I fail to see how anyone "needs" an alternative to Facebook, or Facebook itself. This is not a judgement on those that use it, if it's giving people value then they should continue using it, and judging from their user's numbers it is valuable to at least a portion of the population. That being said, it wasn't around 15 years ago and who knows how long it'll stay around. I'm sure people will handle a world without Facebook just fine once it's out.
The point is that marketplace will never provide the kind of solution society wants. What people want is an easy-to-use way to stay in touch, keep up with and communicate with their friends via the web. What people don't want is to be targeted by advertisers/political campaigns or have their data saved and sold. The market can only take us to the local max of 'you can keep in touch but your data is saved/sold/used', to move to the global max of 'you can keep in touch and your data is safe' we need a solution which isn't tied to profit motive.
Of course no one "needs" Facebook. Or a cell phone. Or computers. Or coffee. But they're still of value.
The values of Facebook are varied. I'm a full-time traveler and it's easy to find an English-speaking Facebook group for any country I visit, which is of real value and note something I would otherwise find. Facebook is also useful for sharing photos with friends and family without necessarily sharing them with the world like you used to with Flickr or Smugmug.
Granted, there are other ways of having forums, or photo sharing, or anything else. But that misses the point. For whatever reason, Facebook became the de facto way to do certain things. And if you want to delete facebook, it's nice to have an alternative with some feasibility in reaching a critical mass.
Ahh, but the article didn't say that people need Facebook. They said that we need an alternative to Facebook. That's two different things. If people are going to use Facebook (and it's been shown that people will) and Facebook use is going to cause systematic problems (as it's apparent that it does), we may need an alternative to Facebook that is less problematic. That's a very different statement than the one you're responding to.
Well ever since social media converted the US into the United States of Meme Generators & Consumers, it is not really possible to go back without mass lobotomies.
I indirectly have control over what the government does with the data (as a citizen). If enough citizens don't like what they're doing, it can be stopped. Also, they have no incentive to make money by harming people.
On the other hand, I'm not a board member or shareholder of Facebook, and they have a legal obligation to make money.
As such, I would absolutely use a US Government social media service over Facebook. (Bonus if it were federated with other countries.)
(In reality I'd use neither because Facebook is boring anyway.)
Honestly, in a perfect world it might make sense. The fact that often there is more trust in private, profit-driven corporations over governments which are meant to represent the public and their interests is definitely something that needs to be considered.
I’ve always wondered about creating an equivalent to Facebook as a desktop and mobile app, that connected to your email account. Adding a friend would just be inputting their email address and connecting would involve a PGP exchange in the background.
Your email would become the decrentralized, encrypted medium for exchange and broadcast. You could use IMAP to leverage it as your datastore on multiple devices.
You could more easily schedule message delivery and times too. The most complicated thing about it would be setting up a simple enough onboarding process.
It wouldn’t be efficient, but it doesn’t really need to be.
Just make it easy for everyone to create their own mailing list. Then you could subscribe to friends, and get updates from them, plus participate in discussions with their other friends. "Muting" a friend would be up to the controls in your desired email client. "Unfriending" is simply unsubscribing.
I've been dreaming about this a lot lately, but there's definitely some roadblocks for the average person. They don't want to clutter up their existing email, and they will drag their feet to getting a new email address just for social networking. People also like the idea that they can actually delete their posts, even if it's illusory, which they can't do to any meaningful extent with email. With ActivityPub, I think a lot of potential developers don't want to bother with email because it's not the future. It is still a great idea in general, though. I would totally build it or sign up for it if enough people I knew were willing to do it. The problem is I wouldn't want that form of social networking just to connect with people who are smart enough to use it.
I feel like that when it comes to social media, decentralized is really the answer. I'm not sure I could trust many big corps (maybe Wikimedia). Mastodon and Diaspora fill these needs, perhaps what they need is better marketing and improved UX (specially for Diaspora).
Does Diaspora actually provide better privacy than Facebook? It removes the need to trust a centralized entity, but it seems to me that it largely replaces it with the need to trust a multitude of distributed entities. At least if we're talking about stuff like clandestinely sharing data about people's friends with third parties.
Why wait for the corporate platforms to get around to aggressively restricting your speech on their services, when you can go right to being limited by the head censor.
Britain already has a rapidly growing problem with censorship and restricted speech. This would just be a more direct way for the government to control what you can express and see online.
The authoritarians continue their march.
Within 20 years, it'll be the rare nation that doesn't have something equivalent to the Chinese firewall heavily controlling what their people do online. Nations with freedom online equivalent to what existed from ~1995-2015 across most of the developed world, will be the exception.
Just when you thought the UK couldn’t get any closer to 1984, they wheel out a doozy like this. This is coming from the country where you can literally end up in jail for shitposting on Twitter.
The utility of Facebook is it's raw messaging and information sharing capacity. These exist in a thousand ways in different apps from Twitter to Diaspora to Signal. People use Facebook not because of the raw utility - it is winning a competition for people's attention that is going to be an endless battle.
Setting some ground rules for what can and can't be collected and shared from people is way more effective than having the government enter that rat race.
In my view, the problem isn't the platform, it's the people using it. Until people are widely educated to give a damn about their own personal information, they will continue to flock to the next free Social Platform over and over again until some scandal, that they don't really care about or understand, now makes that platform 'uncool', and then they will all register for the next 'cool' platform.
What is Facebook but a fancy web host and RSS feed in one? First, it is a web host. It lets everyone make a free website (their Wall). Second, it gives everyone an RSS reader (their News Feed).
My point is, I think we already have the protocols. What the ordinary user lacks is the software. Actually what they also lack is the hardware. Everyone, technical or not, wants their own website. They always have. But most people are at the mercy of some company providing a server. After all, to run a website, you need a computer that's always on, always connected. I propose we use the user's phone. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of that.
So what we need is an easy-to-use webserver that users install on their phones. They don't have to build their website on their phone. It's just hosted there. They could build it on their laptop and push it to their phone.
Then you also make a nice RSS reader that users also install, and they subscribe to each other's websites.
Three years ago I forced myself to reduce my FB usage.
- At the beginning I remember it was super hard not to check FB
- So I just stopped posting first
- Then I realized that it significantly helped to avoid FB in the morning
- Later, I installed the Chrome Extension Eradicator which lets the FB feed disappear; I never used a FB mobile app
- More and more I could stay away from FB the entire day just checking it in the evening
- Still for 1 or 2 years it was kind of tempting to check FB even if it was in the evening
Now, I rarely use FB anymore, maybe once a week or even less and if I see all the same people posting non-stop self-adulations and all the likers liking every little thing because xy posted it, I command-w FB faster than I opened it. I pity those posting people, too lonely, too little attention, on a desperate hunt for some friends on a addictive Skinner Box network.
TBH it was a bit like quitting smoking: initially super, super hard and when looking back FB's feed feels just useless.
Maybe I didn't read the article closely, but...what feature of Facebook makes nationalization necessary? Do we need a FB-like platform "of, by, and for the people" for...ads? News distribution? Sharing news? Connecting people? Classifieds?
To me, the biggest utility of FB that would make such a project worthwhile is the pure network aspect of it; there are very few people in my life who aren't on Facebook.
If that's what we're looking to nationalize, does this just become a national ID card debate for the Internet era?
If it was a public open network then maybe, I wouldn't use it to share things between friends though or messaging. Could be based around posting of public events like a billboard/invitation feature (the tool i use most on fb), and maybe a twitter like status feature too. I wouldn't share images unless random gifs and memes or anything too personal/controversial. It wouldn't be a full network more like a public information service. There was talk of bbc doing something like that.
No, we need a user-owned, democratically-controlled version of Facebook, with correspondingly enshrined “rights.”
The problem is authoritarian control. Swapping out corporate authoritarianism with government authoritarianism solves zero problems, especially given that they already constantly collude to entrench each other’s power.
FB is not a problem. Handing over information blindly to an entity which centralizes and consolidates it's 'power' over you is. FB can only do as much as we 'feed' it.
Stop feeding it. FB is simply doing what inevitably happens when power and knowledge is concentrated into one place.
[+] [-] hamstercat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frgtpsswrdlame|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bouncing|8 years ago|reply
The values of Facebook are varied. I'm a full-time traveler and it's easy to find an English-speaking Facebook group for any country I visit, which is of real value and note something I would otherwise find. Facebook is also useful for sharing photos with friends and family without necessarily sharing them with the world like you used to with Flickr or Smugmug.
Granted, there are other ways of having forums, or photo sharing, or anything else. But that misses the point. For whatever reason, Facebook became the de facto way to do certain things. And if you want to delete facebook, it's nice to have an alternative with some feasibility in reaching a critical mass.
[+] [-] curun1r|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hux_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linedash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReverseCold|8 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I'm not a board member or shareholder of Facebook, and they have a legal obligation to make money.
As such, I would absolutely use a US Government social media service over Facebook. (Bonus if it were federated with other countries.)
(In reality I'd use neither because Facebook is boring anyway.)
[+] [-] ams6110|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mezzode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gramstrong|8 years ago|reply
edit: BBC taking the "Social" part of "Social Networking" too literally.
[+] [-] brightball|8 years ago|reply
Your email would become the decrentralized, encrypted medium for exchange and broadcast. You could use IMAP to leverage it as your datastore on multiple devices.
You could more easily schedule message delivery and times too. The most complicated thing about it would be setting up a simple enough onboarding process.
It wouldn’t be efficient, but it doesn’t really need to be.
[+] [-] taborj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anderber|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeboy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|8 years ago|reply
Britain already has a rapidly growing problem with censorship and restricted speech. This would just be a more direct way for the government to control what you can express and see online.
The authoritarians continue their march.
Within 20 years, it'll be the rare nation that doesn't have something equivalent to the Chinese firewall heavily controlling what their people do online. Nations with freedom online equivalent to what existed from ~1995-2015 across most of the developed world, will be the exception.
[+] [-] throwaway84742|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamColes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mshenfield|8 years ago|reply
Setting some ground rules for what can and can't be collected and shared from people is way more effective than having the government enter that rat race.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|8 years ago|reply
Over, and over, again.
[+] [-] combatentropy|8 years ago|reply
What is Facebook but a fancy web host and RSS feed in one? First, it is a web host. It lets everyone make a free website (their Wall). Second, it gives everyone an RSS reader (their News Feed).
My point is, I think we already have the protocols. What the ordinary user lacks is the software. Actually what they also lack is the hardware. Everyone, technical or not, wants their own website. They always have. But most people are at the mercy of some company providing a server. After all, to run a website, you need a computer that's always on, always connected. I propose we use the user's phone. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of that.
So what we need is an easy-to-use webserver that users install on their phones. They don't have to build their website on their phone. It's just hosted there. They could build it on their laptop and push it to their phone.
Then you also make a nice RSS reader that users also install, and they subscribe to each other's websites.
Profit! I mean, not profit, happiness!
[+] [-] klez|8 years ago|reply
Also, this would be a battery killer.
[+] [-] waytogo|8 years ago|reply
- At the beginning I remember it was super hard not to check FB
- So I just stopped posting first
- Then I realized that it significantly helped to avoid FB in the morning
- Later, I installed the Chrome Extension Eradicator which lets the FB feed disappear; I never used a FB mobile app
- More and more I could stay away from FB the entire day just checking it in the evening
- Still for 1 or 2 years it was kind of tempting to check FB even if it was in the evening
Now, I rarely use FB anymore, maybe once a week or even less and if I see all the same people posting non-stop self-adulations and all the likers liking every little thing because xy posted it, I command-w FB faster than I opened it. I pity those posting people, too lonely, too little attention, on a desperate hunt for some friends on a addictive Skinner Box network.
TBH it was a bit like quitting smoking: initially super, super hard and when looking back FB's feed feels just useless.
Why do we need an alternative or FB at all?
[+] [-] Tehchops|8 years ago|reply
Secondly, the mere premise that we "need" a Facebook, or alternative, is inherently flawed.
Probably echoing the rest of the comments in here at this point, but my 2 cents fwiw.
[+] [-] anuraj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acct1771|8 years ago|reply
If it's federated, that helps completion even further.
[+] [-] Brendinooo|8 years ago|reply
To me, the biggest utility of FB that would make such a project worthwhile is the pure network aspect of it; there are very few people in my life who aren't on Facebook.
If that's what we're looking to nationalize, does this just become a national ID card debate for the Internet era?
[+] [-] bouncing|8 years ago|reply
Facebook's current shitshow is a market failure. Market failures can be addressed through nationalization. Ergo, Facebook should be nationalized.
It's not something I agree with, but that's the thought process distilled.
[+] [-] mistpup|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjwds|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt101|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelvin0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knuththetruth|8 years ago|reply
The problem is authoritarian control. Swapping out corporate authoritarianism with government authoritarianism solves zero problems, especially given that they already constantly collude to entrench each other’s power.
[+] [-] kelvin0|8 years ago|reply
Stop feeding it. FB is simply doing what inevitably happens when power and knowledge is concentrated into one place.