23 ms·

The real anti-Facebook is good old email

255 points by Alex3917 11y ago

ljk 11y ago
and IRC!
vinalia 11y ago
I'm not sure I buy the idea of email as a private alternative to Facebook. To keep your message content private, wouldn't all parties need to be hosting their own servers or using encryption? There's also the problem of knowing who you're contacting and when. Hiding that would probably take some kind of anonymous remailer program. Normal people would probably just have a free email account from companies like gmail or yahoo and not use any encryption. Wouldn't services like TinyLetter then be transferring the data from Facebook to other email hosting companies? This takes care of some privacy issues but still doesn't seem to solve all of problems for private communication.
- kedean 11y ago
  It doesn't sound like it's meant for private social media, it's an alternative to the ultra-public social media that's gotten popular in the last few years. It's about broadcasting yourself, not contacting a small subset of people (hence why you can only publish to the entire set of subscribers). If you need secrecy, then a system billing itself with the term 'newsletters' is probably not for you. The real benefit, as the article points out, is that the empty room problem is solved. Everyone already has an email address, it's your online identity, and email addresses aren't tied to one provider like a facebook account or a twitter account. If gmail dies, TinyLetter still lives. If TinyLetter dies, there's nothing stopping someone from creating an alternative version that imports old newsletters to reconstruct everything.
ssivark 11y ago
Interesting; I was not aware of TinyLetter. Though it doe nothing to address the use of Facebook for interpersonal communication, I guess they're referring to the use of facebook to nurture an audience and reach out to them en masse. Would folks consider this approach a practical replacement for RSS-like services, to reach out to a broader audience? Since most ("lay")people don't seem interested in going out of their way to subscribe to RSS feeds; seems like they'd be happy to subscribe in a manner where (more!) things will land up in their inbox.
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  TinyLetter is a really funky thing, and as you say it's more about nurturing an audience. What's special about it is more the way people have adopted it than anything. Like a public corkboard, its size and functionality belies its usefulness to a wide group (the analogy stops there, as these emails are one-way). Most of the TinyLetter emails that I get are just different, like a special recipe almost. I've been subscribing to tons of RSS feeds for business blogging recently, and while there are similarities, there's just no way I'd accept TinyLetter as a substitute for a feed. First there's the awkward idea of a gigantic email folder hierarchy to store it all. Then there are things like enclosures, a Youtube video, mp3 files, etc. Also, I've noticed that email links (view this in your browser!) tend to rot about 10x as fast and are not indexed by e.g. archive.org. So I dunno, it's just different tech.
ettolurb 11y ago
My real Facebook is the bar. US Social Networking since White Horse Tavern – Rhode Island – Founded 1673
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
  One expert discovered this new neat social hack: hanging out in person. Kidding aside, I prophesize that the next really big, impactful American political movement will not have a web page or twitter/facebook account or forums. The internet as a useful tool for outsiders is over.
DiabloD3 11y ago
I don't agree with that. The real anti-Facebook is a combination of email and well formatted RSS feeds. Email for actual legitimate notifications and mail, RSS feeds for news and news type bloggy stuff and blogs.
- kkarimi 11y ago
  Why not both? I would prefer to have my emails and feeds in one place, just no status updates.
  - mrec 11y ago
    What's stopping you? No reason a mail client can't do RSS as well, is there? (I'm pretty sure some do, or at least did.)
    - DiabloD3 11y ago
      Some do/did, indeed. I personally prefer Feedly, though.
    - Tideflat 11y ago
      Thunderbird supports RSS feed support, though they are kept separate from e-mail, somewhat.
    - MagnumOpus 11y ago
      Every good mail client does RSS, including T-bird and Outlook - but they don't sync subscriptions and read/unread posts to the cloud, so most power users prefer a Google Reader clone.
  - themodelplumber 11y ago
    What you need is Microsoft Outlook. Nirvana
    - knight17 11y ago
      How is RSS support in Outlook?
lcnmrn 11y ago
The real anti-Facebook is Sublevel. But I can forgive Wired for not knowing about it.
- edward 11y ago
  I like it when I can get my favourite username (edward). I signed up. Now what?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mrec 11y ago
  Just read their About page, can't see how it's significantly different to Facebook or Twitter. It's still a proprietary network with all the Balkanization and opportunities for abuse that implies, isn't it?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - ddw 11y ago
      I tried Sublevel when it started, but wasn't getting much out of it. I posted a lot, followed a bunch of strangers and tried to have conversations with them. Eventually I stopped checking it at all and forgot about it. I think the people on it appreciate the qualities that you mention, but unfortunately those features don't add up to a burgeoning and intriguing social network. Perhaps Facebook and Twitter are the last massive timeline-oriented social networks and there just isn't anything else innovative to do.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
- codingdave 11y ago
  The new marketing is apparently name-dropping your own site on HN, too.
meeper16 11y ago
Facebook = AOL 2.0.1. Maybe they'll do a merger more valuable than AOLs merger of $350 billion, maybe not: http://www.fastcompany.com/3046213/verizon-aol http://www.fastcompany.com/3046213/verizon-aol Facebook is what you get when you have a founder that cuts and pastes myspace code to voyeristically spy on girls he can't get while holding a business card that says "I'm CEO bitch" while calling his users "dumb fucks". Worse than the next AOL 2.0.1 The past Prodigy's, Compuserves, AOLs, TheGlobes, geocities, friendsters, myspaces, facebooks have never done very well especially when compared to truly innovative companies like Google which also happens to make billions more and has billions more users.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Google's an exception to almost every rule. And that exception started with their patented Page Rank algorithm. Patents on important stuff forcing users to pony up isn't exceptional, though. So, they can't be used as an example except for what brains + patents + critical tech can earn you.
tommoor 11y ago
This is a great advert for TinyLetter, would love to know if they approached Wired to get this published and how that process went down.
- Animats 11y ago
  That's got to be a "sponsored story". At the bottom of the page, there are links to more "Sponsored Stories - Powered by Outbrain". What is happening, and happened years ago, is that many people stopped using Facebook messaging and went back to email. It's easier to get messages via email on smartphones than to run Facebook's app.
  - noamyoungerm 11y ago
    These are two separate concepts. The sponsored stories by outbrain are just your regular old "lose 100 pounds per second" blogspam. There is another, more benign phenomenon, where a company's PR department writes an article about the company, sends it off to a reporter, and says "Hey, we think you might be interested in publishing this (plus, we already did all the writing for you)" and then the newspaper edits it and publishes it as a regular article. They see it as a sort of win-win situation. Reporters get an article to publish without any work, and companies get free / cheap PR.
  - morgante 11y ago
    Maybe in your social circles that's true, but everyone I know has started to rely on Messenger for almost all their non-professional communication. It's simultaneously killing both email and SMS.
    - Tomte 11y ago
      Here it's WhatsApp. Just about everyone is using it. Many people are using FB Messenger or Threema or whatnot, but WhatsApp is reigning supreme.
    - andybak 11y ago
      Messenger == Facebook Messenger? Please specify for those of us that don't use it. There's been several apps known as 'Messenger' over the years.
jsaxton86 11y ago
I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing what I've been up to lately. It's been a huge win for me for a few reasons: 1: Everyone uses email, so I can reach with friends and family who don't use Facebook. I think my grandmother is my biggest newsletter fan, and is always encouraging me to publish more frequently. 2: I'd rather share a well-written email (with lots of links to my self-hosted photo gallery), than a series of short status updates that may or may not be read by people I want to keep in touch with. Also, a lot of the information I share in the newsletter I wouldn't share on Facebook. Not because it's super private or anything, but I'm not going to post a status update that basically says "My living situation is pretty good right now. I'm renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and my commute is fantastic!" 3: I never really enjoyed checking Facebook, but I did it out of habit/addiction. Quitting cold turkey has made me a happier person. The feedback I have gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. I got a number of really good responses to the newsletter in which friends and family provided similar updates. It even inspired a friend of mine to write his own newsletter. These responses were great, and much better than any information I would have gleaned from Facebook. The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook. For the most part, it hasn't been a problem, except for the time I missed an invitation for a week-long hiking trip in Glacier National Park. I should probably cancel my Facebook account, but I'm not ready to do that yet. Edit: I should add I don't use TinyLetter. I instead send out a mass email via gmail. It has worked well so far, but I don't have a good way of adding subscribers except via word-of-mouth. Maybe I should investigate TinyLetter.
- WWKong 11y ago
  I'm glad you got good response. I suspect for most people, including me, the treatment would be the same as any other newsletter.
  - diqu 11y ago
floatboth 11y ago
And the real anti-Twitter is good old websites. https://indiewebcamp.com https://indiewebcamp.com
- superuser2 11y ago
  I think the biggest barrier to people setting up personal/"open" websites is the exhaustion of the .com namespace. If your name is common or even remotely plausible, it's taken by a squatter. One of the key advantages of a closed, locked-down social networking environment is the ability to have multiple people identified by the same real name, and a relatively less crowded field for screen names (because squatting is less of an issue).
leke 11y ago
I'm still quite fond of both Google+ and Diaspora. The Google+ mobile app is great, but I would go on Diaspora more if it also had a quality mobile app.
krick 11y ago
Except “good old email” is basically owned by Google now, so there’s small choice in rotten apples.
- Tideflat 11y ago
  The difference is that email doesn't depend on Google to exist, and leaving Gmail isn't all that bad. They even support email forwarding, so that you wouldn't loose contact with people that only have your old email: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en
  - krick 11y ago
    Are you joking or what? I, personally, don't use gmail, that's not the problem. The problem is everyone else does. And have you ever (in last 5 years or so) tried using your personal email server to communicate with them? I'm guessing you have not, because otherwise you would know how painful it is, as Google does everything to make it painful as hell. Large portion of my contact list are gmail users, especially that part of my contact list who I'm not friendly enough with to tolerate continuously ending up in their “Spam” folder. And that's exactly what you do, when you write to gmail from your own private email server — end up in their “Spam” folder, no matter what you do. So if you are ever going to communicate via email with whoever you might call your customer, you are basically forced to use gmail or another large email service which will be whitelisted on other large email services. 2015 is not the year of free Internet.
    - chrismartin 11y ago
      I have a very different experience, having run my own email server for the past few months with no trouble communicating with many others on Gmail. Is your SMTP server on a blacklist or something?
hardwaresofton 11y ago
Ellos is a completely different beast than Facebook. While they're definitely not in the spotlight as much as they were previously, the service is still fundamentally sound, and some pretty amazing content gets uploaded there daily. I have yet to see a listicle.
Rangi42 11y ago
I check Facebook once in a while and keep getting alerts (via a userscript) that friends of mine have deleted their accounts. On the other hand, the mailing list that my close friends and I created in high school is still keeping us in touch years later.
fiatjaf 11y ago
Why feeds? Getting a newsletter is getting a feed, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp are all about getting a feed of endless news. All alternative social networks are the same. Why "social network" became synonymous of producing and reading news from the life of people? MySpace and Orkut were not that way. I imagine other social networks from the early 2000's were not that way also.
- lmm 11y ago
  Livejournal was definitely that way. Did Myspace really not give you updates? I find it hard to believe it was so popular with bands if you couldn't tell your friends/followers/whatever "here's our new track"/"we're playing a gig on x date".
libso 11y ago
Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his childhood friends. Take a scrub to your Facebook friends list and you can get a more powerful TinyLetter. Practically speaking you'd never un-friend people unless they personally bother you. This is why I hardly check my Facebook timeline. All I use is Messenger which is pretty useful to keep in touch with people you want to. So, the real anti Facebook is Facebook itself with a fresh start.
- fauigerzigerk 11y ago
  I didn't know that Facebook can send status updates via email to people who are not on Facebook.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    I didn't know email could send updates to people whose address I don't know. Derp derp derp.
    - fauigerzigerk 11y ago
      I'm not sure what you're getting at. No one ever said that email could do what you say. I certainly didn't. But the parent said "Facebook is flexible enough to provide this" in a response to an article about mailing lists. And it's true, Facebook could easily provide this. I just have no way of checking whether they do because I'm not on Facebook. It would be a great feature and extremely easy for them to implement. It would also allow them to make money on ads, so why not?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - lmm 11y ago
    It can't, but that's an incredibly niche feature.
linkydinkandyou 11y ago
Maybe what's needed is something that _looks_ superficially like a social media site, but under the hood is just an email system, using the tried-and-true email protocols, maybe with white-lists enabled. Basically, you're not "friending" someone...you're adding him to your white list.
tedunangst 11y ago
"And on an average day, maybe 51, 52 percent of them open it." Engagement metrics for my status updates! I knew I was missing out on something.
wyclif 11y ago
Now, only a year later, Ello is nearly forgotten, filed away with other would-be Facebook killers like the open source Diaspora and the near-dead Google+ The problem with this statement is that there is a vast difference in number of users between Ello and Google+. The latter is far from "forgotten" or "near dead." Every time I hit G+, it's teeming with activity. I can't say that about Ello, which seems to be populated by mustachioed German font designers who love custom bicycles and the music of Kraftwerk. Now, Google+ has had its issues. It might even be going away or abandonware. And it's a blip on the radar compared to Facebook. But that's different from comparing it to Ello! The "Google+ is dead" meme is just lazy tech reportage.
- meeper16 11y ago
  The fact is: Google makes billions more in revenue and has billions more users. Google is founded on real technology and algorithms, facebook started by copying and pasting cold fusion code from myspace.
  - tim333 11y ago
    Any source for the cold fusion thing? I thought it was all in PHP.
- lmm 11y ago
  Shrug. Not my experience. Google+ looks deader than disco here.
  - wyclif 11y ago
    It's going to if you never circle anybody and none of your friends use it.
    - knight17 11y ago
      None of my friends use G+ but it has lots of active communities and there are many people who use it in a twitter-like manner -- posting non-personal items, starting discussions and the like that are crowd pullers (+1s, comments, resharing to other communities). G+ is a good network, I hope the Facebookers will remain on Facebook and Google will find some way to open it up to outside web to integrate it with its active communities and the wide web - a prime example is the G+ blog comment system. It had potential to be the no 1, but they squandered away the opportunity by limiting it to G+ and Disqus scored there.
TrevorJ 11y ago
Facebook lowered the overhead for staying in touch with your friends. Pretty much every update since the beginning has steadily raised that overhead, and now it's no more efficient than email was at solving the problem.
y_u_no_rust 11y ago
Facebook fails the KISS test, it's also a waste of time.
aws_ls 11y ago
I don't think email is a good replacement for Facebook. Rather what we need is open (email protocol like) social networks. The problem with Facebook is that its a monopoly, and closed. What if it were open, such that I can send a friend request from G+ to Facebook. Just like I can easily send an email from yahoo email id to gmail. This openness, if incorporated, can solve the monopoly problem as well. Plus we don't have to complain of Facebook's AI/ML screwing/controlling our inbox feeds. All my (various social network) friends' statuses come to my hosted social network (G+/Facebook, or my home built) and my host controls the feed, with its own proprietary rules. Everybody will be happy. Even Facebook, as there is no more bashing of it. I guess Facebook can and should take the lead towards openness. It will be a brave move, if it happens. But they will earn a lot of respect.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  That is what diaspora tried to do. It has not gone well.
  - aws_ls 11y ago
    That's why I think, it takes Facebook (the current monopoly) to do the right thing. If they open the other required things will automatically happen. G+ will become an attractive option once again, for people who like that interface. And HN types will implement their own 'social' protocol, and self host.
    - Synaesthesia 11y ago
      Fab ook are not gonna do the right thing. They're gonna try to maximize their profits.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - narrowrail 11y ago
      While I sympathize with the gist of your sentiments: What's in it for FB? Nobody (outside of an HN-type crowd) wants to self-host anything, nor do they know what that means. The 30 yr old+ folks without any technical knowledge think FB is great and see no reason anything should change. You are basically calling for FB to reduce their monopoly to satisfy 0.01% of their addressable market. I believe the force that will reduce the significance of FB will come from outside of FB (and there is no shortage of people trying and failing to do that).
codingdave 11y ago
Periodic updates to friend and family about what is new in your life has a long tradition behind it. Before email, even, it came in the form of Christmas Letters, including with the Christmas cards. And they absolutely serve a purpose for one-way communication out to people. TinyLetter sounds like it would meet that need nicely. Of course, it cannot be too frequent. Family members and friends who send out mass updates too often end up being ignored, just like frequent Facebook updates. And that is because it is one-way communication. It is missing the core piece of asking how the recipients of the email have been, and engaging in a one-on-one conversation, even if just a brief one via email. (Posting a note at the end saying, "Please reply to tell me how you are doing." does not count.) For my own communications, I am not on social media. I call family every week or so. Sunday afternoons are a web of phone calls between us all. For old friends, I send emails periodically, one or twice a year at least. And news gets less frequent as you age. You aren't moving, you have the same job, the kids are 6 months older, but no real news. So sometimes those emails only purpose are to ask the other person how they are doing. So TinyLetter sounds fine for what it is. But I don't see it as a replacement for anything.
- garduque 11y ago
  Reading the title I thought the subject was going to be more along the lines of your response, not an ad for a newsletter service. The anti-Facebook is going back to how we communicated on a personal level before there was Facebook. Anything else still seems like a gimmick.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Email isn't point-to-multipoint. Usenet is.
pud 11y ago
Founder of TinyLetter here. Cool article! Glad TinyLetter is still going strong & a successful acquisition for MailChimp.
- gozo 11y ago
  I would say mobog was the Facebook killer. Before its time though and when Instagram hit the mark Facebook promptly bought them and later WhatsApp. In Asia, primarily China, the Facebook killer is WeChat which is basically Instagram and WhatsApp.
  - zhte415 11y ago
    > In Asia, primarily China, the Facebook killer is WeChat which is basically Instagram and WhatsApp. And banking. A huge 'value add' which has caught on is being able to send real-life money with no transaction fees to other people. And treated in novel ways - 'lucky money' to send friends in your friend circles, paying for a taxi, utility bills, seeing a movie, train and plane tickets, etc.
- ised 11y ago
  fuckedcompany.com was a great site. Wish there was a better archive than the bits saved at archive.org.
  - germanier 11y ago
    There also has been a book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743228626 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743228626
drvortex 11y ago
We all know what keeps Facebook going. Facebook isn't running on well-paid, well-employed family dudes who want to get in touch with relatives. Nor on intelligent commentators on society and tech. It is kept going by gossipy teenagers who want to snoop on their bff, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men who want more 'social' interaction than they can possibly manage in the physical world. Google+ failed because of they didn't give anyone a good reason to move away from Facebook where such networks already existed, and they insisted on lack of anonymity. The intelligent commentators are all on Twitter anyway. But the demographic of teenagers, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men on the internet is very large, and they are on the side 24/7. Pretty much everyone else who uses the internet uses it for work and hardly uses Facebook. But they trudge along to Facebook a bunch of other people who of course need to stay in the communication loop. Email is not going away because no other system is a wide-spread. Slack could come close, if only they took away their silly way of logging in. It was a shame that Gmail is rooted in email. Heck, if Gmail changed their backend to something like Dlack, 50% of internet users would be no longer using email and they wouldn't even know it. I dream of a Slack to Email gateway.
Philipp__ 11y ago
I quit facebook 2 years ago. I found out that Facebook was just another place on internet for wasting time, not for communication and staying in contact with someone. Now when I meet someone new, and he's like add me on Facebook, I give them my email and always get that look in return.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
"Social Media vs. Personal Media"
jister 11y ago
Facebook replacement, email replacement, Windows replacement, etc etc...we heard about these attempts for a long time and yet they failed. Why? From the article, is the problem really the technical complexity or the empty rooms? Is it privacy? Or, is there really a problem at all? Of course there is! Just like any other businesses/companies there some people that will always complain! In the case of TinyLetter, it is NOT a replacement of Facebook. It will NOT be -- far from it. People don't use Facebook just to communicate. Some people use it to advertise, to sell, to communicate (sure), to look for old friends, to pretend to be somebody else, to boast that they are successful, to look for missing people important to them just like this: http://gary.littlethings.com/gary-bentley-nurse/?utm_source=soup&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=misc http://gary.littlethings.com/gary-bentley-nurse/?utm_source=... Now, can you do this in a newsletter? Don't think so...
MikeNomad 11y ago
Glad to see pud is still knocking around. Didn't realize he was the TinyLetter guy. FC was one of the best things ever to hit the web. As for E-mail vs. Fb... It is simply an issue of control: Content, speed, and the Signal-to-Noise ratio. And that goes for both the Sender and the Receiver. Makes e-mail the obvious choice.
pjbrunet 11y ago
I was saving up this idea, but here's how you could disrupt Facebook. This is already happening, but it could be automated. In short, automatically DELAY posting to Facebook. Let everybody know at the bottom of all content: This was published first at example.com and released to social media (Facebook) after X hours. Make Facebook look antiquated like a newspaper. Let everyone know, Facebook is the old news. If you want our latest news, you have to sign up for the email list--you must to go to example.com for the LATEST news. One way I'm thinking this could work with a WordPress plugin, when the publisher schedules a post, the post would be "locked" from view with a countdown timer. "This content unlocks in 6 hours. To unlock this content now, and to get our content before everyone else, sign up for our email list." Maybe for really time-sensitive info you could have three tiers. A paid tier (instant release) and a free tier (unlocked 1 hour later) and a social media tier (unlocked 6 hours later.) Essentially, you're taking advantage of the value of time, automatically. For example, if shampoo is on sale and you're 1 hour late, maybe the shelf is cleared out. But you don't necessarily need a paid tier, because the publisher is a) getting more traffic to example.com, pulling traffic off Facebook and b) getting more email subscribers. Publishers do implement this on their own, but I think it would work well as a WordPress plugin or as some kind of paid service if it was slick enough.
- garduque 11y ago
  I don't know anybody who gets "really time-sensitive" info from Facebook. I can't even think of an example beyond your not terribly good example of a shampoo sale.
  - pjbrunet 11y ago
    In general, if publishers are automatically sharing to Facebook without some kind of delay, people will just stay on Facebook. Also consider the private groups on Facebook, they could be sharing paid subscriptions and who would know? The idea isn't just about Facebook, but publishing anything to get more subscribers. If your posts are time-sensitive and people can get your info through social media (without delay) then you're probably losing traffic, because people are busy, lazy, whatever--they're often already on Facebook and need a reason to go somewhere else. Paid subscriptions aren't as common, and I almost deleted that part of my comment, but people do pay for time-sensitive info. As far as the "paid tier" I was thinking out loud, in terms of building a general purpose SAS app for publishers. I haven't nailed down exactly how it would work, to delay posts to social media. Obviously it would need compelling case studies where people increased traffic and subscribers, and revenue. I can think of a couple of markets to start with, but not getting more specific than that. Another aspect of this is the notifications. I think email notifications are good to start with because they show up on your phone, and if those notifications are customizable and targeted, that's convenient. But I think there's more you could do with notifications, so that people aren't annoyed that they have to go to your website to find the (timely) information they want. If you can do better notifications than social media (more specific, less annoying) then I think people will more likely go to your website vs. consume your content through social media which sends less-useful notifications.
muddi900 11y ago
Man newsletters are making a comeback, but the only one I am subscribed to is Warren Ellis' Oribital Operations. If more newsletters were this well-written, I'd subscribe to them.
superuser2 11y ago
As it stands, Facebook has a better privacy story than email. Facebook traffic is encrypted straight through to Facebook's servers, and I'm confident that my data is not leaving Facebook. (You can pay Facebook to show ads to specific demographics; you can't actually buy user data.) Email, on the other hand, is plaintext for most of its journey and available in cleartext to dozens of shady actors (every ISP in the path, sender's provider, recipient's provider). The courts are clear that email is not considered private and not protected by law. I'd like to see GPG+email become the new Facebook, but I'll take Facebook over email as it stands now easily.
sea2summit 11y ago
I'd like to see Facebook investigated for antitrust violations. If Google can be investigated, Facebook should be more so.

255 points by Alex3917 11y ago

ljk 11y ago

and IRC!

I'm not sure I buy the idea of email as a private alternative to Facebook. To keep your message content private, wouldn't all parties need to be hosting their own servers or using encryption? There's also the problem of knowing who you're contacting and when. Hiding that would probably take some kind of anonymous remailer program. Normal people would probably just have a free email account from companies like gmail or yahoo and not use any encryption. Wouldn't services like TinyLetter then be transferring the data from Facebook to other email hosting companies? This takes care of some privacy issues but still doesn't seem to solve all of problems for private communication.

kedean 11y ago
It doesn't sound like it's meant for private social media, it's an alternative to the ultra-public social media that's gotten popular in the last few years. It's about broadcasting yourself, not contacting a small subset of people (hence why you can only publish to the entire set of subscribers). If you need secrecy, then a system billing itself with the term 'newsletters' is probably not for you. The real benefit, as the article points out, is that the empty room problem is solved. Everyone already has an email address, it's your online identity, and email addresses aren't tied to one provider like a facebook account or a twitter account. If gmail dies, TinyLetter still lives. If TinyLetter dies, there's nothing stopping someone from creating an alternative version that imports old newsletters to reconstruct everything.

ssivark 11y ago

Interesting; I was not aware of TinyLetter. Though it doe nothing to address the use of Facebook for interpersonal communication, I guess they're referring to the use of facebook to nurture an audience and reach out to them en masse. Would folks consider this approach a practical replacement for RSS-like services, to reach out to a broader audience? Since most ("lay")people don't seem interested in going out of their way to subscribe to RSS feeds; seems like they'd be happy to subscribe in a manner where (more!) things will land up in their inbox.

themodelplumber 11y ago
TinyLetter is a really funky thing, and as you say it's more about nurturing an audience. What's special about it is more the way people have adopted it than anything. Like a public corkboard, its size and functionality belies its usefulness to a wide group (the analogy stops there, as these emails are one-way). Most of the TinyLetter emails that I get are just different, like a special recipe almost. I've been subscribing to tons of RSS feeds for business blogging recently, and while there are similarities, there's just no way I'd accept TinyLetter as a substitute for a feed. First there's the awkward idea of a gigantic email folder hierarchy to store it all. Then there are things like enclosures, a Youtube video, mp3 files, etc. Also, I've noticed that email links (view this in your browser!) tend to rot about 10x as fast and are not indexed by e.g. archive.org. So I dunno, it's just different tech.

ettolurb 11y ago

My real Facebook is the bar. US Social Networking since White Horse Tavern – Rhode Island – Founded 1673

a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
One expert discovered this new neat social hack: hanging out in person. Kidding aside, I prophesize that the next really big, impactful American political movement will not have a web page or twitter/facebook account or forums. The internet as a useful tool for outsiders is over.

DiabloD3 11y ago

I don't agree with that. The real anti-Facebook is a combination of email and well formatted RSS feeds. Email for actual legitimate notifications and mail, RSS feeds for news and news type bloggy stuff and blogs.

kkarimi 11y ago
Why not both? I would prefer to have my emails and feeds in one place, just no status updates.
- mrec 11y ago
  What's stopping you? No reason a mail client can't do RSS as well, is there? (I'm pretty sure some do, or at least did.)
  - DiabloD3 11y ago
    Some do/did, indeed. I personally prefer Feedly, though.
  - Tideflat 11y ago
    Thunderbird supports RSS feed support, though they are kept separate from e-mail, somewhat.
  - MagnumOpus 11y ago
    Every good mail client does RSS, including T-bird and Outlook - but they don't sync subscriptions and read/unread posts to the cloud, so most power users prefer a Google Reader clone.
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  What you need is Microsoft Outlook. Nirvana
  - knight17 11y ago
    How is RSS support in Outlook?

lcnmrn 11y ago

The real anti-Facebook is Sublevel. But I can forgive Wired for not knowing about it.

edward 11y ago
I like it when I can get my favourite username (edward). I signed up. Now what?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mrec 11y ago
Just read their About page, can't see how it's significantly different to Facebook or Twitter. It's still a proprietary network with all the Balkanization and opportunities for abuse that implies, isn't it?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - ddw 11y ago
    I tried Sublevel when it started, but wasn't getting much out of it. I posted a lot, followed a bunch of strangers and tried to have conversations with them. Eventually I stopped checking it at all and forgot about it. I think the people on it appreciate the qualities that you mention, but unfortunately those features don't add up to a burgeoning and intriguing social network. Perhaps Facebook and Twitter are the last massive timeline-oriented social networks and there just isn't anything else innovative to do.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
codingdave 11y ago
The new marketing is apparently name-dropping your own site on HN, too.

meeper16 11y ago

Facebook = AOL 2.0.1. Maybe they'll do a merger more valuable than AOLs merger of $350 billion, maybe not: http://www.fastcompany.com/3046213/verizon-aol http://www.fastcompany.com/3046213/verizon-aol Facebook is what you get when you have a founder that cuts and pastes myspace code to voyeristically spy on girls he can't get while holding a business card that says "I'm CEO bitch" while calling his users "dumb fucks". Worse than the next AOL 2.0.1 The past Prodigy's, Compuserves, AOLs, TheGlobes, geocities, friendsters, myspaces, facebooks have never done very well especially when compared to truly innovative companies like Google which also happens to make billions more and has billions more users.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Google's an exception to almost every rule. And that exception started with their patented Page Rank algorithm. Patents on important stuff forcing users to pony up isn't exceptional, though. So, they can't be used as an example except for what brains + patents + critical tech can earn you.

tommoor 11y ago

This is a great advert for TinyLetter, would love to know if they approached Wired to get this published and how that process went down.

Animats 11y ago
That's got to be a "sponsored story". At the bottom of the page, there are links to more "Sponsored Stories - Powered by Outbrain". What is happening, and happened years ago, is that many people stopped using Facebook messaging and went back to email. It's easier to get messages via email on smartphones than to run Facebook's app.
- noamyoungerm 11y ago
  These are two separate concepts. The sponsored stories by outbrain are just your regular old "lose 100 pounds per second" blogspam. There is another, more benign phenomenon, where a company's PR department writes an article about the company, sends it off to a reporter, and says "Hey, we think you might be interested in publishing this (plus, we already did all the writing for you)" and then the newspaper edits it and publishes it as a regular article. They see it as a sort of win-win situation. Reporters get an article to publish without any work, and companies get free / cheap PR.
- morgante 11y ago
  Maybe in your social circles that's true, but everyone I know has started to rely on Messenger for almost all their non-professional communication. It's simultaneously killing both email and SMS.
  - Tomte 11y ago
    Here it's WhatsApp. Just about everyone is using it. Many people are using FB Messenger or Threema or whatnot, but WhatsApp is reigning supreme.
  - andybak 11y ago
    Messenger == Facebook Messenger? Please specify for those of us that don't use it. There's been several apps known as 'Messenger' over the years.

jsaxton86 11y ago

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing what I've been up to lately. It's been a huge win for me for a few reasons: 1: Everyone uses email, so I can reach with friends and family who don't use Facebook. I think my grandmother is my biggest newsletter fan, and is always encouraging me to publish more frequently. 2: I'd rather share a well-written email (with lots of links to my self-hosted photo gallery), than a series of short status updates that may or may not be read by people I want to keep in touch with. Also, a lot of the information I share in the newsletter I wouldn't share on Facebook. Not because it's super private or anything, but I'm not going to post a status update that basically says "My living situation is pretty good right now. I'm renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and my commute is fantastic!" 3: I never really enjoyed checking Facebook, but I did it out of habit/addiction. Quitting cold turkey has made me a happier person. The feedback I have gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. I got a number of really good responses to the newsletter in which friends and family provided similar updates. It even inspired a friend of mine to write his own newsletter. These responses were great, and much better than any information I would have gleaned from Facebook. The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook. For the most part, it hasn't been a problem, except for the time I missed an invitation for a week-long hiking trip in Glacier National Park. I should probably cancel my Facebook account, but I'm not ready to do that yet. Edit: I should add I don't use TinyLetter. I instead send out a mass email via gmail. It has worked well so far, but I don't have a good way of adding subscribers except via word-of-mouth. Maybe I should investigate TinyLetter.

WWKong 11y ago
I'm glad you got good response. I suspect for most people, including me, the treatment would be the same as any other newsletter.
- diqu 11y ago

floatboth 11y ago

And the real anti-Twitter is good old websites. https://indiewebcamp.com https://indiewebcamp.com

superuser2 11y ago
I think the biggest barrier to people setting up personal/"open" websites is the exhaustion of the .com namespace. If your name is common or even remotely plausible, it's taken by a squatter. One of the key advantages of a closed, locked-down social networking environment is the ability to have multiple people identified by the same real name, and a relatively less crowded field for screen names (because squatting is less of an issue).

leke 11y ago

I'm still quite fond of both Google+ and Diaspora. The Google+ mobile app is great, but I would go on Diaspora more if it also had a quality mobile app.

krick 11y ago

Except “good old email” is basically owned by Google now, so there’s small choice in rotten apples.

Tideflat 11y ago
The difference is that email doesn't depend on Google to exist, and leaving Gmail isn't all that bad. They even support email forwarding, so that you wouldn't loose contact with people that only have your old email: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en
- krick 11y ago
  Are you joking or what? I, personally, don't use gmail, that's not the problem. The problem is everyone else does. And have you ever (in last 5 years or so) tried using your personal email server to communicate with them? I'm guessing you have not, because otherwise you would know how painful it is, as Google does everything to make it painful as hell. Large portion of my contact list are gmail users, especially that part of my contact list who I'm not friendly enough with to tolerate continuously ending up in their “Spam” folder. And that's exactly what you do, when you write to gmail from your own private email server — end up in their “Spam” folder, no matter what you do. So if you are ever going to communicate via email with whoever you might call your customer, you are basically forced to use gmail or another large email service which will be whitelisted on other large email services. 2015 is not the year of free Internet.
  - chrismartin 11y ago
    I have a very different experience, having run my own email server for the past few months with no trouble communicating with many others on Gmail. Is your SMTP server on a blacklist or something?

hardwaresofton 11y ago

Ellos is a completely different beast than Facebook. While they're definitely not in the spotlight as much as they were previously, the service is still fundamentally sound, and some pretty amazing content gets uploaded there daily. I have yet to see a listicle.

Rangi42 11y ago

I check Facebook once in a while and keep getting alerts (via a userscript) that friends of mine have deleted their accounts. On the other hand, the mailing list that my close friends and I created in high school is still keeping us in touch years later.

fiatjaf 11y ago

Why feeds? Getting a newsletter is getting a feed, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp are all about getting a feed of endless news. All alternative social networks are the same. Why "social network" became synonymous of producing and reading news from the life of people? MySpace and Orkut were not that way. I imagine other social networks from the early 2000's were not that way also.

lmm 11y ago
Livejournal was definitely that way. Did Myspace really not give you updates? I find it hard to believe it was so popular with bands if you couldn't tell your friends/followers/whatever "here's our new track"/"we're playing a gig on x date".

libso 11y ago

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his childhood friends. Take a scrub to your Facebook friends list and you can get a more powerful TinyLetter. Practically speaking you'd never un-friend people unless they personally bother you. This is why I hardly check my Facebook timeline. All I use is Messenger which is pretty useful to keep in touch with people you want to. So, the real anti Facebook is Facebook itself with a fresh start.

fauigerzigerk 11y ago
I didn't know that Facebook can send status updates via email to people who are not on Facebook.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  I didn't know email could send updates to people whose address I don't know. Derp derp derp.
  - fauigerzigerk 11y ago
    I'm not sure what you're getting at. No one ever said that email could do what you say. I certainly didn't. But the parent said "Facebook is flexible enough to provide this" in a response to an article about mailing lists. And it's true, Facebook could easily provide this. I just have no way of checking whether they do because I'm not on Facebook. It would be a great feature and extremely easy for them to implement. It would also allow them to make money on ads, so why not?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 11y ago
  It can't, but that's an incredibly niche feature.

linkydinkandyou 11y ago

Maybe what's needed is something that _looks_ superficially like a social media site, but under the hood is just an email system, using the tried-and-true email protocols, maybe with white-lists enabled. Basically, you're not "friending" someone...you're adding him to your white list.

tedunangst 11y ago

"And on an average day, maybe 51, 52 percent of them open it." Engagement metrics for my status updates! I knew I was missing out on something.

wyclif 11y ago

Now, only a year later, Ello is nearly forgotten, filed away with other would-be Facebook killers like the open source Diaspora and the near-dead Google+ The problem with this statement is that there is a vast difference in number of users between Ello and Google+. The latter is far from "forgotten" or "near dead." Every time I hit G+, it's teeming with activity. I can't say that about Ello, which seems to be populated by mustachioed German font designers who love custom bicycles and the music of Kraftwerk. Now, Google+ has had its issues. It might even be going away or abandonware. And it's a blip on the radar compared to Facebook. But that's different from comparing it to Ello! The "Google+ is dead" meme is just lazy tech reportage.

meeper16 11y ago
The fact is: Google makes billions more in revenue and has billions more users. Google is founded on real technology and algorithms, facebook started by copying and pasting cold fusion code from myspace.
- tim333 11y ago
  Any source for the cold fusion thing? I thought it was all in PHP.
lmm 11y ago
Shrug. Not my experience. Google+ looks deader than disco here.
- wyclif 11y ago
  It's going to if you never circle anybody and none of your friends use it.
  - knight17 11y ago
    None of my friends use G+ but it has lots of active communities and there are many people who use it in a twitter-like manner -- posting non-personal items, starting discussions and the like that are crowd pullers (+1s, comments, resharing to other communities). G+ is a good network, I hope the Facebookers will remain on Facebook and Google will find some way to open it up to outside web to integrate it with its active communities and the wide web - a prime example is the G+ blog comment system. It had potential to be the no 1, but they squandered away the opportunity by limiting it to G+ and Disqus scored there.

TrevorJ 11y ago

Facebook lowered the overhead for staying in touch with your friends. Pretty much every update since the beginning has steadily raised that overhead, and now it's no more efficient than email was at solving the problem.

y_u_no_rust 11y ago

Facebook fails the KISS test, it's also a waste of time.

aws_ls 11y ago

I don't think email is a good replacement for Facebook. Rather what we need is open (email protocol like) social networks. The problem with Facebook is that its a monopoly, and closed. What if it were open, such that I can send a friend request from G+ to Facebook. Just like I can easily send an email from yahoo email id to gmail. This openness, if incorporated, can solve the monopoly problem as well. Plus we don't have to complain of Facebook's AI/ML screwing/controlling our inbox feeds. All my (various social network) friends' statuses come to my hosted social network (G+/Facebook, or my home built) and my host controls the feed, with its own proprietary rules. Everybody will be happy. Even Facebook, as there is no more bashing of it. I guess Facebook can and should take the lead towards openness. It will be a brave move, if it happens. But they will earn a lot of respect.

cortesoft 11y ago
That is what diaspora tried to do. It has not gone well.
- aws_ls 11y ago
  That's why I think, it takes Facebook (the current monopoly) to do the right thing. If they open the other required things will automatically happen. G+ will become an attractive option once again, for people who like that interface. And HN types will implement their own 'social' protocol, and self host.
  - Synaesthesia 11y ago
    Fab ook are not gonna do the right thing. They're gonna try to maximize their profits.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - narrowrail 11y ago
    While I sympathize with the gist of your sentiments: What's in it for FB? Nobody (outside of an HN-type crowd) wants to self-host anything, nor do they know what that means. The 30 yr old+ folks without any technical knowledge think FB is great and see no reason anything should change. You are basically calling for FB to reduce their monopoly to satisfy 0.01% of their addressable market. I believe the force that will reduce the significance of FB will come from outside of FB (and there is no shortage of people trying and failing to do that).

codingdave 11y ago

Periodic updates to friend and family about what is new in your life has a long tradition behind it. Before email, even, it came in the form of Christmas Letters, including with the Christmas cards. And they absolutely serve a purpose for one-way communication out to people. TinyLetter sounds like it would meet that need nicely. Of course, it cannot be too frequent. Family members and friends who send out mass updates too often end up being ignored, just like frequent Facebook updates. And that is because it is one-way communication. It is missing the core piece of asking how the recipients of the email have been, and engaging in a one-on-one conversation, even if just a brief one via email. (Posting a note at the end saying, "Please reply to tell me how you are doing." does not count.) For my own communications, I am not on social media. I call family every week or so. Sunday afternoons are a web of phone calls between us all. For old friends, I send emails periodically, one or twice a year at least. And news gets less frequent as you age. You aren't moving, you have the same job, the kids are 6 months older, but no real news. So sometimes those emails only purpose are to ask the other person how they are doing. So TinyLetter sounds fine for what it is. But I don't see it as a replacement for anything.

garduque 11y ago
Reading the title I thought the subject was going to be more along the lines of your response, not an ad for a newsletter service. The anti-Facebook is going back to how we communicated on a personal level before there was Facebook. Anything else still seems like a gimmick.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

Email isn't point-to-multipoint. Usenet is.

pud 11y ago

Founder of TinyLetter here. Cool article! Glad TinyLetter is still going strong & a successful acquisition for MailChimp.

gozo 11y ago
I would say mobog was the Facebook killer. Before its time though and when Instagram hit the mark Facebook promptly bought them and later WhatsApp. In Asia, primarily China, the Facebook killer is WeChat which is basically Instagram and WhatsApp.
- zhte415 11y ago
  > In Asia, primarily China, the Facebook killer is WeChat which is basically Instagram and WhatsApp. And banking. A huge 'value add' which has caught on is being able to send real-life money with no transaction fees to other people. And treated in novel ways - 'lucky money' to send friends in your friend circles, paying for a taxi, utility bills, seeing a movie, train and plane tickets, etc.
ised 11y ago
fuckedcompany.com was a great site. Wish there was a better archive than the bits saved at archive.org.
- germanier 11y ago
  There also has been a book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743228626 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743228626

drvortex 11y ago

We all know what keeps Facebook going. Facebook isn't running on well-paid, well-employed family dudes who want to get in touch with relatives. Nor on intelligent commentators on society and tech. It is kept going by gossipy teenagers who want to snoop on their bff, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men who want more 'social' interaction than they can possibly manage in the physical world. Google+ failed because of they didn't give anyone a good reason to move away from Facebook where such networks already existed, and they insisted on lack of anonymity. The intelligent commentators are all on Twitter anyway. But the demographic of teenagers, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men on the internet is very large, and they are on the side 24/7. Pretty much everyone else who uses the internet uses it for work and hardly uses Facebook. But they trudge along to Facebook a bunch of other people who of course need to stay in the communication loop. Email is not going away because no other system is a wide-spread. Slack could come close, if only they took away their silly way of logging in. It was a shame that Gmail is rooted in email. Heck, if Gmail changed their backend to something like Dlack, 50% of internet users would be no longer using email and they wouldn't even know it. I dream of a Slack to Email gateway.

Philipp__ 11y ago

I quit facebook 2 years ago. I found out that Facebook was just another place on internet for wasting time, not for communication and staying in contact with someone. Now when I meet someone new, and he's like add me on Facebook, I give them my email and always get that look in return.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

"Social Media vs. Personal Media"

jister 11y ago

Facebook replacement, email replacement, Windows replacement, etc etc...we heard about these attempts for a long time and yet they failed. Why? From the article, is the problem really the technical complexity or the empty rooms? Is it privacy? Or, is there really a problem at all? Of course there is! Just like any other businesses/companies there some people that will always complain! In the case of TinyLetter, it is NOT a replacement of Facebook. It will NOT be -- far from it. People don't use Facebook just to communicate. Some people use it to advertise, to sell, to communicate (sure), to look for old friends, to pretend to be somebody else, to boast that they are successful, to look for missing people important to them just like this: http://gary.littlethings.com/gary-bentley-nurse/?utm_source=soup&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=misc http://gary.littlethings.com/gary-bentley-nurse/?utm_source=... Now, can you do this in a newsletter? Don't think so...

MikeNomad 11y ago

Glad to see pud is still knocking around. Didn't realize he was the TinyLetter guy. FC was one of the best things ever to hit the web. As for E-mail vs. Fb... It is simply an issue of control: Content, speed, and the Signal-to-Noise ratio. And that goes for both the Sender and the Receiver. Makes e-mail the obvious choice.

pjbrunet 11y ago

I was saving up this idea, but here's how you could disrupt Facebook. This is already happening, but it could be automated. In short, automatically DELAY posting to Facebook. Let everybody know at the bottom of all content: This was published first at example.com and released to social media (Facebook) after X hours. Make Facebook look antiquated like a newspaper. Let everyone know, Facebook is the old news. If you want our latest news, you have to sign up for the email list--you must to go to example.com for the LATEST news. One way I'm thinking this could work with a WordPress plugin, when the publisher schedules a post, the post would be "locked" from view with a countdown timer. "This content unlocks in 6 hours. To unlock this content now, and to get our content before everyone else, sign up for our email list." Maybe for really time-sensitive info you could have three tiers. A paid tier (instant release) and a free tier (unlocked 1 hour later) and a social media tier (unlocked 6 hours later.) Essentially, you're taking advantage of the value of time, automatically. For example, if shampoo is on sale and you're 1 hour late, maybe the shelf is cleared out. But you don't necessarily need a paid tier, because the publisher is a) getting more traffic to example.com, pulling traffic off Facebook and b) getting more email subscribers. Publishers do implement this on their own, but I think it would work well as a WordPress plugin or as some kind of paid service if it was slick enough.

garduque 11y ago
I don't know anybody who gets "really time-sensitive" info from Facebook. I can't even think of an example beyond your not terribly good example of a shampoo sale.
- pjbrunet 11y ago
  In general, if publishers are automatically sharing to Facebook without some kind of delay, people will just stay on Facebook. Also consider the private groups on Facebook, they could be sharing paid subscriptions and who would know? The idea isn't just about Facebook, but publishing anything to get more subscribers. If your posts are time-sensitive and people can get your info through social media (without delay) then you're probably losing traffic, because people are busy, lazy, whatever--they're often already on Facebook and need a reason to go somewhere else. Paid subscriptions aren't as common, and I almost deleted that part of my comment, but people do pay for time-sensitive info. As far as the "paid tier" I was thinking out loud, in terms of building a general purpose SAS app for publishers. I haven't nailed down exactly how it would work, to delay posts to social media. Obviously it would need compelling case studies where people increased traffic and subscribers, and revenue. I can think of a couple of markets to start with, but not getting more specific than that. Another aspect of this is the notifications. I think email notifications are good to start with because they show up on your phone, and if those notifications are customizable and targeted, that's convenient. But I think there's more you could do with notifications, so that people aren't annoyed that they have to go to your website to find the (timely) information they want. If you can do better notifications than social media (more specific, less annoying) then I think people will more likely go to your website vs. consume your content through social media which sends less-useful notifications.

muddi900 11y ago

Man newsletters are making a comeback, but the only one I am subscribed to is Warren Ellis' Oribital Operations. If more newsletters were this well-written, I'd subscribe to them.

superuser2 11y ago

As it stands, Facebook has a better privacy story than email. Facebook traffic is encrypted straight through to Facebook's servers, and I'm confident that my data is not leaving Facebook. (You can pay Facebook to show ads to specific demographics; you can't actually buy user data.) Email, on the other hand, is plaintext for most of its journey and available in cleartext to dozens of shady actors (every ISP in the path, sender's provider, recipient's provider). The courts are clear that email is not considered private and not protected by law. I'd like to see GPG+email become the new Facebook, but I'll take Facebook over email as it stands now easily.

sea2summit 11y ago

I'd like to see Facebook investigated for antitrust violations. If Google can be investigated, Facebook should be more so.