12 ms·

Towards a world without Facebook

323 points by middle1 9y ago

jasonkostempski 9y ago
"wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve" I'm probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is exactly DRM for the individual. I don't want anything with DRM and I don't want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  > I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this. It seems pretty simple to me. People oppose DRM because it is content they paid for and disallows their modifying, repurposing it, etc. None of those things apply to content I have created. I have the original, non-DRM'ed content that is always editable, I am the owner fo the content....
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    So if your proud mom wants to share everything her kid is up to with everyone, including Zuckerberg (because he gave her a way to automate reposting your feed for her directly to Facebook), you don't want a way to prevent that?
- stordoff 9y ago
  The implementation may be similar, and arguably the term DRM could apply, but I imagine that a key difference is that DRM (in general) controls how a content recipient can use the content (e.g. I can't modify it, or I'm limited in what programs can open the file). Here, the goal is (presumably) to control who receives access to the content, but not imposing restrictions on people who do receive it.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    What about reposts, especially to platforms that don't play the game? The only thing that will stop your naive friend, who thinks your slightly off-color remark about the hot-topic of the week is pure gold, from reposting will be potential threats of legal repercussions if they do (some kind of DMCA amongst friends). Who the hell wants that? We're either asking for the same thing media companies have been seeking for decades, perfect DRM (billions of dollars haven't found that solutions yet), or we're admitting that none of this works unless everyone you share things with, and the people they share your thing with, completely agree with you about who should see the thing you just shared with them, and know how to prevent software from automatically doing it, perfect trust (most can't even keep their contact lists from leaking). I don't see either happening, ever. The goal here is to prevent powerful groups from building a profile so they can target ads/guns at you when they decide they want your money/life whenever they decide they deserve it. The only ways I can think of to do that are post anonymously, hope not to get doxed; or STFU and stop broadcasting your life. You can make laws that might make it unprofitable (most likely just for new-comers, the current players will just pay the fines), but that won't stop the guns.
Froyoh 9y ago
What did I just read
- iKevinShah 9y ago
  "Towards a world without Facebook"
- prolikewh0a 9y ago
  A cryptocurrency ad disguised as "a world without Facebook".
blunte 9y ago
Malicious ad took over my browser when I tried to visit the link...
cornholio 9y ago
The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users. If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it simpler yet, and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it's strong incumbent advantage. So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with "a world without Facebook".
- zappo2938 9y ago
  My 90 year old grandpa still uses my late grandmother's AOL account and is afraid to stop paying the monthly service. He doesn't use Facebook mostly only FWD:FWD:FWD emails.
- FlyingSnake 9y ago
  You're right, this is a weird article with a bizarre solution. Throwing obscure technology at a simple human problem is not the solution here. Facebook simply made social communication easier for the average Joes, and in the quest to do so became a monster. IRC/AIM/MSN/Gmail before that, and Snapchat/Slack after that shows that humans just want to communicate about silly things. Whatever comes next needs to solve the problem to share the silly tidbits, without the greed to turn the users into a data farm.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  I think you're downplaying the technical sophistication of Facebook, as well as the pioneering moves it made during its growth phase. Compared to MySpace, which was incumbent during its rise, Facebook did everything faster, with less friction for the everyday user. MySpace would often try and stuff full interstitial page loads between core parts of its user interface. Facebook invented photos tagged with social profiles. Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Since going public, Facebook's ad platform has remained at the forefront of useful and powerful online services. You can target users by interest, worldwide location, age, and more. It is an elegant platform that has been mishandled by aloof executies.
jobvandervoort 9y ago
Is a world without Facebook one with a real alternative (everyone in the same place), or one where there are many alternatives? Reddit is a single platform with many mostly-independent communities. Could a similar thing in the shape of a social network exist?
olivermarks 9y ago
https://steemit.com https://steemit.com http://minds.com http://minds.com Bizarre that jonevans/techcrunch doesn't site these modern social networking sites, only the mysterious demise of Diaspora etc.
swalsh 9y ago
I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video. Which don't belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common protocol. Then multiple "vendors" can host the information (encrypted so they can't read it), and multiple "vendors" can create clients. I often feel like the block chain is derailing the decentralized Internet by adding unnecessary complexity.
- allannienhuis 9y ago
  That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of that.
  - ColinWright 9y ago
    Then sign up on a Mastodon instance, make some new friends, and set up a cross-poster. Edit: I'm getting down-voted - let me expand ... I've set up a Mastodon account, started to integrate, and made new connections. I've also set up a cross-poster, so I can work on either, and I'm finding that my more valuable connections are also migrating to Mastodon. So although it's playing the long game, that's a strategy. If you don't start, it will never happen.
    - allannienhuis 9y ago
      on the first point - I'm not looking for new friends or to promote any of my own views. I'm looking to get birthday party pictures and the occasional meme from my existing friends and family. Like most people I think - I post pretty rarely, but like to comment from time to time on other people's posts/content. I agree it's a chicken-egg problem. But there has to be enough value in it for people like me to be worth the pain of transition. For me there's very little incremental value in another solution. The privacy benefits of using a different service are nebulous - I treat anything I post on facebook as 'public', regardless of my privacy settings, and I really have no reason to believe some other service run by volunteers will be capable of protecting my data, or respecting it at all. I'm paying for facebook by looking at ads and having 'someone' know something (maybe a lot) about my public facing self. I think for most people that's been a reasonable trade. I actually _wish_ there were more competition in this space, and a way for these social graphs to be more transferable in some way, but I haven't seen any options yet that are attractive enough to be worth the cost of switching. [edit] for what it's worth, I didn't downvote you :) the idea of crossposting is a valuable addition to the conversation.
eyeareque 9y ago
After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave. Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.
- ams6110 9y ago
  I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.
  - davidcbc 9y ago
    Those kids these days with their new fangled gadgets and social media. In my day we walked two miles uphill each way to share pictures of cats with our friends.
    - zaphod4prez 9y ago
      I'm confused about why you're dismissive of this person pointing out a very real and interesting situation...not a unique one, but intergenerational gaps in beliefs/lifestyle/socialization/etc is a pretty fundamental challenge throughout the modern world, and the gap caused by iphone/facebook/whatever is a particularly concerning and current one.
    - vanilla_nut 9y ago
      No need to be dismissive. I'm in my early 20s, and most of my life has seen the use of social media as the core mode of communication. Can you imagine moving back to a world where you could only talk to friends in person after you'd experienced talking to friends over the phone? Or shifting back to phone calls only after you'd gotten used to text messages? Like it or not, a paradigm shift has occurred. Personally I think Facebook has gone too far: they've manipulated people too much, and their platform has become mostly useless for its core feature (social interaction) because they've put too much work into monetization, ads, algorithms, and suggested content. I think there's a lot to be said for what is effectively a collection of personal websites where people can share their life events along with a standardized communication protocol. There are a lot of advantages, like being able to keep up with (slightly) more people and being able to stay in contact with people who live farther away, and who you don't have the money or time to visit in person regularly. But it has to be on a platform that values those things, or it'll go the way of Facebook -- exploitative, and eventually useless.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Spearchucker 9y ago
I have no idea how blockchain helps social media. If my details, my posts or other "my thing" end up in one they're indelible, no? So how does that help me exercise my right to be forgotten? Besides the perf question of syncing blockchains, or the design hit of federating them, or apportioning by some yet-to-be-defined traffic/post/data taxonomy...
- Zee2 9y ago
  Couldn't the indelible blockchain-embedded data be pointers to data hosted elsewhere? If the externally hosted data is "forgotten", the blockchain-verified pointers would be useless.
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    Why?
  - kerng 9y ago
    IPFS. There are multiple projects in this space.
  - bitL 9y ago
    Blockchain doesn't store data themselves. We would end up with petabytes of new blockchain data every day otherwise.
- calibas 9y ago
  I have friends who are almost religious about the "virtues of blockchain", but have little to no understanding of how it actually works. There seems to be this idea that adding blockchain to any existing technology will magically make it better. I'm all for blockchain technology, but it's not the solution to everything. It's great when you want relatively immutable, decentralized record keeping.
natural219 9y ago
A fundamental distinction needs to be made between blockchain-based and non-blockchain-based decentralized services. Blockchains are insanely ambitious, century-scale, state-killing, finance-replacing behemoths. WE DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT STUFF TO REPLACE FACEBOOK! You're exploding the problem way out of scope, and constant focus on blockchains seems almost like a false flag to demotivize people who just want to build decentralized alternatives to Facebook, which is already an astoundingly huge problem. Stop trying to put blockchains in web decentralized systems. They're not going to work for several more decades. All we need to do to kill Facebook is solve the self-hosting P2P UX problem, and create a W3C-like body that allows developers to participate in standards creation process for how we schematize common social data. That's it. Once everyone is running a federated node in the cloud or in their basement, then you can go back to doing blockchain stuff.
EGreg 9y ago
How about starting by just having a good, open source social platform for the Web, like Wordpress is for blogs. Wordpress is used to host 20% of all new websites. Meanwhile, to post a comment on TechCrunch, I had to register yet another account with yet another password, and after that the comment I was writing was lost (despite the site saying it will save it). And then I still couldn't post it on a mobile phone! This is 2018, and you can see how the state of decentralized social networking sucks. I made a video about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
wyck 9y ago
Facebook capitalised by being in the right place at the right time, a time when the internet was opened to the non-tech savy, the "regular" world spilled into what was already a social experience. This is why Facebook now has the moniker of the "mom" platform. Technology like blockchain might free the business model from having to generate revenue and better align the experaince. But I have an easier time believing people will just dump social media than some Utopian public social ledger is going to solve what is essentially a psychological shitfest.
beamatronic 9y ago
How about moving away from free services and demanding security, privacy, and customer support. Change our attitudes so we are not willing to be the product any more.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  So basically we pay $1 a year instead of giving facebook all our our information? That might sound reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since 2008.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    I run a Mastodon instance and I’ve had a few users ask me when I’m setting up a Patreon to help cover my costs because they want to start paying for it. YMMV.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      Those users are mastodon users? Then they aren’t in the category I mean. I mean the 90% of Facebook users who will not have heard about #deletefacebook when it’s over for this time. And all those people are the reason I use Facebook. That’s the key to this problem: - making the product isn’t the problem. Technically it’s been done (e.g diaspora) - attracting integrity-conscious users isn’t the problem. But they won’t drag the rest along easily. How to attract a billion Facebook users that won’t even hear about the alternative?
- remir 9y ago
  Before they were acquired by FB, WhatsApp charged like 1$ per year for the service. Since they were mobile-first and most people had entered their credit card info to join the App Store/Play Store, the transaction was friction-less for users. I thought that was genius.
shmerl 9y ago
Why should decentralization equal blockchain? I didn't quite get the idea. Decentralization for social networks was proposed a long time ago. The problem is not in application of it, but in the fact that good social networks aren't supposed to be commercial. And that means someone should invest volunteer time to advance them. Diaspora grew over the years, and it's still growing. But the growth is slow.
im_dario 9y ago
In my opinion: good premise, bad conclusion. Blockchain, as good as it can be, isn't really required for social sharing. I'm going to state pretty obvious things. We need to take a step backwards. What we need is a decentralized/federated app platform. It must run in any OS, it must allow to any actor to provide its own implementation (and their own apps - providing network effect) and it must be easy to use for the final user. We already have some parts of this done. Facebook just took advantage that community didn't know what to do with them.
seattle_spring 9y ago
Boy this is getting old. I hope FB dies for no other reason than for HN to get real content again instead of the same old tired anti FB crap that's dominated the front page for the last 2 weeks.
- rootlocus 9y ago
  Yeah! Any technology that affects the lives of millions of people in potential harmful ways should die because it gets to the front page of my favourite news aggregator TWO days in a row!
  - tcpabc123 9y ago
    any negative facebook article gets front page, its been that way for years. the issue is that literally nothing new gets said
dasil003 9y ago
The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them. The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current cultural standard for ethics. Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations, having come out of academia with their "don't be evil" slogan, but inevitably all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are relying on VC funding. I'd love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.
- bognition 9y ago
  > You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.
  - tsunamifury 9y ago
    Both raised millions before being acquired, and likely would need to raise 100s of millions to start today. Facebooks has reached both network effect and economy of scale which is very hard to unseat.
    - phoneboy 9y ago
Invictus0 9y ago
I'm unconvinced that the US population cares enough about its data to get rid of Facebook anytime soon. The media goes berserk with every new breach, but even the Equifax debacle barely registered in the minds of most Americans. I don't see Cambridge Analytica as a tipping point, because most people are oblivious to the fact that people are deleting their accounts in the first place. Their infinite newsfeeds will be just as full of crap as ever.
jjguy 9y ago
For those of you who read this article and believe there may be a thread of a good idea within, go read Neuromancer. Gibson had a vision of an Internet with decentralized social media, including decentralized code execution, 35 years ago, and we have not yet realized it - or anything remotely close.
- ballenarosada 9y ago
  Gibson's cyberspace is a terrifying place where corporations, who execute total control over financial reality, operate centralized computer systems powerful enough to fry a human mind. It's not about a decentralized execution model.
tammer 9y ago
The blockchain is a potential solution. But deep down I have high expectations for IPFS — I think a workable, usable alternative for Facebook there could be the beginning of a real movement towards a decentralized Internet. Also, for anyone in this space: the Facebook killer app is Events. I can share photos & statuses in myriad ways, but I truly only have one way to access a complete events calendar for my city, organizations & social groups.
- davidcbc 9y ago
  Facebook's killer feature is the people, not anything else. Everything else is worthless without people and nobody is going to unseat Facebook with some technological solution unless they can convince people to use it and make it dead simple to use.
- Spearchucker 9y ago
  IPFS claims to use a blockchain, and that nodes in the directed graph cannot be changed. This means IPFS is of no more than cursory interest to me. I want to be able to curtail and even delete my stuff. When I delete a thing, it must be gone. I don't want a record of it, or that it existed. If I retain a thing privately, I don't want it known publicly that I have it.
booleandilemma 9y ago
Every time I check HN I see increasingly dramatic headlines about Facebook, but I have a feeling that when I check Facebook’s stock a few weeks from now it’ll be back up like nothing ever happened.
danbruc 9y ago
Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price of all the things they buy. That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze the shit out of their behavior. Users could be customers again. So the real question is how do you convince potential users that they are better off paying for services directly? It is of course not that simple, it never is, think for example about people seeing ads for Gucci bags and actually buying them and how they subsidize people which may see those ads but never actually buy the products because they can not afford them and which may also not have the money to pay for services directly. But I do not think any of the peripheral issues fundamentally changes the core challenges, getting people off of ad supported services.
- Tempest1981 9y ago
  > if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze ... behavior. Couldn't they make even more profit by doing both? If they find the optimal balance? I pay for cable TV, and still see lots of ads, so I guess I'm cynical.
  - danbruc 9y ago
    I thought about including this but decided against it. They could of course but I hope people would stay away from such an service. It is really sad that businesses are generally focused on maximizing their profits instead of providing the best service to their customers while making a reasonable profit. Economics 101 promised that competition would take care of that but that obviously has a few failure modes.
- AHMagic 9y ago
  Here's why I don't think decentralization is a red herring: in a centralized service, if you disagree, you don't have another option. If you didn't like AOL and quit, there was no way for you to maintain contact with AOL users unless both parties used a different platform. Decentralized systems like phone, e-mail, and mail allow you to maintain contact with people while having control over your provider. I understand that we've lost some of that control, but the basic idea stands. If you don't have Facebook, you can't reach out to other Facebook users. If you don't have Verizon phone service, you can still call Verizon users with AT&T or <insert your another phone service>. If you don't have Gmail, you can still send e-mails to Gmail users from Yahoo or <insert e-mail service>. If you don't like USPS, you can send mail through UPS or <insert another service>.
2aa07e2 9y ago
The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently. Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against deleting the whole account only because it's an invaluable address book. Realistically, the inertia of people to leave it will keep me as a user for a long time.
- somethingsimple 9y ago
  What extension is that?
  - 2aa07e2 9y ago
    Social Book Post Manager [1] [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...
pmuk 9y ago
Scuttlebutt seems like an interesting implementation of a decentralised social network: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz https://www.scuttlebutt.nz
viach 9y ago
But blockchain means all the information is public. So, author thinks it's better to just publish all your stuff by yourself on blockchain than it could be leaked from the evil Facebook's private database?
wellboy 9y ago
The tech that is proposed in the article sounds a lot like Nano's block lattice, where everyone has their own blockchain. You could even potentially use it to run this social network by just increasing transaction data size.
- TimJRobinson 9y ago
  Yes! After reading the Nano whitepaper a few months ago I realized it could be a protocol for a general, free, scaleable social network. I've been prototyping and designing it for the past few months. You don't need to increase the transaction data size, just make the transactions pointers to the data which lives somewhere else like IPFS or S3, keep the chains small. However a week ago I discovered scuttlebutt.nz who also had the same idea, about a year before me, and already had a working useable app. So I've been using it and will probably be hacking on this for a while and see how I could incorporate some of the ideas I came up with prototyping my own network.
  - wellboy 9y ago
    Ha very cool. Though who pays for storing the data then?
giancarlostoro 9y ago
I think the way forward is to embrace ActivityPub and similar endeavours. I'm not sure how much of Diaspora wound up on ActivityPub[0] / ActivitySteams[1] but I feel as though the best path forward for projects like Diaspora is to reach out to W3C to see what could be standardized. ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it was called) and similar open sourced twitter-like platforms, it doesn't necessarily mean we should be restricted to "micro" blogging by those platforms (besides, sharing pictures, and such is somewhat still valid "micro" blogging just look at Tumblr). If the limits are too much you could still at the very least send over a summary between hubs and if the person wants more info they can visit the originating site for the whole post. I think the path forward is to use open and standardized formats / protocols. We have the technology... There's a couple of implementations for ActivityPub/ActivityStreams already[2], you could either join one and contribute or just start one yourself if none are in the language / license you prefer. [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/ [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ [2]: https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implementation-reports https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implement...
- dane-pgp 9y ago
  If we can get some good examples of social networking sites interoperating with each other using W3C standards like the ones you mention, then things will get very interesting with the introduction of the GDPR in Europe. Specifically, it includes a right to data portability, with the wording: "In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible." https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ Conceivably, a Facebook user could demand that Facebook support automatically sending their Facebook posts to their friends on third party social networks. I imagine that an EU court would not be very sympathetic to Facebook claiming that it isn't technically feasible for a (large, monopolistic, American) company to support this use case when small open source (European?) competitors have implemented the W3C standards with no trouble. Once Facebook is forced by the GDPR to publish data to competing sites, I imagine it will feel compelled to also support receiving data from people on those sites, otherwise the one-way flow of data would put Facebook users at a disadvantage. But then there is basically no reason to use Facebook, as users of competing sites would still be able to see and be seen by their friends on Facebook. This is such a disastrous outcome for Facebook that I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers at Google (or some other big company) were already working on the legal complaints they are going to launch come May, when the GDPR comes into force.
diogenescynic 9y ago
Facebook badly needs a direct competitor. I wish there was social network with fewer features available, like what Facebook was in 2006-2007. Get rid of the newsfeed—it’s toxic and that’s the worst part of the experience. Make sharing related to specific groups— college friends, family, work friends, etc. I would prefer a social network with fewer features.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Facebook has lists or do you mean it should be more intrinsic to the social network like Google Plus was?
lumberjack 9y ago
What happened to the Freedom Box? I think that is the only promising solution to online data tracking. Most problems could be solved if everyone had a small personal server so that developers could deploy online applications that store the data locally.
TimJRobinson 9y ago
This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized social network I've seen.
- baggachipz 9y ago
  From what I see, last commit was a year ago and that was just to bump the version number. Is more work being done on this? It looks interesting. edit never mind, I was looking at https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt
  - fabianhjr 9y ago
    Still very active: https://github.com/ssbc/ https://github.com/ssbc/
  - TimJRobinson 9y ago
    See scuttlebutt.nz the team and user count is still small, but it works well and development is very active.
- matte_black 9y ago
  Unfortunately a name like scuttlebutt does not inspire me to join. I am also unlikely to recommend it to people in real life. How could they get something so simple so wrong?
AHMagic 9y ago
Do you really want to live your days feeling dependent on this sort of "service"? Do you really want to say, "but I need Facebook!". In today's age, you need a phone number and e-mail. It's ok - they are decentralized. Don't let a centralized platform of Facebook's evil nature become necessary for you to live your life. Delete and forget it existed. Ignore and move on. Give up the benefits and pay the cost.
tunesmith 9y ago
For me the trinity is facebook, twitter, and slack, so I've started figuring out how to replace them all at once. So far riot/matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and discord, at least for my purposes. I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook messenger. So riot/matrix could reduce my reliance on facebook in some ways, too. I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems mastodon is the most likely twitter replacement. Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation. As for the rest of facebook... I don't know. I was reading this thing about addiction, and how the bitch of addiction is that not only is it the thing you're addicted to, but it is also the thing that makes it harder to kick the addiction. (In the case of a substance, it hacks your brain to make it more difficult to resist impulse/urge.) Seems like something of a parallel, in how using facebook makes it harder to leave. The only path out in those cases is to take slow incremental steps that make it easier to resist over time. So, carving out the pieces of facebook that are important to you. For me that might be a public blog to share my thoughts, an email list, actually gathering email addresses and phone numbers for people on facebook I might want to stay in touch with, etc. Although I still want to check out Disapora and Scuttlebutt... and I don't know if ActivityPub is relevant here.
- zanny 9y ago
  I don't get what the difference between Facebook and Twitter even is supposed to be. One for people you know and one for people you don't? You can solve that in something like Mastodon by just having two independent content feeds (and you can already set that up). It probably used to be character limit, but again Twitter has already doubled theirs and Mastodon's is already 500 characters. That and the main developer of Mastodon is working on media features to make it work better as an Instagram replacement as well. The real secret sauce is that the Fediverse and AcitivtyPub means if you want a Facebook like experience you can use Diaspora and still friend / share / communicate with people on a Mastodon instance. Different programs can emerge as fews into this data graph but its still the same fundamental primitives (soon to be a web standard) data types. Speaking of Riot, I'm hopeful the developers will look into integrating it better into said fediverse. It should probably at least support some means for Mastodon hosts to easily spin up a Matrix server at their Mastodon domain with no friction and the same account database. It will probably take Matrix protocol revisions to make that work, though. Probably one of the important killer but missing features of Matrix will be the ability to integrate into websites the way Facebook messenger does, so you can have the social media site with the popup chat frames. The only missing feature in my mind after all that is something akin to Facebook / reddit comment threads / disquis / discourse. So that non-social media sites can integrate social media comment sections into their media that either autogenerate threads, repost to a Mastodon instance / on Diaspora and let Fediverse commentors just comment right there on the page.
memorymappings 9y ago
This is so annoying. "A world without Facebook" like it's some kind of almost apocalyptic reality. I'm only 27 and I remember when Facebook came out when I was in highschool. Miraculously, I also remember life before highschool and it was just fine too. I deleted my account in 2014. Wow big woop. I didn't die, and I still stayed I. Touch with my family and friends I cared about. I spent less time passively stalking people I don't care about. Wow. Amazing. Mind boggling. I also deleted my account before it became a fad to write some emotional diary about what it's like to get rid of your account like losing a child or approaching the topic like you just jumped to the other side of a heated world wide political debate and too a stand, about the same time as women started to post with no makeup (like wow, you are some kind of fantastical hero making a YouTube video or posting an fb or Instagram pic without spending an hour caking on foundation, more girls should "be brave" and step out like you) and I honestly can't tell them apart. Stop making getting rid of Facebook a big deal and it won't be a big deal to not have one, the same way I'm a girl and never gave two cents about makeup, quite literally, and I don't make it a big deal to not wear it. I don't waltz around like some superior than thou feministic hero that girls should tremble to their knees.for guidance on how to give up their addiction to drug store eyeliner. News flash. Your social life will not dissapear, in either case. What is the deal. We have better things and more interesting things and more important things, all of us to focus our time and energy on than how other people perceive our obnoxiously curated profiles. Stop giving Facebook so much power. They have power because you give it to them. Theyve been openly untrustworthy for years. So don't give it to them .
halvardo 9y ago
We can never replace Facebook with another Facebook, decentralised or not. It needs to be disrupted orthogonally. Think of the individual components of Facebook that are keeping people from leaving, and create better stand-alone versions of those. Can they be integrated with other things that Facebook doesn't have? Sort of like the concept of disrupting an incumbent by integrating a different part of the value chain from – except there isn't really a (known) value chain. We have to find new points of integration, new ways of bundling valuable features that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. It would likely have social components, and probably be defined as a social network, but don't start in that end. Start with the components. I don't see any other way Facebook is going away in the short term. Personally I'm really only there because of work and for discovering events. Oh, and stalking.
_glass 9y ago
I guess an art collective could really be a group of people who can actually use some kind of decentralized social network. Especially in countries where there is censorship. So a decentralized network and some kind of control over what you post (like high quality pictures of artworks, and the copyright is really unbreakable). On top of the needs of an artist from a capitalist standpoint (need to protect your product, the artwork) there is the ideological-political one. Most artists I know are very political and leaning towards solutions that are liberal and are implemented despite of governmental agencies as well as big corporations.
msangi 9y ago
I find it curios that the article is calling the 'blockchain people' to save the world from Facebook when the blockchain is a public ledger.
nkkollaw 9y ago
I tried to follow the article, but I don't get what the blockchain technology has to do with a social network. Also, given how innefficient Bitcoin became with just a few transactions, how could the thing handle the billion of pictures that get shared every day?
magice 9y ago
How on earth is blockchain going help? Seriously! There is no conceptual situation, in theory or practice, that blockchain will improve upon Facebook situation. Generally speaking, Facebook is bad for about 5 reasons: 1. Privacy: unexpected people see your data (legally). 2. Right-to-be-forgotten: your data sticks around longer than expected. 3. Data Security: your data is stolen from your data keeper. 4. Cyberbully: Unwanted data surfaces without your control 5. Fake news: wrong information is fed to you. How do blockchains help with ANY of these? 2. is certainly getting WORSE, since blockchains never forget. 1. is probably getting WORSE, because most blockchains are public. 3. is getting SO MUCH WORSE, because so many other people will now store data, and compromises in any of them will expose everything (think African Prince scam). 4. will become impossible to solve, because the data is going to be public and cannot be deleted, and because all of those anonymous mechanism will ensure that the culprit is impossible to track. 5. won't be impacted. So, tell me, how the hell do blockchains help? Seriously. Look, I know blockchain is a cool idea (yay! no need for central database!). However, central database can help in many situation, especially in anything involves history, limit of access, and regulation.

323 points by middle1 9y ago

"wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve" I'm probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is exactly DRM for the individual. I don't want anything with DRM and I don't want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

JKCalhoun 9y ago
> I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this. It seems pretty simple to me. People oppose DRM because it is content they paid for and disallows their modifying, repurposing it, etc. None of those things apply to content I have created. I have the original, non-DRM'ed content that is always editable, I am the owner fo the content....
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  So if your proud mom wants to share everything her kid is up to with everyone, including Zuckerberg (because he gave her a way to automate reposting your feed for her directly to Facebook), you don't want a way to prevent that?
stordoff 9y ago
The implementation may be similar, and arguably the term DRM could apply, but I imagine that a key difference is that DRM (in general) controls how a content recipient can use the content (e.g. I can't modify it, or I'm limited in what programs can open the file). Here, the goal is (presumably) to control who receives access to the content, but not imposing restrictions on people who do receive it.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  What about reposts, especially to platforms that don't play the game? The only thing that will stop your naive friend, who thinks your slightly off-color remark about the hot-topic of the week is pure gold, from reposting will be potential threats of legal repercussions if they do (some kind of DMCA amongst friends). Who the hell wants that? We're either asking for the same thing media companies have been seeking for decades, perfect DRM (billions of dollars haven't found that solutions yet), or we're admitting that none of this works unless everyone you share things with, and the people they share your thing with, completely agree with you about who should see the thing you just shared with them, and know how to prevent software from automatically doing it, perfect trust (most can't even keep their contact lists from leaking). I don't see either happening, ever. The goal here is to prevent powerful groups from building a profile so they can target ads/guns at you when they decide they want your money/life whenever they decide they deserve it. The only ways I can think of to do that are post anonymously, hope not to get doxed; or STFU and stop broadcasting your life. You can make laws that might make it unprofitable (most likely just for new-comers, the current players will just pay the fines), but that won't stop the guns.

Froyoh 9y ago

What did I just read

iKevinShah 9y ago
"Towards a world without Facebook"
prolikewh0a 9y ago
A cryptocurrency ad disguised as "a world without Facebook".

blunte 9y ago

Malicious ad took over my browser when I tried to visit the link...

cornholio 9y ago

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users. If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it simpler yet, and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it's strong incumbent advantage. So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with "a world without Facebook".

zappo2938 9y ago
My 90 year old grandpa still uses my late grandmother's AOL account and is afraid to stop paying the monthly service. He doesn't use Facebook mostly only FWD:FWD:FWD emails.
FlyingSnake 9y ago
You're right, this is a weird article with a bizarre solution. Throwing obscure technology at a simple human problem is not the solution here. Facebook simply made social communication easier for the average Joes, and in the quest to do so became a monster. IRC/AIM/MSN/Gmail before that, and Snapchat/Slack after that shows that humans just want to communicate about silly things. Whatever comes next needs to solve the problem to share the silly tidbits, without the greed to turn the users into a data farm.
ghostcluster 9y ago
I think you're downplaying the technical sophistication of Facebook, as well as the pioneering moves it made during its growth phase. Compared to MySpace, which was incumbent during its rise, Facebook did everything faster, with less friction for the everyday user. MySpace would often try and stuff full interstitial page loads between core parts of its user interface. Facebook invented photos tagged with social profiles. Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Since going public, Facebook's ad platform has remained at the forefront of useful and powerful online services. You can target users by interest, worldwide location, age, and more. It is an elegant platform that has been mishandled by aloof executies.

jobvandervoort 9y ago

Is a world without Facebook one with a real alternative (everyone in the same place), or one where there are many alternatives? Reddit is a single platform with many mostly-independent communities. Could a similar thing in the shape of a social network exist?

olivermarks 9y ago

https://steemit.com https://steemit.com http://minds.com http://minds.com Bizarre that jonevans/techcrunch doesn't site these modern social networking sites, only the mysterious demise of Diaspora etc.

swalsh 9y ago

I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video. Which don't belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common protocol. Then multiple "vendors" can host the information (encrypted so they can't read it), and multiple "vendors" can create clients. I often feel like the block chain is derailing the decentralized Internet by adding unnecessary complexity.

allannienhuis 9y ago
That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of that.
- ColinWright 9y ago
  Then sign up on a Mastodon instance, make some new friends, and set up a cross-poster. Edit: I'm getting down-voted - let me expand ... I've set up a Mastodon account, started to integrate, and made new connections. I've also set up a cross-poster, so I can work on either, and I'm finding that my more valuable connections are also migrating to Mastodon. So although it's playing the long game, that's a strategy. If you don't start, it will never happen.
  - allannienhuis 9y ago
    on the first point - I'm not looking for new friends or to promote any of my own views. I'm looking to get birthday party pictures and the occasional meme from my existing friends and family. Like most people I think - I post pretty rarely, but like to comment from time to time on other people's posts/content. I agree it's a chicken-egg problem. But there has to be enough value in it for people like me to be worth the pain of transition. For me there's very little incremental value in another solution. The privacy benefits of using a different service are nebulous - I treat anything I post on facebook as 'public', regardless of my privacy settings, and I really have no reason to believe some other service run by volunteers will be capable of protecting my data, or respecting it at all. I'm paying for facebook by looking at ads and having 'someone' know something (maybe a lot) about my public facing self. I think for most people that's been a reasonable trade. I actually _wish_ there were more competition in this space, and a way for these social graphs to be more transferable in some way, but I haven't seen any options yet that are attractive enough to be worth the cost of switching. [edit] for what it's worth, I didn't downvote you :) the idea of crossposting is a valuable addition to the conversation.

eyeareque 9y ago

After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave. Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.

ams6110 9y ago
I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.
- davidcbc 9y ago
  Those kids these days with their new fangled gadgets and social media. In my day we walked two miles uphill each way to share pictures of cats with our friends.
  - zaphod4prez 9y ago
    I'm confused about why you're dismissive of this person pointing out a very real and interesting situation...not a unique one, but intergenerational gaps in beliefs/lifestyle/socialization/etc is a pretty fundamental challenge throughout the modern world, and the gap caused by iphone/facebook/whatever is a particularly concerning and current one.
  - vanilla_nut 9y ago
    No need to be dismissive. I'm in my early 20s, and most of my life has seen the use of social media as the core mode of communication. Can you imagine moving back to a world where you could only talk to friends in person after you'd experienced talking to friends over the phone? Or shifting back to phone calls only after you'd gotten used to text messages? Like it or not, a paradigm shift has occurred. Personally I think Facebook has gone too far: they've manipulated people too much, and their platform has become mostly useless for its core feature (social interaction) because they've put too much work into monetization, ads, algorithms, and suggested content. I think there's a lot to be said for what is effectively a collection of personal websites where people can share their life events along with a standardized communication protocol. There are a lot of advantages, like being able to keep up with (slightly) more people and being able to stay in contact with people who live farther away, and who you don't have the money or time to visit in person regularly. But it has to be on a platform that values those things, or it'll go the way of Facebook -- exploitative, and eventually useless.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Spearchucker 9y ago

I have no idea how blockchain helps social media. If my details, my posts or other "my thing" end up in one they're indelible, no? So how does that help me exercise my right to be forgotten? Besides the perf question of syncing blockchains, or the design hit of federating them, or apportioning by some yet-to-be-defined traffic/post/data taxonomy...

Zee2 9y ago
Couldn't the indelible blockchain-embedded data be pointers to data hosted elsewhere? If the externally hosted data is "forgotten", the blockchain-verified pointers would be useless.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  Why?
- kerng 9y ago
  IPFS. There are multiple projects in this space.
- bitL 9y ago
  Blockchain doesn't store data themselves. We would end up with petabytes of new blockchain data every day otherwise.
calibas 9y ago
I have friends who are almost religious about the "virtues of blockchain", but have little to no understanding of how it actually works. There seems to be this idea that adding blockchain to any existing technology will magically make it better. I'm all for blockchain technology, but it's not the solution to everything. It's great when you want relatively immutable, decentralized record keeping.

natural219 9y ago

A fundamental distinction needs to be made between blockchain-based and non-blockchain-based decentralized services. Blockchains are insanely ambitious, century-scale, state-killing, finance-replacing behemoths. WE DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT STUFF TO REPLACE FACEBOOK! You're exploding the problem way out of scope, and constant focus on blockchains seems almost like a false flag to demotivize people who just want to build decentralized alternatives to Facebook, which is already an astoundingly huge problem. Stop trying to put blockchains in web decentralized systems. They're not going to work for several more decades. All we need to do to kill Facebook is solve the self-hosting P2P UX problem, and create a W3C-like body that allows developers to participate in standards creation process for how we schematize common social data. That's it. Once everyone is running a federated node in the cloud or in their basement, then you can go back to doing blockchain stuff.

EGreg 9y ago

How about starting by just having a good, open source social platform for the Web, like Wordpress is for blogs. Wordpress is used to host 20% of all new websites. Meanwhile, to post a comment on TechCrunch, I had to register yet another account with yet another password, and after that the comment I was writing was lost (despite the site saying it will save it). And then I still couldn't post it on a mobile phone! This is 2018, and you can see how the state of decentralized social networking sucks. I made a video about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

wyck 9y ago

Facebook capitalised by being in the right place at the right time, a time when the internet was opened to the non-tech savy, the "regular" world spilled into what was already a social experience. This is why Facebook now has the moniker of the "mom" platform. Technology like blockchain might free the business model from having to generate revenue and better align the experaince. But I have an easier time believing people will just dump social media than some Utopian public social ledger is going to solve what is essentially a psychological shitfest.

beamatronic 9y ago

How about moving away from free services and demanding security, privacy, and customer support. Change our attitudes so we are not willing to be the product any more.

alkonaut 9y ago
So basically we pay $1 a year instead of giving facebook all our our information? That might sound reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since 2008.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  I run a Mastodon instance and I’ve had a few users ask me when I’m setting up a Patreon to help cover my costs because they want to start paying for it. YMMV.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    Those users are mastodon users? Then they aren’t in the category I mean. I mean the 90% of Facebook users who will not have heard about #deletefacebook when it’s over for this time. And all those people are the reason I use Facebook. That’s the key to this problem: - making the product isn’t the problem. Technically it’s been done (e.g diaspora) - attracting integrity-conscious users isn’t the problem. But they won’t drag the rest along easily. How to attract a billion Facebook users that won’t even hear about the alternative?
remir 9y ago
Before they were acquired by FB, WhatsApp charged like 1$ per year for the service. Since they were mobile-first and most people had entered their credit card info to join the App Store/Play Store, the transaction was friction-less for users. I thought that was genius.

shmerl 9y ago

Why should decentralization equal blockchain? I didn't quite get the idea. Decentralization for social networks was proposed a long time ago. The problem is not in application of it, but in the fact that good social networks aren't supposed to be commercial. And that means someone should invest volunteer time to advance them. Diaspora grew over the years, and it's still growing. But the growth is slow.

im_dario 9y ago

In my opinion: good premise, bad conclusion. Blockchain, as good as it can be, isn't really required for social sharing. I'm going to state pretty obvious things. We need to take a step backwards. What we need is a decentralized/federated app platform. It must run in any OS, it must allow to any actor to provide its own implementation (and their own apps - providing network effect) and it must be easy to use for the final user. We already have some parts of this done. Facebook just took advantage that community didn't know what to do with them.

seattle_spring 9y ago

Boy this is getting old. I hope FB dies for no other reason than for HN to get real content again instead of the same old tired anti FB crap that's dominated the front page for the last 2 weeks.

rootlocus 9y ago
Yeah! Any technology that affects the lives of millions of people in potential harmful ways should die because it gets to the front page of my favourite news aggregator TWO days in a row!
- tcpabc123 9y ago
  any negative facebook article gets front page, its been that way for years. the issue is that literally nothing new gets said

dasil003 9y ago

The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them. The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current cultural standard for ethics. Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations, having come out of academia with their "don't be evil" slogan, but inevitably all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are relying on VC funding. I'd love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.

bognition 9y ago
> You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.
- tsunamifury 9y ago
  Both raised millions before being acquired, and likely would need to raise 100s of millions to start today. Facebooks has reached both network effect and economy of scale which is very hard to unseat.
  - phoneboy 9y ago

Invictus0 9y ago

I'm unconvinced that the US population cares enough about its data to get rid of Facebook anytime soon. The media goes berserk with every new breach, but even the Equifax debacle barely registered in the minds of most Americans. I don't see Cambridge Analytica as a tipping point, because most people are oblivious to the fact that people are deleting their accounts in the first place. Their infinite newsfeeds will be just as full of crap as ever.

jjguy 9y ago

For those of you who read this article and believe there may be a thread of a good idea within, go read Neuromancer. Gibson had a vision of an Internet with decentralized social media, including decentralized code execution, 35 years ago, and we have not yet realized it - or anything remotely close.

ballenarosada 9y ago
Gibson's cyberspace is a terrifying place where corporations, who execute total control over financial reality, operate centralized computer systems powerful enough to fry a human mind. It's not about a decentralized execution model.

tammer 9y ago

The blockchain is a potential solution. But deep down I have high expectations for IPFS — I think a workable, usable alternative for Facebook there could be the beginning of a real movement towards a decentralized Internet. Also, for anyone in this space: the Facebook killer app is Events. I can share photos & statuses in myriad ways, but I truly only have one way to access a complete events calendar for my city, organizations & social groups.

davidcbc 9y ago
Facebook's killer feature is the people, not anything else. Everything else is worthless without people and nobody is going to unseat Facebook with some technological solution unless they can convince people to use it and make it dead simple to use.
Spearchucker 9y ago
IPFS claims to use a blockchain, and that nodes in the directed graph cannot be changed. This means IPFS is of no more than cursory interest to me. I want to be able to curtail and even delete my stuff. When I delete a thing, it must be gone. I don't want a record of it, or that it existed. If I retain a thing privately, I don't want it known publicly that I have it.

booleandilemma 9y ago

Every time I check HN I see increasingly dramatic headlines about Facebook, but I have a feeling that when I check Facebook’s stock a few weeks from now it’ll be back up like nothing ever happened.

danbruc 9y ago

Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price of all the things they buy. That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze the shit out of their behavior. Users could be customers again. So the real question is how do you convince potential users that they are better off paying for services directly? It is of course not that simple, it never is, think for example about people seeing ads for Gucci bags and actually buying them and how they subsidize people which may see those ads but never actually buy the products because they can not afford them and which may also not have the money to pay for services directly. But I do not think any of the peripheral issues fundamentally changes the core challenges, getting people off of ad supported services.

Tempest1981 9y ago
> if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze ... behavior. Couldn't they make even more profit by doing both? If they find the optimal balance? I pay for cable TV, and still see lots of ads, so I guess I'm cynical.
- danbruc 9y ago
  I thought about including this but decided against it. They could of course but I hope people would stay away from such an service. It is really sad that businesses are generally focused on maximizing their profits instead of providing the best service to their customers while making a reasonable profit. Economics 101 promised that competition would take care of that but that obviously has a few failure modes.
AHMagic 9y ago
Here's why I don't think decentralization is a red herring: in a centralized service, if you disagree, you don't have another option. If you didn't like AOL and quit, there was no way for you to maintain contact with AOL users unless both parties used a different platform. Decentralized systems like phone, e-mail, and mail allow you to maintain contact with people while having control over your provider. I understand that we've lost some of that control, but the basic idea stands. If you don't have Facebook, you can't reach out to other Facebook users. If you don't have Verizon phone service, you can still call Verizon users with AT&T or <insert your another phone service>. If you don't have Gmail, you can still send e-mails to Gmail users from Yahoo or <insert e-mail service>. If you don't like USPS, you can send mail through UPS or <insert another service>.

2aa07e2 9y ago

The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently. Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against deleting the whole account only because it's an invaluable address book. Realistically, the inertia of people to leave it will keep me as a user for a long time.

somethingsimple 9y ago
What extension is that?
- 2aa07e2 9y ago
  Social Book Post Manager [1] [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...

pmuk 9y ago

Scuttlebutt seems like an interesting implementation of a decentralised social network: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz https://www.scuttlebutt.nz

viach 9y ago

But blockchain means all the information is public. So, author thinks it's better to just publish all your stuff by yourself on blockchain than it could be leaked from the evil Facebook's private database?

wellboy 9y ago

The tech that is proposed in the article sounds a lot like Nano's block lattice, where everyone has their own blockchain. You could even potentially use it to run this social network by just increasing transaction data size.

TimJRobinson 9y ago
Yes! After reading the Nano whitepaper a few months ago I realized it could be a protocol for a general, free, scaleable social network. I've been prototyping and designing it for the past few months. You don't need to increase the transaction data size, just make the transactions pointers to the data which lives somewhere else like IPFS or S3, keep the chains small. However a week ago I discovered scuttlebutt.nz who also had the same idea, about a year before me, and already had a working useable app. So I've been using it and will probably be hacking on this for a while and see how I could incorporate some of the ideas I came up with prototyping my own network.
- wellboy 9y ago
  Ha very cool. Though who pays for storing the data then?

giancarlostoro 9y ago

I think the way forward is to embrace ActivityPub and similar endeavours. I'm not sure how much of Diaspora wound up on ActivityPub[0] / ActivitySteams[1] but I feel as though the best path forward for projects like Diaspora is to reach out to W3C to see what could be standardized. ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it was called) and similar open sourced twitter-like platforms, it doesn't necessarily mean we should be restricted to "micro" blogging by those platforms (besides, sharing pictures, and such is somewhat still valid "micro" blogging just look at Tumblr). If the limits are too much you could still at the very least send over a summary between hubs and if the person wants more info they can visit the originating site for the whole post. I think the path forward is to use open and standardized formats / protocols. We have the technology... There's a couple of implementations for ActivityPub/ActivityStreams already[2], you could either join one and contribute or just start one yourself if none are in the language / license you prefer. [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/ [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ [2]: https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implementation-reports https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implement...

dane-pgp 9y ago
If we can get some good examples of social networking sites interoperating with each other using W3C standards like the ones you mention, then things will get very interesting with the introduction of the GDPR in Europe. Specifically, it includes a right to data portability, with the wording: "In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible." https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ Conceivably, a Facebook user could demand that Facebook support automatically sending their Facebook posts to their friends on third party social networks. I imagine that an EU court would not be very sympathetic to Facebook claiming that it isn't technically feasible for a (large, monopolistic, American) company to support this use case when small open source (European?) competitors have implemented the W3C standards with no trouble. Once Facebook is forced by the GDPR to publish data to competing sites, I imagine it will feel compelled to also support receiving data from people on those sites, otherwise the one-way flow of data would put Facebook users at a disadvantage. But then there is basically no reason to use Facebook, as users of competing sites would still be able to see and be seen by their friends on Facebook. This is such a disastrous outcome for Facebook that I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers at Google (or some other big company) were already working on the legal complaints they are going to launch come May, when the GDPR comes into force.

diogenescynic 9y ago

Facebook badly needs a direct competitor. I wish there was social network with fewer features available, like what Facebook was in 2006-2007. Get rid of the newsfeed—it’s toxic and that’s the worst part of the experience. Make sharing related to specific groups— college friends, family, work friends, etc. I would prefer a social network with fewer features.

skinnymuch 9y ago
Facebook has lists or do you mean it should be more intrinsic to the social network like Google Plus was?

lumberjack 9y ago

What happened to the Freedom Box? I think that is the only promising solution to online data tracking. Most problems could be solved if everyone had a small personal server so that developers could deploy online applications that store the data locally.

TimJRobinson 9y ago

This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized social network I've seen.

baggachipz 9y ago
From what I see, last commit was a year ago and that was just to bump the version number. Is more work being done on this? It looks interesting. edit never mind, I was looking at https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt
- fabianhjr 9y ago
  Still very active: https://github.com/ssbc/ https://github.com/ssbc/
- TimJRobinson 9y ago
  See scuttlebutt.nz the team and user count is still small, but it works well and development is very active.
matte_black 9y ago
Unfortunately a name like scuttlebutt does not inspire me to join. I am also unlikely to recommend it to people in real life. How could they get something so simple so wrong?

AHMagic 9y ago

Do you really want to live your days feeling dependent on this sort of "service"? Do you really want to say, "but I need Facebook!". In today's age, you need a phone number and e-mail. It's ok - they are decentralized. Don't let a centralized platform of Facebook's evil nature become necessary for you to live your life. Delete and forget it existed. Ignore and move on. Give up the benefits and pay the cost.

tunesmith 9y ago

For me the trinity is facebook, twitter, and slack, so I've started figuring out how to replace them all at once. So far riot/matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and discord, at least for my purposes. I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook messenger. So riot/matrix could reduce my reliance on facebook in some ways, too. I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems mastodon is the most likely twitter replacement. Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation. As for the rest of facebook... I don't know. I was reading this thing about addiction, and how the bitch of addiction is that not only is it the thing you're addicted to, but it is also the thing that makes it harder to kick the addiction. (In the case of a substance, it hacks your brain to make it more difficult to resist impulse/urge.) Seems like something of a parallel, in how using facebook makes it harder to leave. The only path out in those cases is to take slow incremental steps that make it easier to resist over time. So, carving out the pieces of facebook that are important to you. For me that might be a public blog to share my thoughts, an email list, actually gathering email addresses and phone numbers for people on facebook I might want to stay in touch with, etc. Although I still want to check out Disapora and Scuttlebutt... and I don't know if ActivityPub is relevant here.

zanny 9y ago
I don't get what the difference between Facebook and Twitter even is supposed to be. One for people you know and one for people you don't? You can solve that in something like Mastodon by just having two independent content feeds (and you can already set that up). It probably used to be character limit, but again Twitter has already doubled theirs and Mastodon's is already 500 characters. That and the main developer of Mastodon is working on media features to make it work better as an Instagram replacement as well. The real secret sauce is that the Fediverse and AcitivtyPub means if you want a Facebook like experience you can use Diaspora and still friend / share / communicate with people on a Mastodon instance. Different programs can emerge as fews into this data graph but its still the same fundamental primitives (soon to be a web standard) data types. Speaking of Riot, I'm hopeful the developers will look into integrating it better into said fediverse. It should probably at least support some means for Mastodon hosts to easily spin up a Matrix server at their Mastodon domain with no friction and the same account database. It will probably take Matrix protocol revisions to make that work, though. Probably one of the important killer but missing features of Matrix will be the ability to integrate into websites the way Facebook messenger does, so you can have the social media site with the popup chat frames. The only missing feature in my mind after all that is something akin to Facebook / reddit comment threads / disquis / discourse. So that non-social media sites can integrate social media comment sections into their media that either autogenerate threads, repost to a Mastodon instance / on Diaspora and let Fediverse commentors just comment right there on the page.

memorymappings 9y ago

This is so annoying. "A world without Facebook" like it's some kind of almost apocalyptic reality. I'm only 27 and I remember when Facebook came out when I was in highschool. Miraculously, I also remember life before highschool and it was just fine too. I deleted my account in 2014. Wow big woop. I didn't die, and I still stayed I. Touch with my family and friends I cared about. I spent less time passively stalking people I don't care about. Wow. Amazing. Mind boggling. I also deleted my account before it became a fad to write some emotional diary about what it's like to get rid of your account like losing a child or approaching the topic like you just jumped to the other side of a heated world wide political debate and too a stand, about the same time as women started to post with no makeup (like wow, you are some kind of fantastical hero making a YouTube video or posting an fb or Instagram pic without spending an hour caking on foundation, more girls should "be brave" and step out like you) and I honestly can't tell them apart. Stop making getting rid of Facebook a big deal and it won't be a big deal to not have one, the same way I'm a girl and never gave two cents about makeup, quite literally, and I don't make it a big deal to not wear it. I don't waltz around like some superior than thou feministic hero that girls should tremble to their knees.for guidance on how to give up their addiction to drug store eyeliner. News flash. Your social life will not dissapear, in either case. What is the deal. We have better things and more interesting things and more important things, all of us to focus our time and energy on than how other people perceive our obnoxiously curated profiles. Stop giving Facebook so much power. They have power because you give it to them. Theyve been openly untrustworthy for years. So don't give it to them .

halvardo 9y ago

We can never replace Facebook with another Facebook, decentralised or not. It needs to be disrupted orthogonally. Think of the individual components of Facebook that are keeping people from leaving, and create better stand-alone versions of those. Can they be integrated with other things that Facebook doesn't have? Sort of like the concept of disrupting an incumbent by integrating a different part of the value chain from – except there isn't really a (known) value chain. We have to find new points of integration, new ways of bundling valuable features that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. It would likely have social components, and probably be defined as a social network, but don't start in that end. Start with the components. I don't see any other way Facebook is going away in the short term. Personally I'm really only there because of work and for discovering events. Oh, and stalking.

_glass 9y ago

I guess an art collective could really be a group of people who can actually use some kind of decentralized social network. Especially in countries where there is censorship. So a decentralized network and some kind of control over what you post (like high quality pictures of artworks, and the copyright is really unbreakable). On top of the needs of an artist from a capitalist standpoint (need to protect your product, the artwork) there is the ideological-political one. Most artists I know are very political and leaning towards solutions that are liberal and are implemented despite of governmental agencies as well as big corporations.

msangi 9y ago

I find it curios that the article is calling the 'blockchain people' to save the world from Facebook when the blockchain is a public ledger.

nkkollaw 9y ago

I tried to follow the article, but I don't get what the blockchain technology has to do with a social network. Also, given how innefficient Bitcoin became with just a few transactions, how could the thing handle the billion of pictures that get shared every day?

magice 9y ago

How on earth is blockchain going help? Seriously! There is no conceptual situation, in theory or practice, that blockchain will improve upon Facebook situation. Generally speaking, Facebook is bad for about 5 reasons: 1. Privacy: unexpected people see your data (legally). 2. Right-to-be-forgotten: your data sticks around longer than expected. 3. Data Security: your data is stolen from your data keeper. 4. Cyberbully: Unwanted data surfaces without your control 5. Fake news: wrong information is fed to you. How do blockchains help with ANY of these? 2. is certainly getting WORSE, since blockchains never forget. 1. is probably getting WORSE, because most blockchains are public. 3. is getting SO MUCH WORSE, because so many other people will now store data, and compromises in any of them will expose everything (think African Prince scam). 4. will become impossible to solve, because the data is going to be public and cannot be deleted, and because all of those anonymous mechanism will ensure that the culprit is impossible to track. 5. won't be impacted. So, tell me, how the hell do blockchains help? Seriously. Look, I know blockchain is a cool idea (yay! no need for central database!). However, central database can help in many situation, especially in anything involves history, limit of access, and regulation.