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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#391
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Aether : https://getaether.net/ ?

> Windows 7 or higher https://getaether.net/download/ That does cover much of the market... but leaves out Linux, MacOS, and mobile.

On my browser it says "Download for Mac", so presumably you get a link specific to your current OS.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#392
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Aether : https://getaether.net/ ?

Ah, somebody posted it before I could. :) (Disclosure: I’m the creator of Aether, happy to answer any questions)

It sounds like just what I want.

But I use VPNs. So I'd need to get a mapped port.

What port does Aether want?

Edit: Also, can I just install from source?

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#393
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a fairly large network of friends that existed before FB really had wide adoption. The platform they were on eventually died in favor of facebook. At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.

For your use case, what part of your need isn't provided by a phone/address-book? I suspect it's the receipt of broadcast messages from your friend network? If so, then yes, you need a social network with features like FB. Personally, I'd rather not receive those kind of messages - I only want to receive messages that someone specifically thought to send to me. Doing so dramatically reduces noise. The only exception…

I see your point and it's valid.

Broadcast messages from people you care about are nice. So and so had a baby, or whatever else is going on in their life. It's why FB was useful for before it became a continuous stream of reposted drivel.

I like to keep up with what's going on in people's lives at a scale greater than one to one interactions can support. In my view, there's definitely an upside to technology that supports a number of friends and acquaintances roughly 10x what one could support otherwise.

Hell, even linkedin is somewhat useful to be able to keep up with what old colleagues are up to and reconnect at times.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#394

Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network. I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events. In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events. What else do you need for a…

I was wondering why it needed to be such a jarring price. $13 per month? Really? What’s the bandwidth cost on text and a few images in S3? Critical mass is obviously the barrier to building something like this but I’m inclined to agree that charging $1/month and $10 a year should be able to turn a healthy profit. I do kind of wonder if the public is even aware of the problem, though. Anyone I’ve spoken to outside the…

What costs more is not hardware but the salaries of employees.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#395

With things like GNU Social you can have your own social network effectively free and you 100% control it. How can this compete with that? The only real way is the network effect (all your friends are on it so you feel like you have no choice but to join because it's going to be very hard to get everyone to switch to your network). WT Social doesn't have that, so... ?

WT:Social is never going to have a Facebook level network effect, but it's certainly going to be higher than GNU Social. I just created an account 5 mins ago and I was number 100k+ so they're off to a good start.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#396
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a fairly large network of friends that existed before FB really had wide adoption. The platform they were on eventually died in favor of facebook. At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.

Why wouldn't you go to a open alternative like Mastodon instead to yet another silo?

I've contemplated hosting an instance of Mastodon. It doesn't quite have the features I'd like it to have.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the bay area, I have hundreds of acquaintances that are burners, hippies, makers, etc. I've been keeping up with these folks for nearly two decades now and would like to continue to do so as they have enriched my life immeasurably. Many of us get together on at least a yearly basis and often do special events together. All the other tools that we would've used to communicate and coordinate with each other have die…

That's too bad. I'm lucky -- in my area, the burners, hippies, and makers don't use Facebook for coordination. They have mailing lists for that.

I suspect the community here is just too large for something like a mailing list. I mean, there are mailing list, but they're less generalized than I like.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#398
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't upvote though. One of the nice things same Reddit is that you can go to a subreddit about something you want to learn about and sort for the most popular posts from last year (for example). Some kind of system like that for websites could become a killer feature.

You could treat a link to the post as a proxy for an upvote, and then rank posts based on how many other posts link to them. Of course you wouldn't be able to charge for this service so you'd have to sell ad space on the front page.

That would be an exceedingly thin signal. Very few posts will have incoming links, so you'll get very little scoring data.

The signal will be hugely susceptible to outlier bias -- The Post That Goes Viral, and generates a huge number of incoming links -- will dominate the rankings.

Because the signal is so thin, distorting and manipulation (through link farming) will be cheap and difficult to detect (a small number of links across a large number of sites).

Don't get me wrong: looking at incidental behaviour is useful, and can often be much more beneficial than direct actions. But remember that all of these signals are actually proxies for some ineffible quantity you're trying to measure, quality.

(The very definition of which should leave you crying on the floor after a few hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Or years....)

May minds have attempted this task. All have fail.

Your correspondent included.

(Small site, many moons ago, since surrendered its electrons back to the Great Disk in the Sky.)

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is easy to set up a site, to blog and people can comment and you do not get drowned in auto spam? Where and how?

...and enough people find your content to have a decent conversation without you having to learn marketing?

Try. My blog got 16 visitors from another blog today.

(edit: it is now 23!)

Won't make me rich.

But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web.

If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you.

You won't get rich but you will be part of something.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#400
post #298

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

> What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do? There were a lot of these. I think moderation ended up being a huge problem that none solved. > Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content I've had the opposite experience. I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the…

Reddit, like HN, was never as good as it used to be, though many like to pretend it was.

The locus has shifted, though. Early Reddit was decidely techy, it's now exceedingly popular/memey. There were and are many cesspits. As well as numerous dead or stagnent fora, several of which I can lay claim to myself.

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