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Prof. Wu makes a couple of assumptions when he gives suggestions for Facebook alternatives or successors. I dont see those suggestions as the most important po
by feelin_googley 9y ago
Prof. Wu makes a couple of assumptions when he gives suggestions for Facebook alternatives or successors. I dont see those suggestions as the most important point of his argument however. I believe the most important point is that there must be competition, that trying to "fix" Facebook will not suffice.
Nonetheless, these are the assumptions I see:
1. The software alternatives or successors must be commercial.
2. The software must attract a certain quantity of users to be viable.
3. The software must enable networks comprising large numbers of people, perhaps in the millions or billions.
This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends.
Over the years Facebook may have morphed into a "public square" for exercising "Free Speech" but in the beginning as I recall it was not a means to broadcast to other users outside of ones social circle.
Its primary utility is arguably still in enabling communication within small groups, not enabling broadcasting to the general public.
Wu's assumptions point toward a Zuckerberg-like centrally-managed approach to what I see as historically a locally-managed activity: the human tendency to form small groups.
For many years, gamers and others have been writing software to enable small groups to communicate over peer-to-peer networking, without any funding from advertisers.
Wu writes, "So what stands in the way of a genuine Facebook alternative? It isn't the technology."
Thats exactly right. IMHO.
- guelo 9y agoThe useful feature that's missing if the network isn't large is being able to easily friend a new person. The extra friction of convincing a new acquaintance to join your social network means that it doesn't happen in a lot of situations.
- eadmund 9y ago> This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends. Yes, but only an individual Facebook user. The problem is that my friends' friends' friends' friends' friends' friends encompass the entire human race: at some point, as I invite people who invite people who invite people, the underlying technology has to be able to support all mankind. Indeed, I suspect that this — not some momentary privacy-failure flash-in-the-pan will be what leads to Facebook's actual downfall. It's ultimately building a proprietary Internet (in the sense of a fabric which connects people), and that's extraordinarily expensive. At the end of the day, the actual Internet is able to do that far more cheaply. I imagine that the replacement for Facebook will be something like email: something under the control of its users, something anyone will be able to add himself to and anyone will be able to block.
- indigodaddy 9y agoCould a viable Facebook competitor be built on a distributed/p2p type network, perhaps something like ipfs and/or mesh networking?
- toomuchtodo 9y agoHave you heard of Mastodon? https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
- newscracker 9y agoIsn't Mastodon more of a Twitter replacement than a replacement for Facebook (which has time line, groups, pages, etc.)? I'm curious to know what's closer to what Facebook provides and is decentralized.
- BadassFractal 9y agoDiaspora?
- im_dario 9y agoI think no ActivityPub support should be an instant "nope" nowadays for any project willing to be considered as Facebook replacement/alternative: [0] 0: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422 https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422
- jrs95 9y agoIt seems unrealistic because people would have to make the effort to publish their content on that network to keep it available. Or pay someone else to do so. A distributed approach to this is definitely interesting, but it's more technically challenging and it's not a silver bullet. The big problem is how to fund a social network that doesn't rely on selling it's users data, IMO.
- fabianhjr 9y ago