7 ms·

I feel like this is a good argument for taking another look at projects like Diaspora and Friendica Red

by wonks 10y ago

soylentcola 10y ago
As much as I'd love to see some alternative to Facebook that provides generally the same basic features (easy sharing of original content and links/reposted media with a large group of contacts) I feel that they'll all face the same issues for the foreseeable future. Same issue with the ones you mentioned or even ones like G+ that are backed by another big player: critical mass of users combined with no standardized protocol. I've made the analogy plenty of times before but basically I compare and contrast with email, another service where you can "roll your own" but most general users just stick with a service, either paid or ad-funded, from another company. The thing with email is that it can be 2001 and you're happily using your @aol.com email account but down the line you decide to switch over to Yahoo. Then maybe later you switch to Hotmail and later still, to Gmail. All of those switches are up to the user and nothing stops you from even setting up your own email server if you have the desire. Regardless, none of the people you email need to do anything or change anything. And it's a good thing too because it would suck if in order to move off AOL or Yahoo you need to convince every one of your friends, relatives, business contacts, and potential email recipients to switch over as well. It might be feasible to get that 5% of your "techie" friends to switch services based solely on some new feature or whatever but you won't have much luck getting Aunt Mabel, your kid's 2nd grade teacher, your barber, or your potential clients to all switch over to some new UI and remember some new account address. But since email is based on a common protocol it doesn't matter. No matter how popular one provider is, you can switch to any other one and not lose the ability to email. Contrast this with centralized social media and you're basically screwed if you want to switch to another one. This really struck home when G+ came out. I found it to be a better Facebook for the most part. Faster mobile app, more granular sharing permissions, no stupid game/app spam, better media hosting, and better text/video chat. Maybe 10 of the people I generally connect with on social media felt the same way but the other couple hundred in my friends/contact list? They found it annoying to learn a new interface or they weren't already using Gmail so they'd need to sign up for another account or they just didn't like something else about it. And that's legit. Variety in services means there will be preferences. But in this case it didn't matter because the end result was the same: unless everyone moved over to G+ (or Diaspora or whatever) en masse, you'd either be cutting off contact with most of your list or you'd be maintaining multiple profiles and sharing links and pics on two sites. So G+ only got used for more specific groups and niche interests while Facebook kept more general social networking. And now Google seems tired of trying to build a better Facebook and is de-Plus-ifying most of their services. I seriously wonder how anyone will conceivably succeed at this where massive companies like Google can't pull it off. Instead, just as centralized social media replaced mass email chains for most people, I don't see Facebook going anywhere until something entirely different (not just new and improved) comes along and grabs mass user attention in the same way.
- ISL 10y ago
  As I understand it, the core difficulty is that FB does not make it easy to export your friends list.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Something that "gateways" to Facebook would be great, but of course Facebook would fight it with every weapon possible if it were to get any kind of traction.
  - palerdot 10y ago
    Can you explain your thoughts a bit more on what might be that "gateway"?
    - vidarh 10y ago
      Let's say you built a distributed social network where you can add plugins to communicate via different protocols... And one of them happen to know how to interact with Facebooks APIs or website, so that you would not need to care whether your contacts are facebook users or non facebook users. The same way we have IM clients that can talk multiple protocols. Facebook almost certainly would try to shut it down if it got any kind of traction, because the set of people you could interact with on this new platform would be a strict superset of Facebook users. It'd be bound to have clunky usability issues (e.g. group communication would be hard to get right with groups split across platforms), but it'd enable users to start extracting themselves from Facebook more and more if/when more of their friends decide to try it out. I'd love to see someone try. I won't try myself for two reasons: I don't use Facebook enough to know what features would be necessary, and secondly it's likely to be a game of cat and mouse with Facebook both technically and legally.
      - aws_ls 10y ago
        I totally agree with the concept of "gateway". Kind of like a social protocol similar to SMTP(which is for emails), by which Facebook/G+/<some-new-player> inter-operate. That's the best solution and the only solution to fix this situation. If needed, Facebook must be forced to open up. Its a wrong kind of monopoly. >I'd love to see someone try. I won't try myself for two reasons: I don't use Facebook enough to know what features would be necessary, and secondly it's likely to be a game of cat and mouse with Facebook both technically and legally. SMTP protocol[1] is created and maintained by IETF. Ditto for social. I wonder why don't Google, who didn't succeed with G+, submit a 'social' protocol already to IETF. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
The biggest problem I have with Diaspora is the lack of width of types of people on it. Almost everyone there is an anti-corporate type or someone who is almost certainly only there because they've been banned everywhere else.

I feel like this is a good argument for taking another look at projects like Diaspora and Friendica Red

by wonks 10y ago

I feel like this is a good argument for taking another look at projects like Diaspora and Friendica Red

As much as I'd love to see some alternative to Facebook that provides generally the same basic features (easy sharing of original content and links/reposted media with a large group of contacts) I feel that they'll all face the same issues for the foreseeable future. Same issue with the ones you mentioned or even ones like G+ that are backed by another big player: critical mass of users combined with no standardized protocol. I've made the analogy plenty of times before but basically I compare and contrast with email, another service where you can "roll your own" but most general users just stick with a service, either paid or ad-funded, from another company. The thing with email is that it can be 2001 and you're happily using your @aol.com email account but down the line you decide to switch over to Yahoo. Then maybe later you switch to Hotmail and later still, to Gmail. All of those switches are up to the user and nothing stops you from even setting up your own email server if you have the desire. Regardless, none of the people you email need to do anything or change anything. And it's a good thing too because it would suck if in order to move off AOL or Yahoo you need to convince every one of your friends, relatives, business contacts, and potential email recipients to switch over as well. It might be feasible to get that 5% of your "techie" friends to switch services based solely on some new feature or whatever but you won't have much luck getting Aunt Mabel, your kid's 2nd grade teacher, your barber, or your potential clients to all switch over to some new UI and remember some new account address. But since email is based on a common protocol it doesn't matter. No matter how popular one provider is, you can switch to any other one and not lose the ability to email. Contrast this with centralized social media and you're basically screwed if you want to switch to another one. This really struck home when G+ came out. I found it to be a better Facebook for the most part. Faster mobile app, more granular sharing permissions, no stupid game/app spam, better media hosting, and better text/video chat. Maybe 10 of the people I generally connect with on social media felt the same way but the other couple hundred in my friends/contact list? They found it annoying to learn a new interface or they weren't already using Gmail so they'd need to sign up for another account or they just didn't like something else about it. And that's legit. Variety in services means there will be preferences. But in this case it didn't matter because the end result was the same: unless everyone moved over to G+ (or Diaspora or whatever) en masse, you'd either be cutting off contact with most of your list or you'd be maintaining multiple profiles and sharing links and pics on two sites. So G+ only got used for more specific groups and niche interests while Facebook kept more general social networking. And now Google seems tired of trying to build a better Facebook and is de-Plus-ifying most of their services. I seriously wonder how anyone will conceivably succeed at this where massive companies like Google can't pull it off. Instead, just as centralized social media replaced mass email chains for most people, I don't see Facebook going anywhere until something entirely different (not just new and improved) comes along and grabs mass user attention in the same way.

ISL 10y ago
As I understand it, the core difficulty is that FB does not make it easy to export your friends list.
vidarh 10y ago
Something that "gateways" to Facebook would be great, but of course Facebook would fight it with every weapon possible if it were to get any kind of traction.
- palerdot 10y ago
  Can you explain your thoughts a bit more on what might be that "gateway"?
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Let's say you built a distributed social network where you can add plugins to communicate via different protocols... And one of them happen to know how to interact with Facebooks APIs or website, so that you would not need to care whether your contacts are facebook users or non facebook users. The same way we have IM clients that can talk multiple protocols. Facebook almost certainly would try to shut it down if it got any kind of traction, because the set of people you could interact with on this new platform would be a strict superset of Facebook users. It'd be bound to have clunky usability issues (e.g. group communication would be hard to get right with groups split across platforms), but it'd enable users to start extracting themselves from Facebook more and more if/when more of their friends decide to try it out. I'd love to see someone try. I won't try myself for two reasons: I don't use Facebook enough to know what features would be necessary, and secondly it's likely to be a game of cat and mouse with Facebook both technically and legally.
    - aws_ls 10y ago
      I totally agree with the concept of "gateway". Kind of like a social protocol similar to SMTP(which is for emails), by which Facebook/G+/<some-new-player> inter-operate. That's the best solution and the only solution to fix this situation. If needed, Facebook must be forced to open up. Its a wrong kind of monopoly. >I'd love to see someone try. I won't try myself for two reasons: I don't use Facebook enough to know what features would be necessary, and secondly it's likely to be a game of cat and mouse with Facebook both technically and legally. SMTP protocol[1] is created and maintained by IETF. Ditto for social. I wonder why don't Google, who didn't succeed with G+, submit a 'social' protocol already to IETF. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

The biggest problem I have with Diaspora is the lack of width of types of people on it. Almost everyone there is an anti-corporate type or someone who is almost certainly only there because they've been banned everywhere else.