18 ms·

We should replace Facebook with personal websites

• commandlinefan 8y ago
  Yes, everybody should have their own "space". I, for example, would have "my space".
  • decentralised 8y ago
    I'd call my "space" AOL because I'm never around.
• cpach 8y ago
  I like this idea. Actually, earlier today I set up a private Wordpress site that I will use to share photos of my kids to my family and relatives. One reason I wanted to this is that my dad doesn’t use Facebook. I could have chosen iCloud, but I prefer to use something that I control myself and is not tied to certain hardware. The site is hosted on a VPS on Digitalocean which is very convenient and the price is reasonable.
  • jdhawk 8y ago
    I've been looking for a solution to this for a while. How can I let my friends and family stay connected with photos videos & related metadata, but retain security and ownership? I thought NextCloud might be a good solution, but I'm still searching.
    • aheckler 8y ago
      One of my coworkers wrote a blog post on how he used WordPress to do this: https://chrishardie.com/2017/03/wordpress-private-website/ https://chrishardie.com/2017/03/wordpress-private-website/
    • amerkhalid 8y ago
      Same here. I am continuously searching for such solution. Previously, I used self-hosted WordPress blog for sharing photos, password protection was great but got tired of administering stuff. Also I wanted to backup my photos on VPS, so I was uploading full-resolution photos which of course, was not very price efficient for backup. Then I switched to SmugMug with unlimited space. This was great because I can upload photos directly from Lightroom Classic 6.0. Photos stay synced. And easy automatic backup but photos are slightly compressed when you upload via LR plugin. Now I have "upgraded" to Lightroom CC, it comes with 1TB of storage. Your photos/videos are available on laptop, phone, and web. It comes with Adobe Portfolio which you can use to share. You can share privately too but I haven't tested that. However, it is not a true backup service, if you accidentally delete a photo on phone, it is gone everywhere. And there is no recycle bin. So I keep local copies and run a cron job to copy them to NAS. So this is not a self-hosted decentralized solution but it seems to be best option so far.
      • jdhawk 8y ago
        The critical piece is running a stand-alone environment that has low friction for the users - my family. I want my Significant other to be able to post as easily as Facebook. My parents to browse easily on their devices, and uploading pictures from my phone to be Facebook Simple. Mastodon is pretty close to having all of this if you turn off Federation, other than not being able to run a fully private node. You can still access public pages for users. On my list to check out are: HumHub & Hubzilla.
• Antonio123123 8y ago
  That's a good idea. We need a decentralized facebook, where everybody hosts and shares their data. It would need a registry or identity provider for the initial contact, but then it should replicate facebook functionality in a decentralized way. If you want to see posts in a group (like facebook group) - you query online members part of the group for their data, and download/share the latest version.
  • cpach 8y ago
    That’s an interesting idea but creating decentralised social networks seems quite hard. IMHO it’s easier to just use regular web sites running e.g. Wordpress, Discourse or SMF[0]. [0] http://simplemachines.org/ http://simplemachines.org/
    • Zigurd 8y ago
      There exist various attempts at decentralized social networks. But when I googled to find an up-to-date list I find they're all unfamiliar to me. All the ones I heard of previously are apparently dead or zombies now. Decentralized social networks can't or won't do the kinds of orchestration of social interaction that help lubricate getting a social network up to speed. Many of those mechanisms, like bots, are underhanded and exactly what people want to get away from in decentralized networks. We likely have to live with the fact that social networks are artificial creations, and that they are hostile to many kinds of expression. They probably can and should be better at preventing propaganda manipulation by hostile national adversaries, and at protecting the vulnerable from bullying. But they're never going to be a force for good. Just a less-damaging vice.
    • Antonio123123 8y ago
      The issue is that you can't interact between profiles, or if you interact it's centralized. Looks like there is existing a decentralized social networking protocol: ActivityPub, having the features of social media (as mentioned in related comments).
  • 21stio 8y ago
    there's activitypub.. it's a federated social networking protocol. the most prominent implementation is mastodon (joinmastodon.org). Counting almost 2 million users by now
• thinelvis 8y ago
  Blogger (blogspot) could have been the thing all along.
  • cpach 8y ago
    There are still some really good blogs out there! Usually focused on niche topics.
    • Zigurd 8y ago
      Blogger together with comment threads on Google+ (which could be embedded in more places than just Blogger) were supposed to be the magic elixer between personal sites and a feed that promotes discoverability. Sometimes I think Google has killed G+ just as there was a reason to give it a second look, but I suppose they know how unlikely is a revival of G+. They have got a successful social network in the form of YouTube, even though YouTube comment threads often make Facebook look like the Promised Land.
• kv85s 8y ago
  You could call it "GeoCities"
  • LinuxBender 8y ago
    Which is now replaced by NeoCities [1] It is open source, so you can run it yourself if you wish, or make use of their infrastructure. [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
• jeletonskelly 8y ago
  Alright folks, it's time to bring back Geocities and Angelfire. Pull out your antique rotating skull and "under construction" gifs.
  • LinuxBender 8y ago
    +1 for under construction gifs. I saved all of them! Sparkle rainbow cats too.
    • siffland 8y ago
      Rainbow cats are out, Unicorn cats (or more properly caticorns) are in. Keep up with the times ;)
      • mxuribe 8y ago
        TIL: caticorns!
  • iosonofuturista 8y ago
    http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/ For all your gif needs.
    • lapnitnelav 8y ago
      Epilepsy warning required here.
  • adrianN 8y ago
    There is https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
  • quickthrower2 8y ago
    I just read an old JS book that shows you an advanced IE only feature where you can insert elements in the middle of a page using eval('document.all.something something'). So nostalgic now </marquee>
• jasode 8y ago
  >most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online. Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc). Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have. The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed rather than a 1999 Geocities personal website. (But that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database.)
  • saucoide 8y ago
    When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple
    • ip26 8y ago
      The magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery. I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.
      • startupdiscuss 8y ago
        Is there discovery on Facebook? Most people I add because I meet them in read life. Actually, 100% of the people I add on FB after I've met them in real life. Maybe if there was a good search and easy add mechanism for people I've met, it would fulfill the discovery aspect. I agree with you, it does feel easier to find people on FB.
        • ip26 8y ago
          No, discovery of news & sources. Your friends who know about <your hobby> are a great news source/filter. Whereas with RSS there's not a good method to find new news you care about.
• pmlnr 8y ago
  Homepage. It's your home on the internet. It's good for you. Things to get started with: - https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages - http://mastodon.social/ http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well - https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m - https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near one-click wordpress for near 5$ - https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/ - easy self-hosting, even on top of a raspberry - https://indieweb.org/WordPress https://indieweb.org/WordPress - make your site communicate with other sites - https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ - decentralized, sneakernet friendly, private social system
  • otachack 8y ago
    This is great, thanks. Also have the below: - https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ Static site generator written with Go-lang - https://jekyllrb.com/ https://jekyllrb.com/ static site generator written with Ruby
  • kowdermeister 8y ago
    These are great, but what's the solution for those who don't even know what HTML is? They are the vast majority of FB users. I don't think anyone who taken web development a bit seriously have any problem to publish something online independently.
    • paulddraper 8y ago
      At some point of ease, you pretty much just have MySpace/Facebook. And that's what I always think about these conversations... What separates hassle-free push button website creation and publishing from MySpace/Facebook?
    • fredsted 8y ago
      You don't need to know HTML to make a Web site with a CMS like WordPress.
• vfc1 8y ago
  There is this project which has the goal of building a decentralized Facebook - https://www.scuttlebutt.nz https://www.scuttlebutt.nz I think it will eventually happen, but I don't see how mass adoption will occur. Facebook grew a lot by getting our complete address book on signup and sending invitations to the whole list.
• Puer 8y ago
  The author's thesis is fundamentally flawed. They say it isn't clear why everyone was so excited to have a Facebook, but that's exactly the answer - because everyone had a Facebook. One of the biggest appeals of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (which is arguable even more useless than FB), etc. is that every nobody has direct access to an audience of millions. They can scream their offensive, unoriginal, spontaneous, nuanced thoughts into the void and instantaneously get sympathy, disgust, praise, and simple acknowledgement with little to no effort. Contrast this with maintaining a personal website. Even in a world where FB doesn't exist, it's still a chore to get people to memorize yet another URL and regularly visit it, especially if it isn't updated on a consistent schedule (which most personal websites aren't.) Furthermore, given that the author seems to be advocating for self-sufficiency as much as possible and avoiding centralized platforms, assuming you're hosting your own website and not using a cookie cutter template, you're now fighting Google for search engine visibility and that's a battle that is absolutely not based on merit of content. This is not to mention the unpleasantness of using most personal websites because they're poorly designed (light text on a white background), or they try and guilt-trip me into supporting them with Patreon/Paypal popups, or the only consistent content produced is content promising to produce more content in the future, etc. I'm probably reading too much into the author's article, to be honest. It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but at the same time the thing I don't understand about the recent trend of publishing articles on mainstream news sites preaching the life benefits of going cold turkey on social media is that it isn't a binary choice. I know it's a novel idea, but you don't have to quit FB to pick up that hobby you once loved again! You don't have to quit FB to maintain your personal website! In fact, you can probably use FB and your audience on it to grow your readership on your personal website! Even if you accept the author's argument that personal websites fulfill the purpose that FB does (strongly disagree), they give no reason why you have to pick one over the other. ¿Porque no los dos
  • IshKebab 8y ago
    Yeah the idea of everyone setting up a personal website with their real name and a recognisable photo of themselves is pretty laughable. Are people going to upload photos and implement an account system to restrict access too? That was Facebook's original raison d'etre (and the source of its name).
• Freezerburnt 8y ago
  I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Dispora* yet: https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ I looked into it a while ago and it was a little cumbersome to set up, but I really like the idea.
  • veddox 8y ago
    Did that ever take off? I haven't heard about it in ages... There's quite a bit of talk about Mastodon lately, but not about Diaspora...
    • Freezerburnt 8y ago
      Hmmm. Doing a little research myself now and I think there's a whole bunch of different servers but they all seem to communicate? Dispora* is just one of them.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • ams6110 8y ago
    "it was a little cumbersome to set up" Hence it will never be popular. Sorry, that's just how it works. If you want non-technical people on the platform (i.e. the general public) it needs to just work right away.
    • Freezerburnt 8y ago
      Well, it's not easy to set up your own "pod", but it's easy to join someone else's pod. You could set one up for your family or company or at whatever level you want.
• debacle 8y ago
  A rough timeline of the early 2000s: 1. Google creates the first noteworthy current gen search engine. 2. The web slowly starts moving towards a semantic platform with separate presentation. 3. Google creates the world's largest ad platform. 4. The semantic web inexplicably dies (see 3). 5. The web painfully and lossily becomes a series of dense monolithic networks. 6. People realize this might be a bad thing.
  • drivingmenuts 8y ago
    > 6. People realize this might be a bad thing. 6. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users are fine with it. Good or bad, monolithic networks save a lot of ordinary users the pain of having to learn. The reason they might not want to learn varies greatly, but I'll go out on a limb and say it's related to a lack of time and basic backgrounding, in equal measure. It's not always only about the technically qualified.
    • Juliate 8y ago
      > 6. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users are fine with it. Right. Tell that to the people that slowly come to the realization that their politic decisions and destiny have been heavily influenced through tools that built on and benefited from this very centralization. They are (and will be) very fine with it.
      • blancheneige 8y ago
        we're not talking about mainstream media here. ;)
        • Juliate 8y ago
          Facebook _is_ mainstream today, it's even more mainstream than newspapers and tv/radio news networks.
  • zozbot123 8y ago
• AJ007 8y ago
  If you can't solve the cost (free) and the on boarding (technical aptitude) then it isn't going to replace Facebook. Additionally, a great deal of Facebook use is shifting from photos and writing to video, which makes the cost problem even greater.
• reubeniv 8y ago
  Essentially how MySpace used to work?
• freediver 8y ago
  Perhaps also consider that thousands of people working at Facebook are not on the mission to the evil things. Mistakes have happened, and this could be the wake up call for FB to turn around and employ that massive brain power for truly life changing things.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• jf- 8y ago
  We should replace facebook with a version of facebook where you get control over all your data in exchange for a subscription. Meaning that nobody, app developers or advertisers alike, gets access unless explicitly allowed, there's no tracking, and you can actually permanently delete things. The free tier would be as it is now.
  • veddox 8y ago
    Unfortunately, I suspect that FB makes a whole lot more money offering a free service than they ever would with a subscription model. And though I very much like the idea: if you look at email, you see how few people are actually prepared to pay for an online service... (Email has the added advantage of being a public standard that anyone can implement - free or charged. Social media has no such universally accepted standard.)
• denimalpaca 8y ago
  The author makes a decent point about what drove membership to Facebook in the first place - the "cool" aspect via exclusivity and cool kids leading the charge to make the switch. But he completely misses why having a personal webpage is completely different from Facebook or Myspace or even Tumblr and Reddit - the aspect of community. It's not just about sharing, it's about the "strong connections" vs "weak connections" of finding content within a community; this is simply not something that would exist if everyone had their own page. Almost by definition it wouldn't be a community - in a weird way it's as if the internet alone is too big to allow all these individuals to have a balance of strong and weak connections. What's needed are these pages that establish community rules, and not just "in group" and "out group" dynamics. Myspace had the bulletin board and a Top 8 which gave it some sort of culture; Facebook has the standardized news feed and Apple-esque one-size-fits-all profile structure. A rag-tag libertarian group of individual websites, no matter how many there are (and there are already plenty), are not going to establish the same sense of community because they won't foster a community culture. Yes, I agree we should move away from Facebook, but the answer has to be a better culture. So far from my prowling of alternatives, my only conclusion is that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution because that's exactly what Facebook is trying to do by catering to lowest-common-denominator of culture in the most powerful (psychologically) way: allowing content that gets the most clicks. It's tautological. What we need isn't to break up Facebook or wait for a disruptive alternative, what we need is a better sense of the internet as groups of communities, of which you should be a member of several.
• mhale 8y ago
  This is a good time to point out Micro.blog, an independent publishing platform designed to empower publishers and protect privacy. (Not my work, but I'm a fan) Check it out: https://micro.blog/ https://micro.blog/
• LaserToy 8y ago
  I have being thinking about the same idea for a long time. Search can be externalized, and hosting is very cheap these days. Actually, with right approach, hosting might be virtually free, if we use cloud drive providers
• bwb 8y ago
  This is so crazy, I love the idea but the world isn't going back to how it was in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I've been in web hosting for a long time and I love the idea of everyone creating their own little website. The truth is people don't have the skills or care enough to do something like that, FB, Quora, Twitter, all these services that are walled gardens work because they make it EASY to share/create and CONNECT people easily with others and easy to use apps that do x. WordPress is about the closest you get and it is a nightmare to manage and $$$ on the hosting side compared to closed gardens. We need to just accept the new world and keep innovating inside it, there isn't going back to how it was. And stop this nonsense about privacy, either pass a big federal law or accept that your info is how free sites are funded :).
  • mxuribe 8y ago
    I agree with your comments except for (respectfully) the part about: "We need to just accept the new world..." I firmly think this all represents opportunity. Opportunity for technologists to develop open platforms that are NOT cumbersome to setup nor to host by the layperson, and that - at least over some time - are extremely inexpensive. Maybe i'm an optimist, but i firmly believe there will be an open platform - or multiple complimentary open platforms working in concert - which will fill all of these needs (independence of/control of online presence, privacy, networking opportunities, etc.). I don't think we should merely accept this fate. For the technologists who read hacker news, I think all of this should be a call to arms - or better said a call to service. What is that phrase I've heard, something about being the change you want to see in the world?
    • bwb 8y ago
      Totally agree, I just don't want people to think it is going back to what it was in the late 90s and getting trapped thinking that was some type of golden age. Going forward there is tremendous opportunity to do new things that give people the ability to express themselves online.
      • mxuribe 8y ago
        Yep, understood.
• neovive 8y ago
  I might be looking at this too simply, but I think FB's "current" success is related to the fact that it's simple to use and "everyone" is already there. It's just not worth the effort for a non-technical person to set up a personal website that involved selecting a platform, configuration, hosting, space restrictions, fees, access restrictions, etc. FB is like an "all-inclusive" resort for those wanting to easily connect/share with friends, family and acquaintances quickly. It's free (at least in direct financial costs) and there's very little friction and decision-making involved. As a web developer, I see the value in owning your web space, but it's a very hard sell for others due to the extra work involved.
• nvr219 8y ago
  Bring back LiveJournal!
  • octorian 8y ago
    A site which actually served the exact same purpose as Facebook, in the era just prior to Facebook taking off.
  • mcfunk 8y ago
    My friends and I keep talking about this. The quality of the interactions on LiveJournal were so much more substantial.
• josefresco 8y ago
  This conversation always devolves, or evolves into a discussion about RSS. I actually think there's an opportunity for the "website builders" namely WordPress, to create "consumer" app(s) that pull in feeds from WordPress powered blogs (with RSS) This consumer / consumption app would compete with Facebook/Twitter directly. WordPress powers a significant % of the web and combined with the market share of some of the other large providers like Wix & Squarespace I think they could mount a legitimate challenge to FB/TW
  • andai 8y ago
    I love this idea. Although I think the fastest way to bootstrap that, ironically, would be to make it heavily dependent on Facebook: 1. login with Facebook (no signup needed) 2. share articles & post comments on Facebook 3. model the app after Facebook to hijack existing neural pathways
    • josefresco 8y ago
      I hope you're kidding about 1 and 2 (although 3 kind of makes sense). I'm not sure how they should handle authentication, or if it's even needed at all. Kids don't use email, and in order to differentiate from FB/TW, the less info you ask for on signup the better.
  • egypturnash 8y ago
    Wordpress has this. There’s a “Reader” tab in the official Wordpress app and a web page on Wordpress.com that does the same thing. They don’t promote it. But it’s there.
    • Kye 8y ago
      The commercial WordPress product from the company behind the open source project has this. The open source project does not.
    • josefresco 8y ago
      I figured, thanks for the information. I've used the app to "play" with my own sites but never explored the Reader tab. I think obviously, they'd need a standalone or new app that puts the focus on this feature. Split the site management app out or re-engineer to compliment the user consumption app.
• jamesb93 8y ago
  Okay, I pay almost nothing for my domain. Provide me with the tools to create a cheap, mobile friendly, HTTPS website and I'm in.
  • julienreszka 8y ago
    type "website.new" in google chrome
  • cpach 8y ago
    Wordpress on a cheap VPS? TLS certs are free if you use Let’s Encrypt.
  • gringoDan 8y ago
    Free/$10 template (something like Jekyll) + GitHub Pages for hosting + Cloudflare for HTTPS
  • kowdermeister 8y ago
    1) Install VSCode 2) Create a new HTML file 3) Hit ! and press tab 4) Type in some well thought out content :) 5) Sign up for Netlify and drag&drop your file. 6) Set up that domain On the serious side, look up static site generators. Netlify covers all the complexity for you.
  • superkuh 8y ago
    Run the webserver on your home computer (apt-get install nginx, etc). Make a static site out of html files. Tt's as easy as <html><head><title>my site</title></head><body><h1>first post</h1><p>some content</p></body></html>. For HTTPS you can use the LetsEncrypt easy setup packages.
• wmnwmn 8y ago
  So, the driving force behind facebook is the newsfeed, which enables people to see everyone's updates without going one by one to each page. It's going to be hard to replicate this with personal sites, but maybe we don't want to anymore, now that we see the downsides of the addictive feed. Perhaps a person whose page you would not specifically visit once in a while, is a person who you aren't really friends with. But I'm not sure, because the feed really is fun at times. Politics degrades it as much as anything.
  • bluGill 8y ago
    Things are more complex though. There are people I'm friends with on facebook that I wouldn't visit their web site. However facebook figures out when they have a kid, die, or otherwise some important event happens that I care about and makes sure I know about them. I care much more about random life events in my brother's life and so I see more of them (but I'd visit his web site) That is a valuable service that facebook has figured out.
• ___alt 8y ago
  Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages. * It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues). * It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow everyone's updates. * It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to connect to. * It has group conversation. * It has event planning. Personal pages have none of that, except with syndication where RSS is a partial solution. And on top of that, Facebook is providing it free-of-charge (with the "hidden" cost of scattering your personal data all across the universe) with very minimal setup, including for laypersons.
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    Exactly. People want to be connected, to have a kind of collection of people at their fingertips. Check what someone's been doing, send them a message. They want to share their memories and experiences. And they want the addictive qualities of Facebook... the likes, the comments, the feeds. All of that is a social network, which is not a personal webpage. You could create federated pages with these features using the following: - web pages with comments and pingbacks - wysiwyg editors - photo albums and photo editing tools - blogging - direct messaging (xmpp/jabber) Then, you could create individual social network portals that you could authorize to syndicate your federated web site. They could also host your website themselves. And each could offer unique tools, such as tools for event planning, or to help musicians promote their music (MySpace, anyone?). But the idea would hinge on multiple of these popping up at the same time, owned by different start-ups, which could be tricky.
  • newscracker 8y ago
    > Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages. I'm going to argue on the following points based on observations. > - It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues). Almost nobody knows well about how to control who see what, and even when they do, hardly anyone changes it often. Almost everyone leaves it at something that may not be appropriate for all the content they're sharing. Facebook, after its many privacy blunders, reminds people about the audience setting sometimes, but I don't see people changing it. Also, "lists" as a concept to control who sees what was stillborn. Less than a fraction of a percentage in my circles would even be aware of it (this despite me trying to educate people about privacy). > - It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow everyone's updates. Here again, it's easy to follow updates that Facebook deems the best to keep the person coming back to show more ads and make more money. Almost nobody knows how to choose to see someone's posts always and how to avoid someone's posts short of unfriending them. The default is users not knowing that they can control it, which means practically they don't control what they see and what they don't see. > - It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to connect to. The same argument in the previous point applies here too. Facebook focuses on making people come back often. So the discovery feature may be useful in some cases, but usually it tends to create an overload of people, groups and pages to connect with. Search on Facebook is dismal, and the main "discovery" mechanism is Facebook's suggestions (which is incentivized for ads). To summarize, Facebook's features work to maximize holding people's attention on its platform and showing ads. How well this matches with one's individual choices varies a lot. Facebook isn't really doing anything phenomenal in surfacing relevant content to people.
• UncleEntity 8y ago
  Why go back to the aughts when you can have a federated, distributed, blockchain based social platform? Think I missed some buzzwords but you get the idea. The main thing you need IMHO is discoverability -- finding the people you used to hang out with in college 20+ years ago is something fb is pretty good at. Probably even better these days, dunno, haven't logged in since '13 my friend told me a few years ago.
  • mxuribe 8y ago
    Now that google has killed off their G+ social network, maybe they can focus on adding value by being the "discovery engine" for the fediverse. I mean, their original product was their search engine, so connecting disparate data silos is something that they're good at. It worked for website discovery all these years, why not for federated/distributed points of online presence? Mind you, it need not only be google, but can also be bing, or duckduckGo, etc.
• known 8y ago
  You may want to check https://prism-break.org/en/all/#social-networks https://prism-break.org/en/all/#social-networks
• MisterBastahrd 8y ago
  Facebook is a tool to receive updates from friends and family. As such, what it really is at its core, and what would replace it, would be a giant opt-in personal spying network.
• coliveira 8y ago
  The reason personal websites are not used anymore is that there is no traffic. The big advantage of posting on FB is that everyone is going to the same site and you know the people who are subscribed to your posts. Individual websites have the problem of discoverability. Google solved part of that problem with its search engine, but FB gave the ultimate solution by giving everyone a way to publish directly on their own web site.
• mikehollinger 8y ago
  One of the pros of Facebook is the ability to share content with a restricted set of people, and find content easily (the feed). For example - I’m ok with my friends and family seeing my vacation photos, but don’t generally want all of you (no offense, but we need boundaries!) paging through them. There’s got to be something more in between. I got excited by the various distributed social networks but have yet to see any of them in any non-techie context.
• chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Not to get off-topic but this was one of my knocks against WordPress' new Gutenberg. Sure, it's a cool idea and ideally in time great technology, etc. But "big and fancy" layouts are mainly a __not__ mobile first ideal. Gutenberg 10 years ago? Genius. Today? In a mostly small screen world? A sledgehammer when a hammer would do in most cases. (I'm generalizing. The minutia isn't important really.) When WP started, (self) publishing was the key. We've since evolved to where content is important but network / connections matter more. I know #duh :) With all it's market share and community WordPress was in a unique position to leverage that girth and add the magic of "network" to the content. Imagine something like (e.g.) Disqus but as the default - as Gutenberg is - on every WP website. The general idea might not be new (i.e., Disqus has social-esque features) but the mass network would be. Perhaps adding in a RSS consumption feature for the sources I follow (and might want to share)? That is where we are now, with a lot of small screens. God bless Gutenberg but sometimes it feels like the promise of a new & improved fax machine - too little too late.
• rchaud 8y ago
  Most people bloviating online don't have anything interesting to say. This is as applicable to FB as it is to any contributor-posted crap on Forbes.com. You'll have a hard time convincing these "content creators" to move off FB as they know they won't be able to attract the same audience anywhere nearly as easily. Finally, a personal website doesn't solve the fundamental issue: people crave attention. That's why FB doesn't report likes in real time, it spaces them out so you can log back in re-check like some kind of lab rat. People crave drama too, which is why news sites use clickbait titles on their FB posts. What better way to boost "engagement" than post a headline you know will start a fight in the comments? The flip side of that coin is that people seem to actually want a steady stream of low-quality content, and FB has more than enough behavioural psychologists and UX people on their team to ensure that keeps happening.
• moosey 8y ago
  It is my hope that facebook is crushed and is never effectively replaced by anything. In fact, with a few changes to privacy law, it almost becomes impossible to run a facebook anyways, because it will eliminate many forms of revenue generation for any company collecting user information. I feel as though I live in the age of marketing, where it is more important to market yourself well than it is to, I don't know, produce. So much valuable creative and productive energy towards chasing dollars/likes/whatever. It reminds me of concepts that we regard as dark patterns in tech: Money might have at some point been a measure of productive work, but now it is a goal in and of itself, and I think that the outcome has been suboptimal. I understand that the cat is out of the bag, and, in particular, the ability to upload and share video with the world could be one of the most important advancements in human rights ever, but it seems that many people are too distracted to be concerned. The very technology that could aid people is used to disarm them from action. A large part of my concern is that I'm half European and half Native American. I appear Middle Eastern. I live in the United States. The cultural state here is definitely not sublime for someone with my appearance. My best friend is LGBT, and it is uncomfortable for her as well. I know that racism is a bigger problem, but the way that these systems have been "taken advantage" of by various governments to divide the US culture horrifies me. About the "taken advantage" statement: An American company took money from a foreign government that it used to spread propaganda in the US. What facebook did is by design, and if it is allowed to stand, then what does it even mean to be a US company at that point?
• frogpelt 8y ago
  Obviously, this was already tried. The precursor to Facebook, at least among my peers, were personal blogs on Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc and the precursor to that was personal web sites on GeoCities and Tripod. Many of my friends linked to each other's sites and it formed a pseudo-social network. Facebook was better because you could control who saw your website by limiting your friend list. They had the social framework in place, you just had to sign up. Facebook is also a great place to share local news. Something like it will probably, eventually replace the local newspaper and TV stations.
• simplecomplex 8y ago
  I already did. I post to my own site and use rss/Microformats reader to consume content. Funny thing is I love it but everyone who uses Facebook (especially geeks) likes to tell me this is all wrong because 2 billion people aren’t using my website and I’m not a publicly traded company. I think Facebook has messed with their heads. They just keep prattling about “network effect” and “owning the market”.
• superkuh 8y ago
  It's not that I disagree but he posted on vice.com instead of his personal website. You don't make change by influencing others. You make it be being the change yourself. I've hosted my personal website from my home computers for 20 years now and it's only become easier and more feasible as home connections became better.
• dkrich 8y ago
  I still remember changing from MySpace to Facebook and the reasons had nothing to do with exclusivity. What happened was that my friends and I were using MySpace and one of us tried Facebook and convinced us all to try it. We stayed because there were several aspects that now sound simple but made the user experience night and day. First, MySpace was incredibly clunky. When you posted an update the entire page refreshed. Facebook had a much sleeker interface that used Ajax so posting updates was much more seamless. Second, I think the mid 2000s were a unique time where consumers were very willing, almost wanting to try different sites and technologies. I remember these being the days Tumblr took off as well. Now people seem to like simplicity and speed, and are content focused. At that time it was all new so people like customizing pages and having custom songs play when the pages loaded. Finally, Facebook had integration with third party apps that made using the site more fun and gave people a built in feature to share. I remember living social not as a deal site but a Facebook app where you ranked your five top things from a bunch of categories, such as top five movies, books, etc. Users loved it. These factors are easy to forget now where they don’t seem that big a deal but at that time these were huge differentiating factors that made Facebook more popular and I think Facebook’s early product teams probably don’t get enough credit for some of these decisions.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• kristianc 8y ago
  So, what the author is saying is that we should make something just like Facebook, only: - Harder to find - Harder to update - More expensive to run - Prone to falling over / being hacked - Non-standardized - Doesn't provide instant feedback The reason why we post on Facebook is because it is much (as in an order of magnitude) better and much more convenient than having your own website. Most people do not have their own "platform". The reason why most people gave up blogging is because they discovered that shouting into the void (and then having to repost that material onto social networks so five people would read it) wasn't that fun or rewarding. These decentralized fantasies based on personal grievances with Facebook fail when they run into the real world and how most people actually behave.
  • zymhan 8y ago
    Well, this sounds like the goals of Diaspora, which never gained tons of traction, but has been around for years. https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/
    • kristianc 8y ago
      Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy". Indeed, for many, the centralization of Facebook is a selling point, 'Freedom' might appeal to political activists / journalists but isn't of much interest to people who just want to find their friends rather than talk to 'happybunny123' and 'Privacy' has consistently shown itself to be something people are 'meh' about in deeds. I've got nothing against Diaspora per se, but it's for geeks and privacy nuts. https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ suggests that one of the things I might want to "Join the Conversation" about is "Linux". For the broader population, when you offer very few of the same benefits and introduce additional costs, it's not a surprise it doesn't gain traction.
      • jancsika 8y ago
        > Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy". Since when is "privacy" a feature of Diaspora? Their first big bug was, "any data from any users can be gotten by anybody willing to try." At least for a long time user's posts were stored in plaintext. (Not sure if that's still true.) And it's federated, not distributed. I think your angry rocket of a rant overshot the moon there. Signal users might have privacy. Diaspora users certainly do not.
• coldtea 8y ago
  >Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online. Only Facebook also provides a number of "friends" you "like" your posts (quotes intended). Those likes and "engagement" is superficial of course, but for most people posting on their own website would be a desert.
• toight 8y ago
  The problem with Fakebook is that it perpetuates unnatural outsized social networks because Zuckerburg worked out at its formation that this is 1 very addictive and 2 highly profitable. Clone Facebook. Limit it to Family + 50 friends max which actually seems to many. The numbers arbitrary. I think 150 social relationships is the max a human can handle. The digital social network would resemble the real social network and some form of human decency and dignity would re-emerge. Constrict the size of individuals digital social networks to what they evolved to be able to handle and watch online behaviour and content improve.
  • anticensor 8y ago
    Humans can handle 150 friends and around 1000 acquintances maximum.
• mbrumlow 8y ago
  First time I have ever agreed with vice. Must be a cold day in hell.
• brisky 8y ago
  Shameless plug: you should check out https://dpage.io https://dpage.io - a quick way to create a personal website and own your data too. The website will be hosted on decentralized blockstack server nodes while your identity will be secured on blockchain.
• laythea 8y ago
  Before social media, that's what a lot of people did do.
• rbanffy 8y ago
  A free-to-host solution that included subscription to other websites via a p2p push protocol would be cool. I thought about building it on top of the standard runtime for Google App Engine (which has a free tier), but never got to it.
• LastZactionHero 8y ago
  I've made this suggestion on a few other threads, and I'll keep making it until it works ;) Anyone want to start a modern webring? - Self host your site - Put in a JS snippet to link out to other sites The idea being to drive some traffic to your site without being beholden to Medium/Facebook/whatever.
  • fuball63 8y ago
    I'm not familiar with this concept but am intrigued. Does the snippet just pick a random assortment of links from other members of the webring?
    • fuball63 8y ago
      Update: found this article on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
• taude 8y ago
  I want facebook lite: Facebook for Families. Small, tight, private social network. Public social networks to be handled by Twitter (if you so desire), or your own blog, internet page, rss feed, etc.
• njn 8y ago
  A good idea. idk if that will ever happen. Still I like my weird website - there aren't enough crooked angles, messiness, imperfections or just internet spam in general on Facebook. Parts of the internet are obsessed with authenticity and identity, and also reliability and uptime. Those things are important for airplanes, trains, things like that. Not something like this: a phonebook used to keep in touch with people and have random conversations about nothing. I like to imagine a place like facebook that gets permanently blurry if it gets rained on, like a phonebook would. And also there's no passwords, like a real phone book. Our everyday internet should be taken less seriously - used for what you want, to simplify a few things, not make them more complicated or hidden. Lev Manovich has some interesting thoughts on the database-centric nature of how the internet's come to be. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/language-new-media https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/language-new-media
• madrox 8y ago
  I'm reminded of DiSo from a different internet age: https://diso-project.org/ https://diso-project.org/ It was an attempt to extend the blogging model with open standards so that others could consume it the way they consume the news feed today. Unless you were around for it back then, you probably never heard of DiSo, which tells you all you need to know about how good of an idea it is in practice. Or maybe it was ahead of its time. I don't know.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• chx 8y ago
  Everytime people say "you should quit Facebook", I have two primary use cases: 1. Our high school class. Yes we used to use a mailing list but it's so much better with Facebook, with people freely sharing what interesting shit happens. We are a very closely knit class, at the 25th graduation anniversary like 25 of the 34 was there. 2. I have a group of friends doing all sorts of awesome shit (some of the more memorable include taking a medieval sword duel intro class, another shooting foam arrows at each other, there was laser tag, trampolines, Halloween mazes and much more) and the event functionality is just damn perfect: you create an event, everyone can post on it (I am coming, I am not coming, I need transport) all of the posts can be commented out. And people can just write posts into the group suggesting more events. For both you'd need more than thirty people install a new app (remember how few apps are actually used) and actively use them at the same time or you will be missing events. This won't happen.
  • quickthrower2 8y ago
    That's the funny thing. Email is perfectly good enough, but there is a psychology of not wanting to send too many messages or disturb people. But posting lots of pictures on Facebook doesn't feel like that. Otherwise email is a great social network for people you already know.
    • chx 8y ago
      We would need much much better email organizing tools before this can work.
• aacook 8y ago
  I find one of the most useful and basic aspects of Facebook is sharing photos. I launched NanaGram (https://nanagram.co https://nanagram.co) a little over a year ago to try and bring my 94-year-old grandparents into the fold. It's a service that makes it super easy to mail printed photos in the mail by text message. Something I didn't expect is my family and I started using it like a private social network. Knowing everything is private, we're much more willing to share intimate details and photos. All of us youngins get notifications of the photos we're posting. I also created a "Saturday morning digest" email which is a nice way to delay gratification. At the end of the month, our grandmother gets physical copies in the mail. I subscribe myself to a copy of the photos for QA which is pretty neat. Sometimes I also mail select prints to my siblings.
• byteface 8y ago
  Around 8 years ago I tried to pitch to Nokia/Microsoft to use .git somehow so users were paid to allow access to their data. They didn't listen but I still like the idea that people own their own data and can monetize it themselves somehow.
• racl101 8y ago
  Is the author saying, in so many words, that we should go back to the Geocities era?
• OptionX 8y ago
  And then there would be indexing services where you can put all your friends websites for easy access and a feed of their new content. After that the most popular indexing services would offer hosting for those sites on their servers, then the format would converge in a template-based pattern for ease of use. Finally we would end up right where we started in my opinion.
• j-c-hewitt 8y ago
  My time on Facebook has actually taught me that I want to know a lot LESS about people like casual friends, family, and business associates. I want to know as little as possible about their political opinions, their religious beliefs, their favorite sports teams, and other affinities that they have. I stopped using FB as a user entirely once I realized that it was diminishing my opinions of other people much more than ignorance would. Knowing more about other people greatly impeded my ability to get along with them. "Open" is a big impediment to "connected" in a lot of cases. On, say, a sales call, I would way rather not know someone's opinion about immigration policy and not know about their favorite hockey team. I would rather stay totally ignorant of all the irrelevant personal garbage about that person and just focus on what is relevant to the actual connection I want to create there. There are just too many things that people feel free to say on FB that needlessly alienate others and I found that it's so much better to just be ignorant of that than it is to know and have my opinion of that person diminished. I much prefer interest groups that are less focused on personalities for discussion and to read authors who know what they are writing about for commentary on important topics.
  • gurumeditations 8y ago
    Related to this, I think as a whole, too much connectivity destroys societies. You talk about how you don’t want to know people’s personal beliefs, you just want to be able to get along with them to do business. This used to be the default for society, but this issue of knowing uncomfortable details about others (all sorts of things from political differences to crime and misconduct) shatters people’s trust in each other and society. Social networks also act as a hyperfunnel for everyday people to become radicalized in their beliefs (usually political instead of to violence), but that’s a different issue.
    • CM30 8y ago
      Yeah, this is basically the reason I feel social media sites are a bad idea. People by definition present different 'faces' to different audiences, and society stays stable because (for the most part) these different sides of people's personality aren't public for everyone to see. Social media shattering all this has definitely led to an increasingly polarised society with increasingly radical beliefs.
• kgwxd 8y ago
  We should host our own content then publish it as a copy and/or link to any number of places we want from there. A new platform pops up, point your stuff at it. A platform goes away, there's plenty of others. A platform misbehaves, easy to boycott.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  The alternative, now that network bandwidth isn't in the 56Kbps range and sometimes on and sometimes off, is doable. If you look at the "end" game, imagine that everyone has a machine at their house that they can access locally in their web browser. It has easy tools for posting updates and pictures. When you create a "profile" on it, you can choose to upload that profile to a well known repository of profiles. There is a widget to search the repository for people you might know, and if you "friend" them then your local machine gets a link to their RSS equivalent feed. Friend graphs become distributed, content is always local, and the only cost is to maintain the machine holding the profile repository. IPV6 addressing and more than 500Kbps of upload bandwidth makes this possible. The current long pole in the tent are ISPs who specifically disallow (and interfere with!) long live server processes in their consumer internet accounts. I've written the FCC and my representatives suggesting that this is a place where some good rulemaking would enable Facebook alternatives that protected civil liberties.
  • rootusrootus 8y ago
    That machine will need to be an appliance, something like a Google Home or Amazon Echo style device, and your local router should transparently proxy www.facebook.com to it. I'm only sorta kidding. HN is really good at creating solutions that seem totally reasonable to other HN readers but would fall on their face in the wider market of Uncle Bob, Aunt Lois, and Grandma Pearl. You know, the real customer base.
    • martythemaniak 8y ago
      The problem with Uncle Pearl and Grandma Bob is that you're trying to deliver advanced features AND ease of use. That does require large centralized apps such as facebook. If you ditch either of those requirements, you can probably deliver a solid product.
    • ChuckMcM 8y ago
      So my history includes a period of time at NetApp, which at the time was doing a pretty good job of creating appliances out of otherwise Intel motherboards with a lot of I/O slots. Appliances with a way to customize them appropriately to the customer by either trained service personnel or technically astute relatives (so documentation has to be available).
• bscphil 8y ago
  Spitballing a bit here. Why do they have to be websites? That is to say, why do they have to be on the "web", HTML over HTTP, at all? This seems like the default way to do things to us now, but if you think about it, what most of us fundamentally want with a social media site like Facebook (not Twitter, that's different) is just to communicate and keep up with our friends and family. That's why people flock to any app that gets mindshare: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, that allows them to do these things. What does an alternative look like? Something like a shared Discord for friends and family to use, divided into groups or "servers". (That was the key insight of Google+, that people don't have one online presence for their family, close friends, coworkers, acquaintances, etc. It failed for other reasons.) The extra feature you need is just a shared searchable history to find media, albums of photos, etc. I think the points the article makes are valid, but better understood as a criticism of Twitter. It effectively asks, if what we want is to post stuff online for other people to read, why not use the open web for that rather than [centralized service]. Thing is, people are already working on alternatives to this and not everyone needs to use the same thing for it to be successful. ActivityPub, websites using RSS for synchronization, Neocities, etc etc. So my response is that there are two sorts of things we use social media for, and there's no reason to try to do them both with one site. I think I'm going to look into open Discord alternatives, and try to get some family and friends interested. Worst case, it will be an interesting experiment I'll learn something from.
• greekgordo 8y ago
  Mastodon is a great option, me thinks: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
• rootusrootus 8y ago
  What I would rather see is something that works pretty much exactly like Facebook, but paid for, no advertisements, and total privacy. Aside from convincing people it's worth paying $25/year for the same functionality they currently get for "free" I think that's the closest to a viable option. If Facebook hadn't lost so much trust already, they could try to jump ahead in that game by offering this service themselves. Pay us what we typically would earn off you from ads, and we'll turn off the ads and disable the tracking.
  • mxuribe 8y ago
    I think there was a platform several years ago - maybe App.Net - that tried this but had to eventually close. Perhaps the climate nowadays might be more suited to support a pay model? Small though it might be, I'm sure there would be a portion of the population that would pay for this. The trick is in the marketing and in triggering the network effect.
• josephcohen 8y ago
  Facebook is now many things, but when it started it was about identity: this is who I am, this is who I know, this is what I care about. As Facebook has expanded, it's become a mostly passive experience. This is a byproduct of Facebook's business model, which is to sell other people's time. Like any business, it's incentivized to maximized its inventory, which in this case is time spent on Facebook properties. People are waking up to the fact that Facebook doesn't add value to your life, it extracts value by consuming your time. There is another way. You don't need to be the product. This is why I created Universe (YC W'18), a new kind of tool that allows everyone to build their place on the internet—their own website, with their own domain, and their own design. The internet should look more like a bustling, erratic metropolis and less like a centrally-planned suburb. To do that, it needs to be built by everyone. Check out Universe and let me know what you think: http://apple.co/Universe http://apple.co/Universe ---- Some sites made on Universe: http://showcase.onuniverse.com http://showcase.onuniverse.com More about our story: http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-design-doesnt-involve-computers-at-all http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-design-doe...
  • whereistom 8y ago
    Wow this is sick! Excited to give it a try. Why don't more people know about y'all?
    • josephcohen 8y ago
      Only a matter of time, we think
      • agnos_tic 8y ago
        Do you have an Android app?
  • santiagosada 8y ago
    I use and love Universe regularly, thanks Joe!
• FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
  Duplicate post, originally posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18721857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18721857
• dccoolgai 8y ago
  No one here has mentioned Solid yet, which I find odd given the topic and the volume of replies. It has some technical problems still (like 500 friends of friends requiring 500 separate http requests) but it really promises to solve what the author is complaining about. I was skeptical of TBL after the DRM debacle but he really does seem to be trying to do right with this proposal and I wish more people would pay attention.
• porpoisely 8y ago
  Should we? Heck, I'm feeling real nostalgic. Lets go back to land lines and 56K dial up modems while we are at it. The real question is who is this guy and why should we even consider what he says seriously? And why is this so heavily upvoted?
  • a3n 8y ago
    My guess is that people wish for a people networking protocol/facility that isn't corporately controlled, similar to how email is not.
• a3n 8y ago
  > There was no indication that something we’d been conditioned to do would be quickly weaponized against us. In the early 90s, early web and internet, I knew people who protected their IRL identities from the net. "Flying under the radar." I thought they were somewhere between paranoid and "excitable." We should probably not ignore crazy people as hard as we do.
• z3t4 8y ago
  I think the biggest problem is authorization, you don't want random people on the Internet to be able to see your family photos. That's what Facebook solves. We need a decentralized ID system, something like a private/public key, that is easy to implement and even easier to use/login to a site with.
• Domark 8y ago
  Nice blog post at vice.com! That’s all this is. Facebook posts my content using a template. Wordpress could do the same thing, but it’s missing Friends. So we need a personal site with Friends. Looks like Facebook works for that. Discord is the only other app I have with Friends list.
• miguelmota 8y ago
  My old mother uses Facebook because it's extremely easy for her to upload photos, find people, and comment on other people's feed. She's barely capable of managing logins. Granted there are millions of people just like her who don't really care about privacy (also due to ignorance) and will use a service simply because it's convenient and is good enough. This is like saying people should do maintenance on their own cars because mechanics at the shop will be able to see your personal identifying information that you have in the car. Posting content online and having sensitive private chats on a third party website is like leaving personal identifying information inside a locked car and expecting that it'll never get broken in to, either by hackers or by the manufacturer leaking the car keys. Also many people with personal websites are starting to use Medium because it provides greater reach. I'm all for decentralization and self-sovereignty and would love to see a world where everyone hosts their personal website but this idea is far-fetched because the masses are going to prefer free, fast, and convenient services that require little management and thinking.
• eriktrautman 8y ago
  The award for most obnoxious impossible to close invasive mobile ad experience goes to vice.
• cynoclast 8y ago
  lol, no we shouldn't It would leave 99.99% of people high and dry. Facebook fills a niche that personal websites don't. Love it or hate it, your computer illiterate grandparents aren't going to create a personal website, and if they did, their grandchildren aren't going to visit it unless their parents make them.
• h0p3 8y ago
  Come and join me folks! I am an open wiki, and I'm happy to connect with you. https://philosopher.life/ https://philosopher.life/
  • indigodaddy 8y ago
    I feel like I just read a thousand Dr. Bronner's bottles..
    • h0p3 8y ago
      That's a fascinating thing to be compared to, lol.
• charliebrownau 8y ago
  A: dont trust a word that comes from BBC UK ABC AU Vice Verge Vox Young Turks B: We wouldn't need to look into other platforms if the LEFT wasn't censoring people globally when ANYONE disagrees with SOCIALISM or PROGRESSIVES C: Platforms that DONT censor speech * Minds + mewe (FB alt) * Gabai (Twitter alt) * Bitchute (Youtube alt) * Tutanota + Protonmail(email alt) * Wire (skype alt) * Librepay (Donation alt)(Warning they use STRIPE+Paypal) * subscribestar (Donation alt)(Warning they use STRIPE+Paypal) * Startengine (Kickstarter alt) * peertube (DIY self host youtube stream style server) * stream.me (steaming alt) * Voat (Reddit alt) * Movim (Tumblr alt) * @GetTogether (meetup.com alt) Also look into:- * searX.me or Duckduckgo (search alt) * OpenStreetmap - instead of Google maps * imgtc or tineye - free image upload site * Linux - Win/MacOSX replacement * f-droid.org - Google Play Store ALT * Mumble - Discord ALT * spreadshirt - shirt alt Regards Charliebrownau
• Bud 8y ago
  I'm all for bashing Facebook for being evil, but this article is abjectly idiotic. "Personal websites" would replace essentially NONE of the things people use Facebook for. Let's be honest.
• evo_9 8y ago
  I get what others are saying on this thread regarding the feed/content aspect of FB, and agree a personal website isn't a substitute for those FB features. BUT - if you just happened to have gotten married like I did, and are on the path toward kids in the semi-near future, a personal website isn't a bad idea. I was just starting to reconsider my no-FB account ever policy because of the need to easily share family pictures/news, etc. Then I read this and thought - NO! - I will not get sucked into finally having a FB account; a personal website is a viable option.
• daveheq 8y ago
  That's not a social network. That's not even Google+, which is just a bunch of personal microblogs. If you somehow came up with some way to have personal websites be an app that let people post on each other's walls and message and like and reply to posts... then you've just got a different Facebook that would need some sort of conformance authority.
• EpicOne4223 8y ago
  #MakeNewsgroupsAndIRCGreatAgain
• magduf 8y ago
  I'm surprised I'm not seeing a lot of comments simply recommending decentralized social networks as an obvious replacement for Facebook. We've had these for a while. One of the most famous is probably Diaspora. Instead of having all your stuff on one centralized site so they can profit off it, everyone has their own Diaspora site/account, which can be hosted anywhere. You can have your own hosted site, or you can just have an account on an existing site, and you can easily move your account around if you don't like your provider or want to roll your own. That way, no one organization controls everything. The problem, of course, is that this is too much work for most people, and most people are perfectly happy to give Mark Zuckerberg control of all their personal information because it's easier that way. So Diaspora has languished with almost no users, because the only way a social network survives is by having a "critical mass" of users. If all your friends aren't on there, you're not going to bother with it either. Facebook has that critical mass now, so it'll be virtually impossible to unseat them; the only way is if people simply stop being interested in social networks, or some other centralized service brings something to the table that everyone craves and FB misses the boat before it's too late (which is basically how FB unseated MySpace).
• yoav 8y ago
  I think we’re looking at the problem wrong. Facebook solves for some social aspects of the web really well, and then layers on some toxic nonsense for profit. We don’t need to replace Facebook. We need to regulate it, and replace its leadership and business model. Just like private firefighters were transformed into a public service