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> Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! How so? What makes Facebook so appealing is the fact that pretty much everybody is

> Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! How so? What makes Facebook so appealing is the fact that pretty much everybody is on there, just like a telephone book. As such an alternative, with a huge positive effect, has to deliver at least this "centralization" to fulfill the same needs Facebook has been serving until now. This is a pretty common theme around IT savvy communities: People complain about Facebook and how there are so much better alternatives and how you supposedly don't even need Facebook. But the reality for over 2 billion people (among them many friends and family members of said tech-savvy folk) out there looks quite different, they use Facebook because it's what everybody uses, it wouldn't even work without that, which is what most Facebook competition comes to realize sooner or later. I just don't see any good solution to any of this that doesn't involve some paradigm shift how we handle private information as societies and as businesses.

gregknicholson 9y ago
What if a lot of your friends and family are on it, and some interesting people you don't know yet are on it, and your favourite brands… aren't? What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?
- freeflight 9y ago
  > What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it? Facebook might have started out that way, but don't think that angle is gonna help you build a new, even bigger, Facebook. How long did Facebook actually stick to its "Only students" rule? Imho that was more marketing than anything else.
  - gregknicholson 9y ago
    Scuttlebutt is designed deliberately so that you don't see the whole network, only the bits you care about. Partly this is view-filtering, but also your user agent only requests and stores data if it might be relevant to you, i.e. friends of friends and replies to their messages. It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.
    - freeflight 9y ago
      > It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks. That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience. If you are from the US and looking to befriend somebody from France, then you don't have to join "Facebook.fr" to make that connection, it all works through Facebook.com. Not too long ago the same process looked pretty much like this: "Are you on AIM?" "No, are you on ICQ?" "Nah, but I'm on MSM!" "Sorry I'm not on MSM, but I'm on Linkedin!" "No good for me I don't like Linkedin!" "Guess I'm gonna make an MSM account -_-" For that very same reason I ended up creating my first Facebook account on Facebook.de, which was a scam site back then. But decades of compartmentalization of users into "regions" convinced me that if I want to get any use out of Facebook I better sign up with their German version of the site, as most of my friends/family are German, that's how alien this whole "aggregate all your social contacts in one place" idea was back then.
      - gregknicholson 9y ago
        > > It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks. > That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience. Talking about Scuttlebutt here, it's actually the other way round. It's one protocol and any two people on it could connect, but in practice you won't see everyone, because you only have a social connection to certain people.

gregknicholson 9y ago

What if a lot of your friends and family are on it, and some interesting people you don't know yet are on it, and your favourite brands… aren't? What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?

freeflight 9y ago
> What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it? Facebook might have started out that way, but don't think that angle is gonna help you build a new, even bigger, Facebook. How long did Facebook actually stick to its "Only students" rule? Imho that was more marketing than anything else.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  Scuttlebutt is designed deliberately so that you don't see the whole network, only the bits you care about. Partly this is view-filtering, but also your user agent only requests and stores data if it might be relevant to you, i.e. friends of friends and replies to their messages. It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.
  - freeflight 9y ago
    > It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks. That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience. If you are from the US and looking to befriend somebody from France, then you don't have to join "Facebook.fr" to make that connection, it all works through Facebook.com. Not too long ago the same process looked pretty much like this: "Are you on AIM?" "No, are you on ICQ?" "Nah, but I'm on MSM!" "Sorry I'm not on MSM, but I'm on Linkedin!" "No good for me I don't like Linkedin!" "Guess I'm gonna make an MSM account -_-" For that very same reason I ended up creating my first Facebook account on Facebook.de, which was a scam site back then. But decades of compartmentalization of users into "regions" convinced me that if I want to get any use out of Facebook I better sign up with their German version of the site, as most of my friends/family are German, that's how alien this whole "aggregate all your social contacts in one place" idea was back then.
    - gregknicholson 9y ago
      > > It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks. > That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience. Talking about Scuttlebutt here, it's actually the other way round. It's one protocol and any two people on it could connect, but in practice you won't see everyone, because you only have a social connection to certain people.