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We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

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Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#51

Post by wmeredith »

blatherard wrote: post #42
65827 wrote: post #8

The alternative increasingly is to simple delete facebook and live a more offline life. Starting to see it become more and more trendy nowadays, especially among teenagers. It's considered retro and hip to just schedule social time and disconnect completely

Here's one bit of anecdata in response. I've tried to disconnect from social media and get out in the real world. I took an improv class in NYC with about 15 other people, a range of ages & backgrounds. On the last day of the class, a number of the students were asking around for Facebook profiles to keep in touch. When asked, I replied that I didn't have a Facebook account anymore and it was...awkward, to say the le…

The fact that exchanging a phone number or email is more formal is a feature, not a bug. Very few people's Facebook "friends" are actually so. That's why it's an annoying time sync.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#52

Post by Existenceblinks »

glenstein wrote: post #46
Existenceblinks wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need 1 instance for every individual, that's the problem. Non techies who already have privilege to access internet should be able to instantiate their own instances very easily.

I'm all for it if we can get there, but I think a wide range of individual, federated instances is a good step in that direction, and even that would be a huge achievement. I think something like Opera Unite had the potential to be a single instance per person if that ever caught on.

I think Mastodon as a native or Electron app that uses bit torrent protocol should do it. Not sure what's the problem with that or I am too optimistic.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#53

Post by marmaduke »

skewart wrote: post #44
Sir_Substance wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). We already have a model for this: email. You and I can use w…

> We already have a model for this: email. Come to think of it, you could build a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter clone on top of email pretty easily. All it would take is a slightly reimagined client. Just whitelist addresses of people you "follow" and display their emails in a separate, more visually rich feed (e.g. automatically downloading and displaying images). Make the UI/UX of "posting" an email to your feed…

How would you keep rich messages from polluting the traditional inbox? I mean, I'd want to keep my existing address and use it as regular email, too

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#54

Post by skybrian »

wmeredith wrote: post #50
skybrian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is insecure and was overwhelmed by spam, driving people to use systems (such as Gmail) that are good at filtering spam. Any distributed system will need to figure out how to deal with spam and abuse. That's hard to do without there being a dedicated team to deal with flagged messages.

Eh, if you set up your social email client like Twitter, you only get messages from those people you follow. Done.

That's a rather simplistic model of how Twitter works. People use @ replies and hashtags for impromptu communication between strangers.

It's not how email works either.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#55

Post by agnivade »

kem wrote: post #13

This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized services...) I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services. The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own service…

You might want to take a look at - https://zeronet.io/

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#56

Post by slim »

godelski wrote: post #47

It seems to me that a social network is one of those natural monopolies. It works so well because so many people use it. Remember the big reason many social network alternatives failed, no one else was on them. There are some things (very few in fact) that just work better as monopolies. But that just means you need to regulate it differently. And there's an interesting discussion, how best to regulate natural monopo…

Nationalise Social Networks

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#58

Post by Sir_Substance »

marmaduke wrote: post #53
skewart wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already have a model for this: email. Come to think of it, you could build a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter clone on top of email pretty easily. All it would take is a slightly reimagined client. Just whitelist addresses of people you "follow" and display their emails in a separate, more visually rich feed (e.g. automatically downloading and displaying images). Make the UI/UX of "posting" an email to your feed…

How would you keep rich messages from polluting the traditional inbox? I mean, I'd want to keep my existing address and use it as regular email, too

There are a bunch of email headers you could backwards shoe-horn into serving the purpose of allowing clients to recognize the difference between a life update and a traditional mail, or you could create a new one. You could then make it standard behavior to handle emails with that header via a social client if one is available, and otherwise discard/hide them.

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#59

Post by Sir_Substance »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #29
Sir_Substance wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). We already have a model for this: email. You and I can use w…

The W3C Social Web Working Group [1] is working on this. Relevant standards through that lens include Micropub [2] and Activity Streams [3]. [1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ [3] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

I didn't know that, but that's excellent. I've got some reading to do!

Re: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

#60

Post by Sir_Substance »

skybrian wrote: post #36
Sir_Substance wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). We already have a model for this: email. You and I can use w…

Email is insecure and was overwhelmed by spam, driving people to use systems (such as Gmail) that are good at filtering spam. Any distributed system will need to figure out how to deal with spam and abuse. That's hard to do without there being a dedicated team to deal with flagged messages.

It's very true, but this is a known and heavily researched problem. We have solutions to it, compromised solutions perhaps, but solutions none the less.

The current state of social networks vs email is night and day. I would never host my own email (despite self-hosting almost all my other online services) because the anti-spam techniques in wide usage are so punitive if you get your config wrong (your IP and domain basically get permanently sin-binned), but I use gandi.net as my email provider, I'm able to choose to pay them money and in exchange get my mail handled by someone I trust.

I'd gladly pay to use facebook, but run by someone I trust. However, social services are centralized to such an extreme even vs email that I actually cannot pay to have secure and respectful social networking, as facebook has successfully locked everyone else out of the game.

I digress. Email is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than social.

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