The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts.
For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users.
If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it simpler yet, and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it's strong incumbent advantage.
So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with "a world without Facebook".
When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database?
There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.
You're right, this is a weird article with a bizarre solution. Throwing obscure technology at a simple human problem is not the solution here. Facebook simply made social communication easier for the average Joes, and in the quest to do so became a monster. IRC/AIM/MSN/Gmail before that, and Snapchat/Slack after that shows that humans just want to communicate about silly things.
Whatever comes next needs to solve the problem to share the silly tidbits, without the greed to turn the users into a data farm.
I think you're downplaying the technical sophistication of Facebook, as well as the pioneering moves it made during its growth phase. Compared to MySpace, which was incumbent during its rise, Facebook did everything faster, with less friction for the everyday user. MySpace would often try and stuff full interstitial page loads between core parts of its user interface.
Facebook invented photos tagged with social profiles. Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Since going public, Facebook's ad platform has remained at the forefront of useful and powerful online services. You can target users by interest, worldwide location, age, and more. It is an elegant platform that has been mishandled by aloof executies.
>"The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet"
I don't think people actually want the Internet, they want a walled garden.
Something with a the functionality of facebook and the commenting system of reddit would get me on board. When you get into a discussion with someone under a comment they posted on CNN you literally have to check in periodically to see if they replied and if two conversations get going on the same thread the're just layered in chronological order so things get really confusing. Facebook seems to actively discourage discourse. Just leave a comment and go away.
I also like how Mastodons feed just shows everything posted by people you're following in chronological order. I don't need a custom algorithm to decide what shows up in my feed when unless it's an algorithm of my design.
Also facebook has broken a lot of its features on mobile browsers to try and force people into installing it's apps. I don't want facebooks crappy apps on my phone so I have to force the desktop page to load to view private messages, but that breaks the website completely so I have to reload the mobile version of the site m.facebook.com while forcing desktop mode to be able to read private messages from the phone.
I would say that during it's rise to market leader facebook was the most user friendly social networking site, but the whole thing rattles and the tires are getting bald now
simpler is not directly needed, as Facebook already reaches the minimum viable simplicity for many functionalities. More compelling certainly would help.
The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.
We need the DoJ to take Facebook to court for being a social network monopoly. If AT&T exhibited destructive network effects, Facebook is them times ten. “Market share” measured solely in purchasing consumers is no longer a good sole metric for monopolies.
A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well. The question I ask myself is how a product that so demonstrably[1] makes people unhappier the more they use it can be sustainable. What problem does Facebook cure?
The engagement loops trigger behavioral patterns that are supposed to encourage healthy relationships, but in this case it pulls us into a low-fidelity world of screens that pulls us away from enjoying the moment together with people that actually chose to be there in real life with us.
The endless feeds are arguably even more destructive as it removes the natural stopping point and the small moments of boredom where our minds get a chance to be creative instead of just consuming.
Maybe real life has a moat that is stronger than Facebooks network? I believe all need people that are offended when we don't hang out often enough more than Facebook likes and pretty pictures, so if the choice is between the two ....
My 90 year old grandpa still uses my late grandmother's AOL account and is afraid to stop paying the monthly service. He doesn't use Facebook mostly only FWD:FWD:FWD emails.
The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them.
The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current cultural standard for ethics.
Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations, having come out of academia with their "don't be evil" slogan, but inevitably all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are relying on VC funding.
I'd love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.
I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video. Which don't belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common protocol. Then multiple "vendors" can host the information (encrypted so they can't read it), and multiple "vendors" can create clients.
I often feel like the block chain is derailing the decentralized Internet by adding unnecessary complexity.
That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of that.
The useful part of block chain is the Merkel tree, where each small piece of data is tamper proof and consistent because it hashes the data that came before it. Having all the social data on one big chain would be silly, because it would never scale.
Scuttlebutt is a protocol just like you describe and is already being used by different clients and plugins to build a distributed social network that works quite well.
I have no idea how blockchain helps social media. If my details, my posts or other "my thing" end up in one they're indelible, no? So how does that help me exercise my right to be forgotten? Besides the perf question of syncing blockchains, or the design hit of federating them, or apportioning by some yet-to-be-defined traffic/post/data taxonomy...
I have friends who are almost religious about the "virtues of blockchain", but have little to no understanding of how it actually works. There seems to be this idea that adding blockchain to any existing technology will magically make it better.
I'm all for blockchain technology, but it's not the solution to everything. It's great when you want relatively immutable, decentralized record keeping.
Couldn't the indelible blockchain-embedded data be pointers to data hosted elsewhere? If the externally hosted data is "forgotten", the blockchain-verified pointers would be useless.
For me the trinity is facebook, twitter, and slack, so I've started figuring out how to replace them all at once.
So far riot/matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and discord, at least for my purposes.
I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook messenger. So riot/matrix could reduce my reliance on facebook in some ways, too.
I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems mastodon is the most likely twitter replacement. Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation.
As for the rest of facebook... I don't know. I was reading this thing about addiction, and how the bitch of addiction is that not only is it the thing you're addicted to, but it is also the thing that makes it harder to kick the addiction. (In the case of a substance, it hacks your brain to make it more difficult to resist impulse/urge.) Seems like something of a parallel, in how using facebook makes it harder to leave. The only path out in those cases is to take slow incremental steps that make it easier to resist over time. So, carving out the pieces of facebook that are important to you. For me that might be a public blog to share my thoughts, an email list, actually gathering email addresses and phone numbers for people on facebook I might want to stay in touch with, etc. Although I still want to check out Disapora and Scuttlebutt... and I don't know if ActivityPub is relevant here.
I don't get what the difference between Facebook and Twitter even is supposed to be. One for people you know and one for people you don't? You can solve that in something like Mastodon by just having two independent content feeds (and you can already set that up).
It probably used to be character limit, but again Twitter has already doubled theirs and Mastodon's is already 500 characters.
That and the main developer of Mastodon is working on media features to make it work better as an Instagram replacement as well.
The real secret sauce is that the Fediverse and AcitivtyPub means if you want a Facebook like experience you can use Diaspora and still friend / share / communicate with people on a Mastodon instance. Different programs can emerge as fews into this data graph but its still the same fundamental primitives (soon to be a web standard) data types.
Speaking of Riot, I'm hopeful the developers will look into integrating it better into said fediverse. It should probably at least support some means for Mastodon hosts to easily spin up a Matrix server at their Mastodon domain with no friction and the same account database. It will probably take Matrix protocol revisions to make that work, though.
Probably one of the important killer but missing features of Matrix will be the ability to integrate into websites the way Facebook messenger does, so you can have the social media site with the popup chat frames.
The only missing feature in my mind after all that is something akin to Facebook / reddit comment threads / disquis / discourse. So that non-social media sites can integrate social media comment sections into their media that either autogenerate threads, repost to a Mastodon instance / on Diaspora and let Fediverse commentors just comment right there on the page.
> Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation.
I've a carefully curated list of people I follow and Twitter is 100% useless with the algorithmic sort. Get a client that has a strictly chronological timeline. For example, I use Flamingo for Android and it's great.
After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave.
Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.
I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.
I upvoted you. What gets down voted on HN no longer makes sense to me. You make a really good point alluding to the direction our society is heading. I think a world where everything is digital and behind a "veil" of keyboard and monitors is a dangerous one. We need to make sure we don't lose touch with the reality that is the physical world so we don't live 100% online. All I see these days are groups of teenagers standing together looking at their phones...it's fucking terrible.
In my case there it's not a problem with a good friends, but that I will lose access to some interesting people, who publish/discuss interesting topics on FB.
Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price of all the things they buy.
That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze the shit out of their behavior. Users could be customers again. So the real question is how do you convince potential users that they are better off paying for services directly?
It is of course not that simple, it never is, think for example about people seeing ads for Gucci bags and actually buying them and how they subsidize people which may see those ads but never actually buy the products because they can not afford them and which may also not have the money to pay for services directly.
But I do not think any of the peripheral issues fundamentally changes the core challenges, getting people off of ad supported services.
Here's why I don't think decentralization is a red herring: in a centralized service, if you disagree, you don't have another option. If you didn't like AOL and quit, there was no way for you to maintain contact with AOL users unless both parties used a different platform.
Decentralized systems like phone, e-mail, and mail allow you to maintain contact with people while having control over your provider. I understand that we've lost some of that control, but the basic idea stands.
If you don't have Facebook, you can't reach out to other Facebook users. If you don't have Verizon phone service, you can still call Verizon users with AT&T or <insert your another phone service>. If you don't have Gmail, you can still send e-mails to Gmail users from Yahoo or <insert e-mail service>. If you don't like USPS, you can send mail through UPS or <insert another service>.
Facebook capitalised by being in the right place at the right time, a time when the internet was opened to the non-tech savy, the "regular" world spilled into what was already a social experience. This is why Facebook now has the moniker of the "mom" platform. Technology like blockchain might free the business model from having to generate revenue and better align the experaince.
But I have an easier time believing people will just dump social media than some Utopian public social ledger is going to solve what is essentially a psychological shitfest.
This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized social network I've seen.
How on earth is blockchain going help? Seriously! There is no conceptual situation, in theory or practice, that blockchain will improve upon Facebook situation.
Generally speaking, Facebook is bad for about 5 reasons:
1. Privacy: unexpected people see your data (legally).
2. Right-to-be-forgotten: your data sticks around longer than expected.
3. Data Security: your data is stolen from your data keeper.
4. Cyberbully: Unwanted data surfaces without your control
5. Fake news: wrong information is fed to you.
How do blockchains help with ANY of these? 2. is certainly getting WORSE, since blockchains never forget. 1. is probably getting WORSE, because most blockchains are public. 3. is getting SO MUCH WORSE, because so many other people will now store data, and compromises in any of them will expose everything (think African Prince scam). 4. will become impossible to solve, because the data is going to be public and cannot be deleted, and because all of those anonymous mechanism will ensure that the culprit is impossible to track. 5. won't be impacted.
So, tell me, how the hell do blockchains help? Seriously.
Look, I know blockchain is a cool idea (yay! no need for central database!). However, central database can help in many situation, especially in anything involves history, limit of access, and regulation.
In my opinion: good premise, bad conclusion. Blockchain, as good as it can be, isn't really required for social sharing.
I'm going to state pretty obvious things. We need to take a step backwards. What we need is a decentralized/federated app platform. It must run in any OS, it must allow to any actor to provide its own implementation (and their own apps - providing network effect) and it must be easy to use for the final user.
We already have some parts of this done. Facebook just took advantage that community didn't know what to do with them.
How about starting by just having a good, open source social platform for the Web, like Wordpress is for blogs. Wordpress is used to host 20% of all new websites.
Meanwhile, to post a comment on TechCrunch, I had to register yet another account with yet another password, and after that the comment I was writing was lost (despite the site saying it will save it). And then I still couldn't post it on a mobile phone!
This is 2018, and you can see how the state of decentralized social networking sucks. I made a video about it:
Do you really want to live your days feeling dependent on this sort of "service"? Do you really want to say, "but I need Facebook!".
In today's age, you need a phone number and e-mail. It's ok - they are decentralized. Don't let a centralized platform of Facebook's evil nature become necessary for you to live your life.
Delete and forget it existed. Ignore and move on. Give up the benefits and pay the cost.
How about moving away from free services and demanding security, privacy, and customer support. Change our attitudes so we are not willing to be the product any more.
So basically we pay $1 a year instead of giving facebook all our our information?
That might sound reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since 2008.
Before they were acquired by FB, WhatsApp charged like 1$ per year for the service. Since they were mobile-first and most people had entered their credit card info to join the App Store/Play Store, the transaction was friction-less for users.
The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently.
Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against deleting the whole account only because it's an invaluable address book. Realistically, the inertia of people to leave it will keep me as a user for a long time.
I think the way forward is to embrace ActivityPub and similar endeavours. I'm not sure how much of Diaspora wound up on ActivityPub[0] / ActivitySteams[1] but I feel as though the best path forward for projects like Diaspora is to reach out to W3C to see what could be standardized.
ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it was called) and similar open sourced twitter-like platforms, it doesn't necessarily mean we should be restricted to "micro" blogging by those platforms (besides, sharing pictures, and such is somewhat still valid "micro" blogging just look at Tumblr). If the limits are too much you could still at the very least send over a summary between hubs and if the person wants more info they can visit the originating site for the whole post.
I think the path forward is to use open and standardized formats / protocols. We have the technology... There's a couple of implementations for ActivityPub/ActivityStreams already[2], you could either join one and contribute or just start one yourself if none are in the language / license you prefer.
If we can get some good examples of social networking sites interoperating with each other using W3C standards like the ones you mention, then things will get very interesting with the introduction of the GDPR in Europe. Specifically, it includes a right to data portability, with the wording:
"In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible."
Conceivably, a Facebook user could demand that Facebook support automatically sending their Facebook posts to their friends on third party social networks. I imagine that an EU court would not be very sympathetic to Facebook claiming that it isn't technically feasible for a (large, monopolistic, American) company to support this use case when small open source (European?) competitors have implemented the W3C standards with no trouble.
Once Facebook is forced by the GDPR to publish data to competing sites, I imagine it will feel compelled to also support receiving data from people on those sites, otherwise the one-way flow of data would put Facebook users at a disadvantage. But then there is basically no reason to use Facebook, as users of competing sites would still be able to see and be seen by their friends on Facebook.
This is such a disastrous outcome for Facebook that I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers at Google (or some other big company) were already working on the legal complaints they are going to launch come May, when the GDPR comes into force.
A fundamental distinction needs to be made between blockchain-based and non-blockchain-based decentralized services. Blockchains are insanely ambitious, century-scale, state-killing, finance-replacing behemoths. WE DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT STUFF TO REPLACE FACEBOOK! You're exploding the problem way out of scope, and constant focus on blockchains seems almost like a false flag to demotivize people who just want to build decentralized alternatives to Facebook, which is already an astoundingly huge problem.
Stop trying to put blockchains in web decentralized systems. They're not going to work for several more decades. All we need to do to kill Facebook is solve the self-hosting P2P UX problem, and create a W3C-like body that allows developers to participate in standards creation process for how we schematize common social data. That's it. Once everyone is running a federated node in the cloud or in their basement, then you can go back to doing blockchain stuff.
Facebook badly needs a direct competitor. I wish there was social network with fewer features available, like what Facebook was in 2006-2007. Get rid of the newsfeed—it’s toxic and that’s the worst part of the experience. Make sharing related to specific groups— college friends, family, work friends, etc. I would prefer a social network with fewer features.
[+] [-] cornholio|8 years ago|reply
For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users.
If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it simpler yet, and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it's strong incumbent advantage.
So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with "a world without Facebook".
[+] [-] tlb|8 years ago|reply
There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.
[+] [-] FlyingSnake|8 years ago|reply
Whatever comes next needs to solve the problem to share the silly tidbits, without the greed to turn the users into a data farm.
[+] [-] ghostcluster|8 years ago|reply
Facebook invented photos tagged with social profiles. Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Since going public, Facebook's ad platform has remained at the forefront of useful and powerful online services. You can target users by interest, worldwide location, age, and more. It is an elegant platform that has been mishandled by aloof executies.
[+] [-] gerbilly|8 years ago|reply
I don't think people actually want the Internet, they want a walled garden.
Facebook is the new Compuserve, or AOL.
[+] [-] breakyerself|8 years ago|reply
I also like how Mastodons feed just shows everything posted by people you're following in chronological order. I don't need a custom algorithm to decide what shows up in my feed when unless it's an algorithm of my design.
Also facebook has broken a lot of its features on mobile browsers to try and force people into installing it's apps. I don't want facebooks crappy apps on my phone so I have to force the desktop page to load to view private messages, but that breaks the website completely so I have to reload the mobile version of the site m.facebook.com while forcing desktop mode to be able to read private messages from the phone.
I would say that during it's rise to market leader facebook was the most user friendly social networking site, but the whole thing rattles and the tires are getting bald now
[+] [-] sharpercoder|8 years ago|reply
The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asabjorn|8 years ago|reply
The engagement loops trigger behavioral patterns that are supposed to encourage healthy relationships, but in this case it pulls us into a low-fidelity world of screens that pulls us away from enjoying the moment together with people that actually chose to be there in real life with us.
The endless feeds are arguably even more destructive as it removes the natural stopping point and the small moments of boredom where our minds get a chance to be creative instead of just consuming.
Maybe real life has a moat that is stronger than Facebooks network? I believe all need people that are offended when we don't hang out often enough more than Facebook likes and pretty pictures, so if the choice is between the two ....
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-u...
[+] [-] zappo2938|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|8 years ago|reply
The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current cultural standard for ethics.
Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations, having come out of academia with their "don't be evil" slogan, but inevitably all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are relying on VC funding.
I'd love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.
[+] [-] swalsh|8 years ago|reply
I often feel like the block chain is derailing the decentralized Internet by adding unnecessary complexity.
[+] [-] allannienhuis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TimJRobinson|8 years ago|reply
Scuttlebutt is a protocol just like you describe and is already being used by different clients and plugins to build a distributed social network that works quite well.
[+] [-] Spearchucker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calibas|8 years ago|reply
I'm all for blockchain technology, but it's not the solution to everything. It's great when you want relatively immutable, decentralized record keeping.
[+] [-] Zee2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tunesmith|8 years ago|reply
So far riot/matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and discord, at least for my purposes.
I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook messenger. So riot/matrix could reduce my reliance on facebook in some ways, too.
I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems mastodon is the most likely twitter replacement. Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation.
As for the rest of facebook... I don't know. I was reading this thing about addiction, and how the bitch of addiction is that not only is it the thing you're addicted to, but it is also the thing that makes it harder to kick the addiction. (In the case of a substance, it hacks your brain to make it more difficult to resist impulse/urge.) Seems like something of a parallel, in how using facebook makes it harder to leave. The only path out in those cases is to take slow incremental steps that make it easier to resist over time. So, carving out the pieces of facebook that are important to you. For me that might be a public blog to share my thoughts, an email list, actually gathering email addresses and phone numbers for people on facebook I might want to stay in touch with, etc. Although I still want to check out Disapora and Scuttlebutt... and I don't know if ActivityPub is relevant here.
[+] [-] zanny|8 years ago|reply
It probably used to be character limit, but again Twitter has already doubled theirs and Mastodon's is already 500 characters.
That and the main developer of Mastodon is working on media features to make it work better as an Instagram replacement as well.
The real secret sauce is that the Fediverse and AcitivtyPub means if you want a Facebook like experience you can use Diaspora and still friend / share / communicate with people on a Mastodon instance. Different programs can emerge as fews into this data graph but its still the same fundamental primitives (soon to be a web standard) data types.
Speaking of Riot, I'm hopeful the developers will look into integrating it better into said fediverse. It should probably at least support some means for Mastodon hosts to easily spin up a Matrix server at their Mastodon domain with no friction and the same account database. It will probably take Matrix protocol revisions to make that work, though.
Probably one of the important killer but missing features of Matrix will be the ability to integrate into websites the way Facebook messenger does, so you can have the social media site with the popup chat frames.
The only missing feature in my mind after all that is something akin to Facebook / reddit comment threads / disquis / discourse. So that non-social media sites can integrate social media comment sections into their media that either autogenerate threads, repost to a Mastodon instance / on Diaspora and let Fediverse commentors just comment right there on the page.
[+] [-] tinkerer|8 years ago|reply
I've a carefully curated list of people I follow and Twitter is 100% useless with the algorithmic sort. Get a client that has a strictly chronological timeline. For example, I use Flamingo for Android and it's great.
[+] [-] eyeareque|8 years ago|reply
Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.
[+] [-] ams6110|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] traviswingo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newbie912|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbajson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbruc|8 years ago|reply
That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze the shit out of their behavior. Users could be customers again. So the real question is how do you convince potential users that they are better off paying for services directly?
It is of course not that simple, it never is, think for example about people seeing ads for Gucci bags and actually buying them and how they subsidize people which may see those ads but never actually buy the products because they can not afford them and which may also not have the money to pay for services directly.
But I do not think any of the peripheral issues fundamentally changes the core challenges, getting people off of ad supported services.
[+] [-] AHMagic|8 years ago|reply
Decentralized systems like phone, e-mail, and mail allow you to maintain contact with people while having control over your provider. I understand that we've lost some of that control, but the basic idea stands.
If you don't have Facebook, you can't reach out to other Facebook users. If you don't have Verizon phone service, you can still call Verizon users with AT&T or <insert your another phone service>. If you don't have Gmail, you can still send e-mails to Gmail users from Yahoo or <insert e-mail service>. If you don't like USPS, you can send mail through UPS or <insert another service>.
[+] [-] Tempest1981|8 years ago|reply
Couldn't they make even more profit by doing both? If they find the optimal balance?
I pay for cable TV, and still see lots of ads, so I guess I'm cynical.
[+] [-] wyck|8 years ago|reply
But I have an easier time believing people will just dump social media than some Utopian public social ledger is going to solve what is essentially a psychological shitfest.
[+] [-] olivermarks|8 years ago|reply
Bizarre that jonevans/techcrunch doesn't site these modern social networking sites, only the mysterious demise of Diaspora etc.
[+] [-] TimJRobinson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baggachipz|8 years ago|reply
edit never mind, I was looking at https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt
[+] [-] matte_black|8 years ago|reply
I am also unlikely to recommend it to people in real life. How could they get something so simple so wrong?
[+] [-] magice|8 years ago|reply
Generally speaking, Facebook is bad for about 5 reasons: 1. Privacy: unexpected people see your data (legally). 2. Right-to-be-forgotten: your data sticks around longer than expected. 3. Data Security: your data is stolen from your data keeper. 4. Cyberbully: Unwanted data surfaces without your control 5. Fake news: wrong information is fed to you.
How do blockchains help with ANY of these? 2. is certainly getting WORSE, since blockchains never forget. 1. is probably getting WORSE, because most blockchains are public. 3. is getting SO MUCH WORSE, because so many other people will now store data, and compromises in any of them will expose everything (think African Prince scam). 4. will become impossible to solve, because the data is going to be public and cannot be deleted, and because all of those anonymous mechanism will ensure that the culprit is impossible to track. 5. won't be impacted.
So, tell me, how the hell do blockchains help? Seriously.
Look, I know blockchain is a cool idea (yay! no need for central database!). However, central database can help in many situation, especially in anything involves history, limit of access, and regulation.
[+] [-] im_dario|8 years ago|reply
I'm going to state pretty obvious things. We need to take a step backwards. What we need is a decentralized/federated app platform. It must run in any OS, it must allow to any actor to provide its own implementation (and their own apps - providing network effect) and it must be easy to use for the final user.
We already have some parts of this done. Facebook just took advantage that community didn't know what to do with them.
[+] [-] pmuk|8 years ago|reply
https://www.scuttlebutt.nz
[+] [-] EGreg|8 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, to post a comment on TechCrunch, I had to register yet another account with yet another password, and after that the comment I was writing was lost (despite the site saying it will save it). And then I still couldn't post it on a mobile phone!
This is 2018, and you can see how the state of decentralized social networking sucks. I made a video about it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
[+] [-] AHMagic|8 years ago|reply
In today's age, you need a phone number and e-mail. It's ok - they are decentralized. Don't let a centralized platform of Facebook's evil nature become necessary for you to live your life.
Delete and forget it existed. Ignore and move on. Give up the benefits and pay the cost.
[+] [-] beamatronic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|8 years ago|reply
That might sound reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since 2008.
[+] [-] remir|8 years ago|reply
I thought that was genius.
[+] [-] 2aa07e2|8 years ago|reply
Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against deleting the whole account only because it's an invaluable address book. Realistically, the inertia of people to leave it will keep me as a user for a long time.
[+] [-] somethingsimple|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|8 years ago|reply
ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it was called) and similar open sourced twitter-like platforms, it doesn't necessarily mean we should be restricted to "micro" blogging by those platforms (besides, sharing pictures, and such is somewhat still valid "micro" blogging just look at Tumblr). If the limits are too much you could still at the very least send over a summary between hubs and if the person wants more info they can visit the originating site for the whole post.
I think the path forward is to use open and standardized formats / protocols. We have the technology... There's a couple of implementations for ActivityPub/ActivityStreams already[2], you could either join one and contribute or just start one yourself if none are in the language / license you prefer.
[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
[2]: https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implement...
[+] [-] dane-pgp|8 years ago|reply
"In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible."
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
Conceivably, a Facebook user could demand that Facebook support automatically sending their Facebook posts to their friends on third party social networks. I imagine that an EU court would not be very sympathetic to Facebook claiming that it isn't technically feasible for a (large, monopolistic, American) company to support this use case when small open source (European?) competitors have implemented the W3C standards with no trouble.
Once Facebook is forced by the GDPR to publish data to competing sites, I imagine it will feel compelled to also support receiving data from people on those sites, otherwise the one-way flow of data would put Facebook users at a disadvantage. But then there is basically no reason to use Facebook, as users of competing sites would still be able to see and be seen by their friends on Facebook.
This is such a disastrous outcome for Facebook that I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers at Google (or some other big company) were already working on the legal complaints they are going to launch come May, when the GDPR comes into force.
[+] [-] natural219|8 years ago|reply
Stop trying to put blockchains in web decentralized systems. They're not going to work for several more decades. All we need to do to kill Facebook is solve the self-hosting P2P UX problem, and create a W3C-like body that allows developers to participate in standards creation process for how we schematize common social data. That's it. Once everyone is running a federated node in the cloud or in their basement, then you can go back to doing blockchain stuff.
[+] [-] diogenescynic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinnymuch|8 years ago|reply