t even use the direct message feature at all in Reddit, but I still feel like interacting with people when I write comments though.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#259

Post by thosakwe »

mehhh wrote: post #233
thosakwe wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of ActivityPub, but in practice, I think the very complex protocol, which is built on top of JSON-LD (I still don't understand why) of all things, and accepts variable structures for many, if not most fields, which makes it cumbersome to (de)serialize in languages with static typing, will hurt adoption by new projects. My main gripe with it is that potentially writing a spec-compliant server in an ent…

There are tons of differing implementations like PeerTube, PixelFed (Instagram-esque), Lemmy (Federated Reddit/HN), Write.as (great for blogging on the fediverse and closed platforms at the same time), Pleroma, etc

Yet out of those, which actually implement the full spec (server-to-server, not to mention client-to-server, though I do think I remember reading that Pleroma has it), or even if they implement parts of it, do it in a compliant way? I would imagine the number is small because of the sheer complexity of the spec, and the many ways the same data can appear in different requests. I remember reading one of the Pleroma authors saying that they don't support JSON-LD in their implementation because no library for it existed in Elixir.

Like I said, I'm a fan of ActivityPub and its concept, but I think it's fair to say that spec is more complex than what it needs to be, and would have been better off strictly defining the shape of data it can handle.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#260

Post by machello13 »

psweber wrote: post #62
jermaustin1 wrote: post #14

I can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago. Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be…

I fantasize about a product like that sometimes. A private, pay social site geared towards families. Your family pays a yearly subscription. Photo/video sharing. Event planning. Family news timeline. Everything purely linear. No manipulation to maximize engagement. No ads. Just real information about your family that you care about. One side of my family has about 30 people that are all willing to travel to meet some…

I think Glassboard used to be something like this, but it never took off.
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