Slow social media

It was also invite based and it was exciting to get an invite back then. It was more like a phone book, it had detailed profiles where you could specify your favorite things, introduce yourself, upload a few pictures etc. It didn't have a newsfeed. Later they would introduce some kind of notification when someone uploaded new pics. But it was mainly "poll-based", i.e. you'd go to specific profiles to see if they uploaded anything new.

This was a significant break from the pseudonymous forum and chat culture (A/S/L?), and blended your real life with the previously totally separate online world for the first time. Now you could look up classmates, see who viewed your profile, of course it drove a lot of teen drama as you'd expect. It was a more public companion to the nascent MSN Messenger culture (which replaced the SMS-based more private teen comms culture, which replaced the family-landline-phone-based gossip culture and of course IRL-based one, feels weird to have lived through all those transitions - we didn't even have a family landline phone in the early 90s and would use phone booths to call family members in other cities).

The mainstream dominance of iWiW in Hungary was actually quite short-lived (~2004-2009), though it feels longer in my memory, there was so much happening, so much new stuff popping up. Note also that iWiW got bought by the local subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom already in 2006. So it was quite obvious that there's commercial value in such sites.

Initially Facebook was also more profile-focused, where the main activity was looking up profiles, checking their friends, reading bios, looking at galleries etc. (where you actually clicked links to explore, instead of being fed a feed and just scrolling), and the newsfeed-focus only got introduced later.

Nowadays, Facebook is mostly a public agora in Hungary, the platform for politicians and pundits and social critique etc (instead of Twitter like in other countries). I think the eager culture to post updates for real friends has dwindled, people are less naive about it and also realized they don't really care all that much about their second cousin's vacations or their old classmates' life updates. Real personal "social media" is mostly in private Whatsapp groups I think.

These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from venturing outside the walls.

Friendica is one of several fediverse platforms the author basically describes. You can even self-host an instance for yourself and friends/family.

And you may say:

> I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.

Perfect. IMO, the minuscule friction to enter is the benefit. The walled gardens exist and hold people in such high numbers exactly because they've reduced the friction to enter and increased it to leave. The definition of a trap, yes?

I expect that by suggesting something that is quite literally what the author described, we'll both be downvoted to hell because HN has a staunch "fediverse, ew!" mentality.