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Having an online network of professional contacts makes sense. LinkedIn has that. But on top of that it also has unbelievable amounts of toxic profit seeking ga
by emerged 6y ago
Having an online network of professional contacts makes sense. LinkedIn has that. But on top of that it also has unbelievable amounts of toxic profit seeking garbage which makes us abhor the thought of even logging in.
The network effect makes it almost impossible to compete with it. If anyone did manage to compete, they are likely to be sucked into recreating the same abhorrent garbage layers over time.
This is social media in a nutshell. I doubt blockchain is going to solve it, so wtf will?
- nikolay 6y agoYeah, like their obscene in term of pricing Job Seeker fee.
- visarga 6y agoNothing will fix social networks, everyone has their own goal and they often don't line up, so you get self promotion and bullshit.
- berkes 6y agoI'm working on flockingbird (dot social), which is a federated professional network. No blockchain, just activitypub (mastodon, peertube, pixelfed et.al.) The only feature is to be 'a Rolodex on steroids', or 'an adressbook in which some entries are maintained by the contacts themselves' No social network features beyond that. We're doing our best to align the businessmodel with this. And truly believe it can carve out a niche (and slowly grow from there) without adding all the perverse attentionseeking, 'garbage layers'. Is that naive?
- rapnie 6y agoVery interesting. Do you have pointers to some more reading & background on the platform you are developing?
- berkes 6y agoAnyone interested can drop me a mail at ber at berk dot es for a longer version. I try to post some updates and insights on @flockingbird@fosstodon.org as well. Not sure if this is an appropriate thread to drop this, but since you asked: The idea is simple, though: you have a profile on which you put contact details, a list of aspirations and competences. Each such data can be kept private, shared public, or within your network. You add people to your contact list, tag them, keep notes on them or add rich oneway relations (Foo has worked for Bar, from datex to datey at Acmeinc.). Basic crm features. Again, each such data has several privacy levels. You can search through your contacts and search through the contacts of your contacts. E.g. if you need to find a translater, but don't know any yourself, one of your contacts might know one, and might have shared some data, notes, tags and relations with that translator. A 'network' is basically a server, instance, in fediverse-speak. An instance would be hosted by your startup-hub, coworking-space, university, etc. You register with one (or more) such instance, and become part of that community, but can add anyone from any other instance, as long as they have a public profile.
- Aeolun 6y agoIf you call it flockingbird, and host it on a .social domain, I think maybe it is. At least I wouldn’t consider it a serious professional network just based on that. That may be incredibly shallow, but those are the only datapoints I have right now. I guess it’s a matter of adoption though. I’d never have considered google either :)
- berkes 6y agoGood points. I'm really happy with the name and domain, but if they don't emit the right vibe, they're wrong. Thanks. Any pointers as to what puts you off? From your feedback, I get that you find the name and domain too much hinting at a social network?