Live data from Hacker News

We should replace Facebook with personal websites

motherboard.vice.com

291–300 of 318 posts

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#291
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

My ideal social media was FriendFeed, and yes it was in many ways similar to an RSS feed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#292
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…

For non-technical people who have some interest in learning html / css and a free weekend, its even easier: - https://www.codecademy.com/learn/make-a-website - host for free on netlify - maybe simple intro to git to make updating and deploying to netlify easier anyone can learn basic html / css (in 6th grade we did a week long "build a website" project and everyone did it -- this was back in the late 90s), and with f…

To us this seems very easy and I too have designed my own portfolio webpage for instance, but really do you think my nearly 80-yo grandpa or even my peer and best friend from high school who has those pesky 12-hour nursing shifts between all of her downtime has the ability or more importantly cares to do this? the desire and wherewithal to design a webpage is still a very niche interest.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself. Said as a true developer who no longer realizes how hard some of the things we do are to the average person who can barely operate their computer or smart phone. Think of all the things you have to learn in order to host your own site. I still have to explain the basics of what a domain name is to potential freelance customers, and why they need hosting in…

lol ... this seems to be a theme today in several different threads. Literally anyone on this website should take their own behavior as the opposite of what they assume the average user can or will do.

I honestly can't with the HN crowd at times. The problem with a bubble is you often don't realize you're in one.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#294
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d think that if personal websites were a valid substitute for Facebook, the whole thing would have never taken off in the first place. Personal websites didn’t see massive adoption the first time around, and we can safely doubt they ever will.

Because they were obtuse to set up for 99% of people. Myspace basically made quick and easy personal pages for the masses, and everyone used it because it was quick and easy. If a company is able to do it right for the 99% of people who don't know what FTP is, then its got a shot.

Squarespace? But still, a website isn’t worth $10/month to most folks.

I think the other user was right who commented that most Facebook users are content consumers, versus content creators. That is, they browse much more than they post.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#295
post #208
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…

Ehh, wordpress is a mis-step along our path of digital expression. There's this new thing called flat HTML files that are very easy to maintain and much more flexible (and secure). If you don't mind a complete mess, like me :P

I miss messy 90s sites

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#296
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…

We are already trying here to offer FREE personal website for User at https://UserCV.com/users

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#297
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…

We are already trying here to offer FREE personal website for User at https://UserCV.com/users

Personal CV websites are future, but they need more like "FEED" or "RSS" and "followers" mechanism

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#298

That's a good idea. We need a decentralized facebook, where everybody hosts and shares their data. It would need a registry or identity provider for the initial contact, but then it should replicate facebook functionality in a decentralized way. If you want to see posts in a group (like facebook group) - you query online members part of the group for their data, and download/share the latest version.

Agreed. We need a common social media specification. Like Diaspora, but just the spec. Diaspora is a solution, and solutions would implement the spec. Then sites like Facebook/Neocities/Wordpress could comply with the spec. How you treat your own posts on your own site, with your own theme etc would be up to you. Your feed would exist within your own website and would consist of posts pulled in via RSS or some other syndication spec.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#299

The alternative, now that network bandwidth isn't in the 56Kbps range and sometimes on and sometimes off, is doable. If you look at the "end" game, imagine that everyone has a machine at their house that they can access locally in their web browser. It has easy tools for posting updates and pictures. When you create a "profile" on it, you can choose to upload that profile to a well known repository of profiles. There…

I had a very similar idea, except the machine you're referring to here is your phone. Once you restrict yourself to text and low-res pictures, your phone can be your server. A single app would let you edit your profile and post items to a feed. This includes a web server. You can also use it to view friends' profiles and chronological updates from their feeds. All data lives on your phone, fetching updates happens by…

This sounds a lot like the scuttlebutt protocol [1] if you provided a discovery service for it.

1. https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/

Post reply on HN