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you compete with facebook by doing things that facebook cannot do. gnu/social and mastodon are one step in that direction b/c they are ad free on purpose and pr
by xj9 9y ago
you compete with facebook by doing things that facebook cannot do. gnu/social and mastodon are one step in that direction b/c they are ad free on purpose and provide a much more personal experience via gift economy. sure, some instances have a tip jar, but its easy enough to find a friend who has a private instance you can live on for free b/c they like you.
of course, to compete properly things have to go further. #p2p applications and decentralized authentication systems to compete with "Sign-up with Facebook" and creating an ecosystem for competitive applications that don't rely on centralized infrastructure. facebook can and will crush you if you need to spend your way to victory. they're huge and rich. this is p obvious imo. so, to compete you have to make cost to the rando dev ~$0 so they can face the behemoth forever.
that isn't to say you can't make money. totally possible to sell cloud services to boost performance or increase storage for users. the point is that it doesn't cost you anything to run in the first place and provides acceptable performance without the cloud speedups.
- thisrod 9y agoFacebook's killer app was being the phone directory. Once upon a time, there were paper mail and landline phones, with a directory where you could look up pretty well anyone's address and phone number. That was really useful; it was lost in the email years between letters and Facebook messenger. Since no one got a distributed internet directory to work back then, it's hard to imagine that there will be one in the future. And so we're doomed to Facebook.
- xj9 9y ago\> doomed this is the doomed timeline, i suppose. no need to be so, uh, defeatist about it tho. building a facebook alternative/competitor isn't impossible, just hard. took forever, but #ostatus is finally making some headway against twitter. could happen again, right?