Alright folks, it's time to bring back Geocities and Angelfire. Pull out your antique rotating skull and "under construction" gifs.
There is https://neocities.org/
We should replace Facebook with personal websites
51–60 of 318 posts
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#52Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages.
* It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues).
* It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow everyone's updates.
* It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to connect to.
* It has group conversation.
* It has event planning.
Personal pages have none of that, except with syndication where RSS is a partial solution. And on top of that, Facebook is providing it free-of-charge (with the "hidden" cost of scattering your personal data all across the universe) with very minimal setup, including for laypersons.
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#53This 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…
I agree with your comments except for (respectfully) the part about: "We need to just accept the new world..." I firmly think this all represents opportunity. Opportunity for technologists to develop open platforms that are NOT cumbersome to setup nor to host by the layperson, and that - at least over some time - are extremely inexpensive. Maybe i'm an optimist, but i firmly believe there will be an open platform - o…
Totally agree, I just don't want people to think it is going back to what it was in the late 90s and getting trapped thinking that was some type of golden age. Going forward there is tremendous opportunity to do new things that give people the ability to express themselves online.
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#54I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Dispora* yet: https://diasporafoundation.org/ I looked into it a while ago and it was a little cumbersome to set up, but I really like the idea.
Did that ever take off? I haven't heard about it in ages...
There's quite a bit of talk about Mastodon lately, but not about Diaspora...
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#55A rough timeline of the early 2000s: 1. Google creates the first noteworthy current gen search engine. 2. The web slowly starts moving towards a semantic platform with separate presentation. 3. Google creates the world's largest ad platform. 4. The semantic web inexplicably dies (see 3). 5. The web painfully and lossily becomes a series of dense monolithic networks. 6. People realize this might be a bad thing.
> The semantic web inexplicably dies
"Inexplicably" except for the fact that it doesn't actually work - outside purely charitable and socially-oriented efforts (e.g. Wikidata), there's no incentive for web sites to provide machine-readable, "semantic" information, and quite a bit of incentive not to. And Google didn't "create" the world's largest ad platform, either - they bought it (DoubleClick) and merged it with their technically-superior advertising offer.
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you back that claim about the majority of Facebook users not producing content with data please EDIT: Specifing the claim
The author of the article did not, so why should a comment saying differently be held to a higher standard? Plus asking for data about a long post without referencing which part you even want data on is unconstructive.
The author of the article did not, so why should a comment saying differently be held to a higher standard?
Two wrongs don't make a right, and how do you know to what standard the parent poster holds the author? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Plus asking for data about a long post without referencing which part you even want data on is unconstructive.
There was one claim made in the five sentence GP post.
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#57That'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.
Aspects of this already exist to varying degrees of polish. Conduct a search for pleroma, mastodon, gnu social, hubzilla, friendica, diaspora, etc. and you'll see a diverse ecosystem of platforms. By the way, this ecosystem is referred to as the fediverse (federated universe). Sure, the thousands (yes thousands!) of mastodon servers/instances receive most of the limelight, but mastodon is not the only platform. The old challenge used to be the network effect ("oh, but none of my friends are on network X...")...but with recent stats citing over 2.5 million users active on the above networks...it is just a matter of time when one of your friends will make their way onto the fediverse, pulling you and your other friends into it. So - perhaps a little prematurely - I welcome you to the Fediverse! :-)
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#58This conversation always devolves, or evolves into a discussion about RSS. I actually think there's an opportunity for the "website builders" namely WordPress, to create "consumer" app(s) that pull in feeds from WordPress powered blogs (with RSS) This consumer / consumption app would compete with Facebook/Twitter directly. WordPress powers a significant % of the web and combined with the market share of some of the o…
I love this idea. Although I think the fastest way to bootstrap that, ironically, would be to make it heavily dependent on Facebook:
1. login with Facebook (no signup needed)
2. share articles & post comments on Facebook
3. model the app after Facebook to hijack existing neural pathways
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#59>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…
There are also a number of people who primarily share content rather than create/write it as well.
Me, I personally treat it like a blog in the sense that I'm there to either "like" it, go past it, or go to the comments section.
Regardless, reproducing Facebook via personal websites would be daunting if not impossible. One, not everyone is going to feel comfortable doing HTML/CSS/JS or even working in a CMS w/ drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG. Two, if I know your name (and if it isn't unique enough, we either share connections or I know some other details about you you've posted), I can search for you on Facebook. How easily can that be created with personal websites when you're also searching against the broader web (good luck searching for your friend Mercedes's personal site. Have a friend named Mike Rowe and you guys joke about how his name is like that one guy with the tv show? Best of luck finding his site too).
And we can argue "but the user can take back control of their data" which on face value is true, the problem is that I think for a lot of people I know on Facebook, they don't care. At least the convenience outweighs the concerns. And that's fine, that's their right. They weighed the pros/cons and found Facebook to have agreeable compromises. As do businesses that sell on Amazon I'm sure.
I do want a solution that gets away from Facebook. The problem is it needs to be something that is easy enough for a non-tech user to manage and consume. If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche.
Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites
#60>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
The magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery. I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.