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

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).