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How about (3) Less consolidation of power Personally as someone who doesn't use FB and never will, I couldn't care less if Facebook wants to track and monitor

How about (3) Less consolidation of power Personally as someone who doesn't use FB and never will, I couldn't care less if Facebook wants to track and monitor every one of their users, monetize their every movement, and ban any message they want. In a free market you'd have thousands of social networks to provide competition with all sorts of different policies and ToS. The real issue is that one company is in a skewed position of power due to a broken marketplace. Fix that problem and all the other problems are irrelevant.

Shish2k 5y ago
How would thousands of competing networks deal with a government-enforced “no E2EE; wiretapping API required” law?
- cabalamat 5y ago
  Badly, and that's the point. I'd like social media to be run by everyone having a social media server linked to their home network (imagine something like a Raspberry Pi), with it being totally decentralised and every user controlling their own server. Then if the government wants to shut it down, they have to raid everyone's home.
  - herval 5y ago
    Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal, like with BitTorrent. Also, what you want already exists - you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node. You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would be able to use.
    - cabalamat 5y ago
      > Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal, like with BitTorrent. BitTorrent certainly isn't illegal in the UK; it might be in other jurisdictions. > you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node Would it work behind a NAT'ed router on a dynamic IP? I suspect it might not. > You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would be able to use. What I envisage is an SD card containing the OS + apps, you put it in the Pi, plug it into your router by ethernet, configure it via its web app, and you're ready to go. I think it ought to be possible to make it easy enough for the average person to install (certainly anyone who could install a router + internet would be able to).
beaner 5y ago
> The real issue is that one company is in a skewed position of power due to a broken marketplace Nobody seems able to identify what the unfair advantage is. The truth is that this is the nature of social networks: the successful ones tend towards Monopoly. Why? Because more people attract more people. Access begets access. The value of a network grows with the square of its size [0], and higher-value networks attract more users. You can't break up a social network without starting to make rules about who can associate with who, which is a fundamentally anti-free position. The problem is not Facebook. In its absence another would take its place. The "problem" is human nature, and that we were not designed cognitively for the types of networks that technology now enables for us. We should focus on education, friendship, and real-world experiences. Legal fights against social networks in general or Facebook in specific are futile. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
BurningFrog 5y ago
> In a free market you'd have thousands of social networks to provide competition with all sorts of different policies and ToS. You know, I want to believe that, but I don't think it's true. Because of the "network effect", the value of belonging to a social network is mostly dependent on how many people are on it. This dynamic very strongly favors a few big social networks.
- another-dave 5y ago
  But the network effect of a social network is a status quo we kind of just let happen, and maybe that needs to be rethought. You could equally imagine a case where email was a walled garden — where Gmail users could only send messages to other Gmail users, Hotmail to Hotmail etc — and someone said "well, that's the nature of email platforms". It doesn't have to be this way — if we had a common protocol for 'social' (or used & improved the ones that we already have), you could have interop of posts/comments/media between platforms and then the platform's 'secret sauce' be curation of messages, discoverability of people you might want to connect with, etc. Facebook could focus on connecting with friends & being free but ad supported. Instagram could be only media posts & supported by sponsored influences in your timeline. Twitter could be focused on current events rather than your friends and be subscription based, etc. Similarly with IM, we had lots of competing IRC clients when that was a thing. As products, you could easily create competing messengers that could speak to each other. You could even have additionally things on top e.g. if you have a FB<->FB message it can support 'stickers' or whatever that are outside the spec, but similar to browser development they _do_ get added to a shared spec that isn't controlled by one company.

Shish2k 5y ago

How would thousands of competing networks deal with a government-enforced “no E2EE; wiretapping API required” law?

cabalamat 5y ago
Badly, and that's the point. I'd like social media to be run by everyone having a social media server linked to their home network (imagine something like a Raspberry Pi), with it being totally decentralised and every user controlling their own server. Then if the government wants to shut it down, they have to raid everyone's home.
- herval 5y ago
  Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal, like with BitTorrent. Also, what you want already exists - you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node. You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would be able to use.
  - cabalamat 5y ago
    > Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal, like with BitTorrent. BitTorrent certainly isn't illegal in the UK; it might be in other jurisdictions. > you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node Would it work behind a NAT'ed router on a dynamic IP? I suspect it might not. > You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would be able to use. What I envisage is an SD card containing the OS + apps, you put it in the Pi, plug it into your router by ethernet, configure it via its web app, and you're ready to go. I think it ought to be possible to make it easy enough for the average person to install (certainly anyone who could install a router + internet would be able to).

beaner 5y ago

> The real issue is that one company is in a skewed position of power due to a broken marketplace Nobody seems able to identify what the unfair advantage is. The truth is that this is the nature of social networks: the successful ones tend towards Monopoly. Why? Because more people attract more people. Access begets access. The value of a network grows with the square of its size [0], and higher-value networks attract more users. You can't break up a social network without starting to make rules about who can associate with who, which is a fundamentally anti-free position. The problem is not Facebook. In its absence another would take its place. The "problem" is human nature, and that we were not designed cognitively for the types of networks that technology now enables for us. We should focus on education, friendship, and real-world experiences. Legal fights against social networks in general or Facebook in specific are futile. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

BurningFrog 5y ago

> In a free market you'd have thousands of social networks to provide competition with all sorts of different policies and ToS. You know, I want to believe that, but I don't think it's true. Because of the "network effect", the value of belonging to a social network is mostly dependent on how many people are on it. This dynamic very strongly favors a few big social networks.

another-dave 5y ago
But the network effect of a social network is a status quo we kind of just let happen, and maybe that needs to be rethought. You could equally imagine a case where email was a walled garden — where Gmail users could only send messages to other Gmail users, Hotmail to Hotmail etc — and someone said "well, that's the nature of email platforms". It doesn't have to be this way — if we had a common protocol for 'social' (or used & improved the ones that we already have), you could have interop of posts/comments/media between platforms and then the platform's 'secret sauce' be curation of messages, discoverability of people you might want to connect with, etc. Facebook could focus on connecting with friends & being free but ad supported. Instagram could be only media posts & supported by sponsored influences in your timeline. Twitter could be focused on current events rather than your friends and be subscription based, etc. Similarly with IM, we had lots of competing IRC clients when that was a thing. As products, you could easily create competing messengers that could speak to each other. You could even have additionally things on top e.g. if you have a FB<->FB message it can support 'stickers' or whatever that are outside the spec, but similar to browser development they _do_ get added to a shared spec that isn't controlled by one company.