18 ms·

Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?

147 points by louisbarclay 3y ago

onychomys 3y ago
Yeah, it's an interesting question. 15 years ago every party and community meeting was a facebook event. Now we just do it via a messaging service or email or whatever. I didn't notice it happening, and I'm not really sure why it happened. Presumably it's a critical mass sort of thing, plenty of people don't use facebook anymore and so it's not as good of a way to get things set up.
- geek_at 3y ago
  Oh yes and I remember a time where people who were not on facebook kind of stopped existing in your mind. Where "I don't have facebook" was feeling like an insult on the community. Times have changed now my facebook feed is only ads (from facebook or people in my list promoting their own thing) and news articles where people are writing things to each other that they would be ashamed for if read to their parents
  - notpachet 3y ago
    > Where "I don't have facebook" was feeling like an insult on the community Now LinkedIn is like that.
- rimeice 3y ago
  The network crumbling effect
- Aurornis 3y ago
  Depends entirely on the group. I still have some activities that organize primarily via Facebook. And honestly, it’s fine. HN talks about Facebook with out of control hyperbole, but I have no problem logging in and finding what I need. I could see how it would be a problem for people without impulse control or with social media addictions, but then again HN is a well known time waster website with social features as well.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    HN is a time waster all right, but I guess one reason why I still keep using it despite it technically being a Silicon Valley platform is the lack of social features.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >15 years ago every party and community meeting was a facebook event. It's still like this in Europe. Comedians, bands, bars, cafes, basically any kind of venue and enternatiner, organize and announce their events mainly on Facebook. There isn't another alternative that's as seamless and all encompassing as Facebook for this. With one facebook account I can follow all the bands, bars and cafes in my city without them having to build their own website(they don't even bother) and me having to subscribe with an account to each of them separately. Also, the marketplace is great for selling old crap and for finding plumbers, electricians and various handymen as Facebooks is their main free advertising avenue. SO IMHO, it's far from dead, its just not the cool new thing anymore that gets you hooked, like TikTok, but unlike TikTok it's actually more valuable.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
roody15 3y ago
My take… Reddit clones .. Facebook clones get shut down pretty quickly by the government as soon as they start to gain any traction.
- deprecative 3y ago
  If it's infringing then they're not viable. However, there are plenty of Reddit-like sites that are out there. The issue isn't functionality. As always in these matters it's that they cannot reach a critical mass of users.
- CRCPowershroom 3y ago
  You can't shut down a decentralized alternative, which already exists with the Fediverse.
skrbjc 3y ago
I'll say that groups on facebook for various interests still seem quite active, but these are more targeted for a shared interest, like espresso machines, rather than a group of people that know each other and are interacting in a group, like XYZ High School Class of 2024.
- pests 3y ago
  I have a bunch of the latter group types too.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Totally agree with this. I remember when I first got on Facebook (it was when they just started opening it up to non-college students), and I was so excited about an easy way to keep up with old friends I cared about but had lost touch with. I remember the very first update that I hated, when Facebook moved to much more of a "Twitter-like" interface, and the feed felt like much more disjointed, "stream of consciousness" stuff. Now it's all that on steroids - none of the social media platforms actually care about keeping you connected with your friends and family. My current FB feed is a joke, 95% of my friends rarely/never post anymore, it just got too exhausting.
- bluGill 3y ago
  I make it a point to hit "block all from" everytime a friend shares something from someone else. Then after two hit blocks from I'd done and log off. It had made my feed better, but not by much. It makes my life better though because it stops me from endlessly scrolling in hopes that maybe the next post will be what my friends are doing. I encourage everyone to do the same - if enough do maybe facebook will notice and hopefully get back to what makes them valueable: what my real life friends are doing.
  - blowski 3y ago
    I don’t check the Facebook feed at all. I have to use it to post and read updates in a community group, and nothing else. Never had Instagram or Threads. I use WhatsApp as little as possible. I mostly rely on email and SMS.
  - optimalquiet 3y ago
    I used to do the same. And I got it to a point where my feed was great, I could check it every few days and get updates from people I know and community organizations. But the issue is, it seems Facebook is now injecting algorithmic content into the feed, so suddenly my feed was full of random internet drama (that the algorithm obviously pushed because it was maximally controversial, leading to more engagement). I deactivated my account not long after, and don't miss it.
  - 3y ago
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
I wonder why people don't want to give their private data to yet another platform. Absolute mystery.
- mcphage 3y ago
  I think the question is not "...give their private data to yet another platform" as "...give their private data to a different, possibly less hostile platform"
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    Or possibly more hostile. We're talking about something which doesn't exist. It'd be reasonable for people to be skeptical, and assume at least an equal likelihood of the new Facebook also not respecting their privacy, given the precedent. But I don't think the median social network user cares much about privacy at all, so that's probably not why there is no new Facebook, one way or the other.
PaulHoule 3y ago
For one thing this is the mother of all two-sided markets. I made my own content-based recommender which only needs 2000 judgements from me to work really well. If I wanted to make a social network of some kind I am going to need thousands if not millions of users, with the exception that there is some room for products like discord where somebody makes a private instance which will not need to get that big. In the past, people who started social networks and communication apps of various kinds would use spammy tactics to get enough users to have a scene. Today I think it’s a lot harder to do that and when companies try to jumpstart the process, like TikTok or Temu, they spend hundreds of millions or more on advertising.
- pixl97 3y ago
  "Network effects" is pretty much the default answer to the question in the headline.
  - dopeboy 3y ago
    Which begs the question, is there a way to dethrone something like Facebook? Because those network effects are increasingly strong. Perhaps if the AVP reaches the masses, Apple will layer a social layer there and that will become our new social network.
    - AdrenalinMd 3y ago
      Instagram and WhatsApp could have remained independent, but they were acquired by Facebook. This suggests that anti-monopoly laws may not be effective.
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        It's funny. There have been narrow time and place windows where investors have been willing to bet on social media, roughly the 2005-2010 era in Silicon Valley and the 2017-current period in China. It's conjectured that one factor is the size of the cultural zone, it is easy for a site to get established in a big country like India and then move to a small country like Belgium, but to go to the other way is thought to be impossible. There was a time when it seemed the route for a social media startup was to go public, after Facebook went public that window seemed to close and the next business plan became "get bought by Facebook". On one hand, events like this https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whatsapp-best-facebook-purchase-ever.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whats... seem like an orderly way for Facebook to keep ahead of the next big thing, bit I think if they had to do it every year for some new startup they'd start to feel that it is like extortion so I imagine Facebook has used whatever pull they have with VCs to suppress investment in this sort of company in SV. (I wish I had some evidence and/or specifics!) And of course Facebook can't keep buying competitors forever because eventually the antitrust cops will wise up. I found this article https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-twitter-facebook-alternatives-funding-rises-vcs-2022-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-twitter-faceboo... but it strikes me as pretty silly. Since Twitter has shown some weakness the competitors we've seen move in are not scrappy commercial startups but instead Facebook with Threads, Bluesky by the founder of Twitter and Mastodon which is whatever it is but it sure isn't commercial.
NoblePublius 3y ago
Old Facebook now exists in group chat
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  Pretty much this. Apart from friend discovery, group chat pretty much fills that niche. It has the advantage that you are more likely to get normal social feedback (don't be a dick, or shit thats nice) Old facebook is a function of its time. Like london coffee houses were the ferment of social, commercial and political change, they were only that because of time, place and social conditions. New facebook will need to be mobile first, more about personal connections than one sided showing off.
BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
They did already. It's called VK. The last time I logged in it looked exactly like original Facebook.
- patates 3y ago
  VK is much better but still has a lot of recommendation in the feed going on.
  - noja 3y ago
    This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(service)
    - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
      Yep. Russian facebook clone.
simbas 3y ago
because it exists mbasic.facebook.com
zwieback 3y ago
Sometimes I ask myself "why don't we have Windows File Manager or Norton Commander anymore" but then when I find an old version and try it out it's always "ah, right, time has moved on and nostalgia is tricking my brain". I think it's a mixture of three things: 1) nostalgia, it wasn't actually that great 2) someone eventually had to pay for the initially free infrastructure 3) many other options
- yreg 3y ago
  The commanders are still good, I use one.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > but then when I find an old version and try it out it's always "ah, right, time has moved on and nostalgia is tricking my brain". Easy to forget that the software and sites we enjoyed were a product of their times. The novelty and excitement of something new can sometimes be remembered, but it can’t be recreated because we’ve all moved on. Interestingly, the closest I’ve come to rekindling the feeling is having kids. Introducing them to fun things, including retro things, and watching the spark of excitement and novelty is far more fun for all of us than I ever would have guessed in my pre-kid years. Underrated part of parenting.
byyoung3 3y ago
It's called Instagram
dr_dshiv 3y ago
It’s called LinkedIn
jdnordy 3y ago
> That would explain why messaging, which is mostly based on phone contacts and therefore more in the user’s control, would be the place people now trust for their social graph. This is the reason the I wouldn't be interested in an new old Facebook. I'd add that Messaging Apps have significantly improved since the time old Facebook was relevant. They allow Group Chats that function like a "feed" and include images, videos, memes. You can even search your chat history. Group chats are basically old Facebook feeds with a select part of the social graph. I never thought about it this way, but they totally are. This is actually where Messaging Apps improve upon the old model. A Facebook feed was your entire social graph and your "posts" went out to that entire graph. I don't want this. I never did, really. I like the scoped social graph my "posts" reach in a Group Chat.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  I think you're right. I recently came to the realization that Discord has functionally replaced Facebook for me and most of my peers. We use it to chat, coordinate events, share pictures, etc. And it gives us all the tools we need to organize this stuff how we want, with no algorithmically curated feed. Discord is essentially group chat on steroids. And because it's a chat app first, it is fundamentally incompatible with the various "features" that ultimately enshittified Facebook.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Yeah, Discord is it. One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think). Everybody has taken a few loops around the merry-go-round at this point, we don’t need to do the whole thing where we try to make it look grown-up and serious. The solution is somewhere in the ballpark of MySpace, AIM, and IRC.
    - tobymather123 3y ago
      I'm really curious about Discord for social, because literally _no one_ I know uses it here in the UK for anything social. is it a US thing? Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?
lenerdenator 3y ago
Because the network effect that Facebook has isn't present and even if it were, it'd be like visiting your university after graduating: you remember it but you can never go back. Facebook's now a dead mall for the original userbase, people born between 1980 and 1995. It was a great place to hang out when you were young but now it's just kiosks of shitposting groups and old people walking around saying insane things. Most of the Millennials I know are on a combo of other social media, usually a mix of IG, Meetup and Discord. I guess there's no market interest for an old FB.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > it'd be like visiting your university after graduating: you remember it but you can never go back You are quite literally back there though. And you could probably do another master if you wanted. Your friends are gone but the university is still there. You can't go back to old Facebook even if you wanted.
Solvency 3y ago
Because it's literally not needed. If I want to see endless photos of your baby, I'll ask to follow your private Instagram. If I want to message you, I'll either text you or IG message you. Hell, if I want to group message I'll text or IG group message. If I want to share photos I have iCloud shared albums. Besides that I live my life out in the real world. I don't need some weird monolithic Jurassic era social network to maintain relationships with people. So yeah, tastes change. The basic functionality of an old Facebook has been atomized and woven into the fabric of my regular phone usage.
seydor 3y ago
There's like 10 social network websites like this. They are probably greatly enjoyed by their users, but they are not as many as the author thinks they are
baxtr 3y ago
Asking this question misses the point. What needs to be asked is: how would one attract users to a revamped version of the original Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg, despite being a nerd, excelled in the distribution strategy of “The Facebook”. He strategically expanded it campus by campus, effectively mapping local social networks into a digital version. It's pretty uncertain whether this approach would succeed today or if anyone would invest the same effort as Zuckerberg did.
- yreg 3y ago
  MySpace attracted users without zuck.
  - tcmart14 3y ago
    And Tom is a genius. Made his money and now he just travels the world doing photography, living life.
nostromo 3y ago
Privacy preferences have shifted pretty dramatically. People now understand that sharing their personal information and personal opinions in an open platform is high risk low reward. So we now scratch our social itch with group chats and private groups.
- avgDev 3y ago
  I disagree, maybe in tech circles. From my experience normal people don't care like at all.
  - nostromo 3y ago
    Young people care and are very aware of what they share and don't share. That's why Facebook is only popular with boomers now. Young people are in private chat groups, using alts on Instagram, and then only sharing the most anodyne content publicly under their real name.
grumple 3y ago
If you allow people to freely post messages, it will just devolve into the same sort of facebook/twitter/tiktok/instagram toxicity. Big companies will still overwhelm you with ads on the platform. Facebook was great for a few things when it started and was exclusive to college students, like: 1) connecting with new friends at college - it's still pretty good for this as far as I know, as long as you share exactly the same sociopolitical beliefs as the people you befriend (no longer on it). 2) organizing events (usually parties, but also dorm events or others for school) - it stopped being great after the first 2 years, when police across the country started using it to shut down parties. The culture around parties also changed. Now it's not great because a lot of people no longer use fb, and because they made changes to make it harder to actually use this feature effectively. 3) documenting how you met someone - they removed this feature around 2006 or so, there's no replacement for it on any platform that I'm aware of. 4) sharing photos with friends - Instagram is better for this. Nobody wants to look through a whole album of poorly taken photos anymore. Also normal people learned that having a ton of photos of you online could be a bad thing.
octacat 3y ago
FB is a result of slowly AB-tested mutated app. By the way, FB is dead. The people I care about I want to keep away from FB. Oh, we have IG, which is an absolute mess right now. But really, the answer is pretty simple, just compare what people post now and 8 years ago... Now we need "perfect" stuff to post, because we got auto-curated by the algorithm. TikTok is even worse, it basically gives you a demo version of attention for some random post and from now on you have to work on each post, because there is no followers on the app (just random people who could maybe see your post again, if algo will like it). So, TLDR: very low expectations for social networks to be useful in any kind of form for most of people, so there is zero interest to invest anything into it (i.e. post coffee/cat/travel image? maaybe to instagram stories - these are still alive).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nostrademons 3y ago
"Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel The success of the old Facebook was very much rooted in a particular time and place. The leading edge of the Millennial generation (which was raised to be both more social and more trusting than previous generations) was in college. The Internet was new, and people were figuring out what it was for. The economy was humming along, and recovering from the dot-com bust, and people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and food would be taken care of. A website where the point was to throw sheep at each other was a nice idle diversion for that time surplus. It also helped that Facebook was started in one of the highest social-status dorms, in the highest social-status college, among the highest social-status demographic (college students), in a generation that was tightly socially connected. I'd remarked to a coworker, when Google was just starting Google+, that we were replicating all the technology in Facebook (and many good ideas not in Facebook that had been pioneered by LiveJournal), but we were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg capitalized on. In short, yes, consumer preferences have changed. Consumer preferences are always changing. The new Facebook is messaging, or hanging out in person, or maybe TikTok. Replicating the old Facebook won't give back the moment in time that lead to its ascendance.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- threeseed 3y ago
  Also it was before many parents were on the internet. Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them. And so they instead prefer messaging apps for these relationships. And then for communicating within their age group it's much more about trends and what is new and different as every young generation is enticed by.
  - xela79 3y ago
    > Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them the amount of young people who realize this and actually take action, if a very very small part, majority is just spoon-fed the new normal of these "social" apps
protomolecule 3y ago
It's called vk.com if you don't mind FSB reading your private messages :)
- stainablesteel 3y ago
  im confused by this because its basically open information now that social media websites have very close relationships with the federal government, is this not already done?
  - reaperman 3y ago
    AIUI the NSA has had direct warrantless access to unencrypted domestic social media correspondence since perhaps 2008 or so.
  - protomolecule 3y ago
    I'm not sure what you are confused about. NSA is American, FSB is Russian. Which government has more power over you?
    - stainablesteel 3y ago
      gotcha, i mistook it for being an american bureau
tacostakohashi 3y ago
Because if they made a new version of old facebook, it would be subject to the same growth/enshittification forces they turned old facebook into new facebook, so better to just cut to the chase. It is weird how different facebook is now compared to when it started. In a few of the small towns I have lived in, there are very active Facebook groups with basically the whole town in, all the businesses, tradespeople, etc elected representatives, and the Facebook group takes the place of a local newspaper/classified ads or personal/business dedicated webpages. It's quite practical, but unfortunately how much ad and other drivel content gets mixed in. Meanwhile, the actual person-person "friend" stuff is almost completely hidden/unusable behind dark patterns.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > In a few of the small towns I have lived in, there are very active Facebook groups This is so annoying. If I wanna know if the local library has a child story hour or whatever I need Facebook. But believe it or not, I managed to make them add a Facebook group feed to their homesite so I don't need Facebook! But many smaller less ambitious events from other actors are just announced on Facebook. And the only way I get to know is via my wife.
  - Intriq 3y ago
    you will like qstudy.ai
bonney_io 3y ago
It seems to me that Mastodon, tumblr, Wordpress, Threads, and any future platform's support of ActivityPub could theoretically make the entire internet "old Facebook". Facebook is/was two things: 1) a microblog (your personal page) 2) an interface for following other's microblog posts This sounds an awful lot like a following, say, a bunch of WordPress blogs in your Mastodon feed. We just need the interface over it all. Heck, if Threads does what they say it will, Threads very well may become that interface for many folks.
- echelon 3y ago
  I certainly hope Threads has no future in the internet of tomorrow. We need to move away from centralized systems. ActivityPub is dangerous too! The protocol suffers from federated cabal censorship. Entire Mastodon instances will ban over the prettiest rationales, just like Reddit moderators and their little fiefdoms. It's quite fascist. I'm hoping BlueSky's protocol of distributed opt-in filtering and extensions wins. I don't want anyone deciding things on my behalf. You're free to filter me out, you're free to subscribe to someone who filters me out, but I get angry when the means of communication and those chosen to rule over it do it without recourse. The reasoning, despite being mostly petty, shouldn't even matter - it's authoritarian and awful.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Who moderates the moderators has always been an issue. Still, there is no way around it. If that community has toxic mods, you probably don't want to stick around there anyway : go to a different one or make a new one yourself ! This is still better than being in a situation where there are only giant platforms like Facebook/Reddit/Discord/Xitter and no hope of starting a community outside their walls.
- CRCPowershroom 3y ago
  A facebook ActivityPub alternative already exists with Friendica. https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/
  - 3y ago
dividefuel 3y ago
I don't think a 'new version of old Facebook' can succeed in the medium term, for a few reasons: 1) I don't think a platform can get enough critical mass like Facebook did. It's much easier to get a smallish circle of people (5-20 people) to align on one platform and use a group chat than it is to get everyone you know to align on the same platform. 2) The rise of mobile. Things like having an individual profile made more sense when sitting at a laptop/desktop PC and actively browsing someone else's content. With mobile, there's more friction to viewing profiles, so the feed model tends to win out. 3) I think many people are more apprehensive about posting content to a wide audience than they were in Facebook's prime.
- tobymather123 3y ago
  Hasn't LinkedIn kind of maintained 2 & 3, but in a work specific context? Which maybe feels safer, armed by the suit of a corporate identity...
  - dividefuel 3y ago
    Yes, I was thinking how LinkedIn may be the one exception. "Profiles" though only stick around because they're effectively resumes, and users hope that keeping their profile up to date improves their chances of landing a job. I'd also suspect LinkedIn has a lower percent of its traffic on mobile than many other social network sites do currently.
phatboyslim 3y ago
My attempt to speculate on potential obstacles which exist today over the (I believe, 2009) version shown: - Eroded public trust in (all) social media - Increased regulatory scrutiny today vs 2009 - More competition today (i.e. TikTok) - Changing demands from advertisers
- manbitesdog 3y ago
  - Huge cold start disadvantage vs conglomerates like Meta
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thih9 3y ago
> Either: billions of people who used to find old Facebook useful have changed their preferences in the last few years, and no longer need something like that Yes. To elaborate, these people have gotten used to Facebook’s new UI, are now relying on its new features, and are accessing it in different ways.
octacat 3y ago
Reality is that facebook hit the jackpot of era of digitisation of social groups. Which means groups are online now, but also extremely radicalised (politically). Tiktok algo knows what stuff to show you and what stuff you will never ever see, because you are from a different social group (but cat videos would be shown to anyone). IG was showing you stuff from people you follow, but it does not work anymore, once people start posting controversial opinions (which they do, once they use TikTok long enough, because the algo pushes radical opinions to the top, they catch attention). Offline groups would have to be less radical for its members, because of fear of rejection from a group. So, the answer is "there is nothing to digitise, the only way to go: A. build offline groups - nobody wants it. B. Do the same as Facebook/Twitter/Reddit - but good luck competing). If the old way of Facebook worked, FB would use the old way.
- godshatter 3y ago
  > If the old way of Facebook worked, FB would use the old way. Not necessarily. If the old way of Facebook worked (i.e. was profitable) but it wasn't as profitable as the new way, FB still wouldn't use it. But some other company might be able to get away with it.
  - octacat 3y ago
    Not necessarily, but most likely. If there is a way to make more profit, any company would try to do it. The moment service stops growing, aggressive monetisation kicks in. Otherwise, investors/shareholders would blame CEO for incompetence.
sfmz 3y ago
"Every empire carries the seeds of its own destruction" FB let you connect with friends -- but that's also its fatal flaw -- friendships are trending towards zero. TikTok enters the scene and now friendless people can have parasocial relationships with their tiktok subs.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Here is the fallacy that so-called "tech" company-dependent commenters will propagate: If no one is making it, then no one would use it if someone made it. It's fine for "developers" to hypothesise about other "developers", but making conclusions about computer users who are not "developers" is nonsense. Yet some HN commenters will do this ad nauseum. Unless and until someone makes "a new version of old Facebook" and forces it upon computer users to the same extent as "new Facebook", then no one knows which option computer users would choose. Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-competitive tactic.
- spit2wind 3y ago
  > Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-competitive tactic. Other people's points about network effect and the Goldilocks Moment are valid and surely play a part. In reality it's more likely laws and enforcement have changed to skew the game in Facebook's favor. There is no "free market." Never has been, never will be. Markets function according to the environment they operate in, including but limited to law.
sandworm101 3y ago
Am I the only one here who remembers when a "facebook" was made of paper and glue? they used to be a tool used by professors in at least new England and probably many other areas at the time. That's where the name came from.
atemerev 3y ago
Here's your free Facebook-like open source social network server: https://github.com/FreeFeed/freefeed-server https://github.com/FreeFeed/freefeed-server Works in production at https://freefeed.net/ https://freefeed.net/.
mariusor 3y ago
They do, or rather not old Facebook, but old VK: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen As a bonus it's an ActivityPub enabled application, so any specific instance of it requires less work to get a network effect going. :)
INTPenis 3y ago
I mean there are fedi alternatives like mobilizon right?
hateful 3y ago
Like a lot of other comments here, I agree that it's been moved to private chats, but I would add that what's missing is: - everyone having a "Profile" that can be passively looked at at any time. Having an old classmate or a friend from your friend group (kind of solved in group chats) that's not a direct friend, but you still want to be part of that community - or have a sense of their life without having to the whole social interaction part. - events - the ability to "look up" someone before actually interacting with them - the ability to "post on someone else's wall". This is something that many Facebook clones got wrong. I don't want to tag someone, I want to put something on their page that their friends can see that I put there.
- randomdata 3y ago
  Nobody on the other side of the fence wants those things, though. In the beginning the implications of allowing others to take a look into your life weren't well understood, but it soon became creepy knowing that others are taking a look into your life, hence why Facebook had to change gears and focus on more private spaces and lean on 'professional' content creators who are happy to let others watch them fill the void.
axegon_ 3y ago
For starters, there are like 100k platforms for "sharing" stuff. Where I live, facebook and to some degree instagram completely dominate the social media market: think 95% and above. People are creatures of habit and they get used to the platforms they use as they evolve. In addition, most users use a smartphone most of the time. And by extension, most of the time they spend on their smartphone is distributed among a certain number of apps(low, single digits). If anything new comes along, you first need to gain some market share by squeezing yourself into that time slot, which is nearly impossible. I spent most of my career at a company that solely developed games for smartphones and I did countless studies on the matter. The South Park episode about freemium games couldn't possibly be more accurate. So much like no one on HN wants any updates from the board itself, people get what they want and so long as it works, they will complain but keep using it unironically. I got a chance to speak to reddit admins a few months ago and they admitted that till this day, they all, till this day use old reddit, even though new reddit has been around for more than half a decade and now there's new-new reddit. Same reason no one has made a new myspace - it was great back in the day. By today's standards, it would have been a security black hole but it did it's job back in the day and if not else, it taught a large number of people some basic html and css skills. Today, no one cares about shiny profile pages with sparkles and music. That's kinda the first rule in monopoly: you are either first or you are last, along with everyone else. It doesn't matter if you have 100, 1000 or 10000 users - you are still at the back of the pack, not even getting scraps for dinner.
nkotov 3y ago
About 10 percent of the people I follow post regularly via stories or less often through posts, the rest just view or post once or twice a year. Most people don't even use a desktop any more for personal computing. The online culture has shifted to highly specific group chats and consumption since most are afraid of putting themselves out there as they previously did when they were younger. I use Facebook nowadays only to post life events once or twice a year for my parents and in laws and cringe at the memory posts from 10+ years ago. I consume most of my friends lives through Instagram. For entertainment, I have TikTok and YouTube.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
Creating a new version of old Facebook is easy. Getting people on it is hard. I think these days, the attention limit is the biggest problem, not just in what people see, but in being seen. A true "old Facebook" is going to be considered boring to today's audience. They don't want to post a silly video to their friends, they want to post it to the world and hope it gets millions of views because they think that will lead to monetization. It sucks, tbh. I really wish there was a good social network site that truly existed for the sole purpose of keeping up with friends. NO public posts. NO groups or business pages. Every post is available only to friends, or optionally, extended to friends of friends to one level. Discord is not the answer I'm looking for. Group chats aren't it, either. If I have something I want to share with all my friends, I don't want to have to post it in 5 different places, especially when 3 of them have overlaps in friends. I just want to see what all my friends are up to in a single feed.
- captainmuon 3y ago
  Just do what the German Facebook clone StudiVZ did back in the day. Find a couple of people in every college town and make them multiplicators, who invite other people and spam every place with flyers. Spend a few hundred thousand $ if neccessary and hire a couple of them or pay venues for putting their events on your site. I think there is still a big hole in the social landscape left by old Facebook. One thing is it is not just about keeping up with close friends. That's easy, you can just message them or call them. It's for connecting with not-quite-friends, people in your extended social circle. If your class mates are going to that party and you don't know if you are welcome, it might be scary to ask directly what they're up to and face rejection, but it's easy to connect over some website. It's a form of social lubricant. I think all the chat apps haven't replicated that effect.
atum47 3y ago
I find it hard to find users. I just built an app to share memes with my friends. It's invitation based. I invited the first users and they each got 3 invites when registering. I got 7 of my friends to join (similar sense of humor) but that's it. They don't seem to be using it all the much also, and also haven't invited any of their friends.
- onthecanposting 3y ago
  A more successful model is to launder a DoD project into a private company (Lifelog to Facebook, for example) and then a leviathan of media flaks can promote the product as the Next Big Thing.
Jedd 3y ago
There's a chrome extension called Fluff Busting Purity [0] that seems to still be alive, but evidently struggles to respond quickly to the ever-increasingly user-hostile coin-chasing changes coming out of the mothership. It doesn't get you the 'old Facebook' (of which there are many variants) but does help with suppressing the 'recommended for you' en masse along with what feels like several hundred other things it can tweak or suppress in the UI. Ultimately 'the feed' as generated by Facebook's algorithms remains monumentally janky, and it's hard to believe it matches any user's actual preference. [0] https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
yallpendantools 3y ago
I've personally considered doing something along these lines but one thing simply stopped me on my tracks: moderation. I feel like twenty odd years ago you can just open the gates to a web community and get by with little moderation; you can still cultivate a community from which participants derive some value. Nowadays, moderation would have to be no less than someone's full-time job. And I believe this has been the case for a good few years #before# generative AI came into the scene. Maybe for a good while you can hold down the fort with technical moderation solutions like fail2ban or Captcha but I bet you will run into problems within your first half a million users or so. Maybe projects like Mastodon have more robust solutions to this but, still, moderation will be a problem if and when you make it big, just like your server costs. Finally, don't even get me started about CP, which is a whole other level of low and rotten. Maybe if you restrict your community to niche topics it would (a) deter malicious outsiders and (b) be self-moderating to a degree. The thing is, a niche discussion forum old Facebook ain't.
seltzered_ 3y ago
"a huge unmet demand currently exists for a social network which is based on the social graph, instead of the content graph, and which is pre-enshittification*" I would argue this hasn't disappeared, but merely moved. There's a number of other platforms people are using for seeking a certain social graph: Social networking style: - Mighty Networks ( https://mightynetworks.com https://mightynetworks.com ), Hylo ( https://hylo.com https://hylo.com ), Circle ( https://circle.so https://circle.so ), etc. Chat Style: - Discord, Slack, etc.
thrusong 3y ago
I hesitate to post this here because I probably can't handle a rush of traffic if it gets attention, but I've been working on this at prezince.com. Just launched an MVP on February 1st and it is very much alpha software. It's a social network generator, essentially Wix or Squarespace for social networking. You go through a simple wizard to choose what type of feed your network is based around (like Facebook/Twitter/Insta, YouTube-like streaming, TikTok-like vertical videos, or classic chat), how connections work (follow/follow back, request friend/confirm friend, or automatic for teams), what it looks like (fonts and colours), what features it has (right now, like button, comments on posts, and trending topics), and who can access it (public or invite only). I very much learnt PHP and MySQL back in 2007 because of how cool I thought Facebook was, and I miss the early way the site operated. I also just see how it can be a solution to a lot of different problems. My family is using one as a replacement for group chat on Signal— we can keep discussion centred around posts in the feed which only we have access to.
Megustatrw 3y ago
We all learned that people actually don't care for using Facebook the way it was intended. It's just easier to share the few images you care for through Whatsapp (or whatever else people use, at least for my family chat it's what app for years now). It's effort to curate through holiday pictures and people don't want to go through 10 or more. They are happy with 1 or 4 or so.
aaroninsf 3y ago
If you want to know, study the market for new versions of the old Twitter. Many are super close to the "new" Twitter, indeed some are nicer. Which have been successful, with whom, why? And what are their prospects? Oh and it's a good moment to take a refresher look at the foundational business model for these networks. Facebook succeeded by giving users some stuff for "free," in exchange for agreement(?) to be subject to total surveillance. And it turned out, also in exchange for being subject to sentiment steering. C.f.. Cambridge Analytica's collaboration with the GRU and Facebook: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/origins-russias-broad-political-assault-united-states/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/origins-russias-bro... Given the catastrophic consequences, does the same devil's bargain succeed today? Are voters more educated or more skeptical? Are legal protections stronger? They are in the EU. Or has enshittification so defiled the entire social space that users are as OP suggests "burned out"? Anyone trying something in this space today had better keep a close on eye on the movement to repeal section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as well. That would instantly kill most any social media worth participating in.
weare138 3y ago
Elgg is pretty close... https://elgg.org https://elgg.org
deleted 3y ago
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Wouterken 3y ago
I spent some time last year exploring similar ideas. I assumed that an application that bridged the divide between public feed-first models and private group messaging apps by allowing control of post visibility across your network, was bound to be an attractive proposition. I put something together but was surprised at just how few people signed up, even if just to take advantage of it as a private social network between small friend groups. Interestingly, the few users that did join, tend to never bother to use the more public social aspects of it, and exclusively post privately. I think this is likely representative of the big shift of the more genuine social media interactions we first enjoyed in old Facebook, all now having migrated to private messaging apps and that the original experience we all remember fondly, may simply not be repeatable in today's social media landscape.
nitwit005 3y ago
Cohost is pretty close to that, minus the use of real names and photos. It's pretty much a dumb feed of people you've chosen to follow.
salad-tycoon 3y ago
I logged into Facebook for the first time in a very long time. Most of my feed is of plain clothed porn actors I guess, Simulating sex. Posted by people I don’t know. What is going on?
wkat4242 3y ago
A lot of people have tried. But they failed to gain momentum. There's been openbook for example, later renamed to okuna. Completely gone, they went on to make some kind of NFT style scam (which I regretted deeply because I helped kickstart them). But that also failed quickly. But there were many. I think there's just no point anymore because the whole concept of social media has been perverted so much that nobody believes in it anymore. Too bad because the original Facebook that just let me follow my friends instead of all this suggested crap was really nice. There was also mewe. I think that still exists. But personally I'm no longer interested in anything that has a business objective. It has to be federated for me to be interested. Any business goal will eventually lead it to be perverted and enshittified.
unsignedint 3y ago
To me, the issues stemmed not from the platform itself, but from its users. Facebook was enjoyable until I encountered individuals compelled to comment on every post I made, regardless of its significance. The situation worsened during the 2016 election season, when Facebook became a battleground showcasing the worst of humanity. This turmoil prompted me to take an extended break from the platform. Although I've recently returned, I'm now much quicker to use the "block" button to safeguard my peace of mind.
pseudocomposer 3y ago
I am (sort of), but it's decentralized and AGPL-licensed, and has more chat-oriented features that old Facebook didn't. Chronological sorting, no likes, a heavy focus on events. I hope to get some local businesses and/or municipal governments deploying it in the next year or so. Last time I posted it to HN (earlier in development) it got hugged to death pretty quickly. But this is only a comment rather than a full post, and I've made Jonline a bit more resilient (and stuck its HTML and media behind a CDN), so let's see how this goes :) https://github.com/jonlatane/jonline https://github.com/jonlatane/jonline https://jonline.io https://jonline.io https://bullcity.social https://bullcity.social https://oakcity.social https://oakcity.social

147 points by louisbarclay 3y ago

Yeah, it's an interesting question. 15 years ago every party and community meeting was a facebook event. Now we just do it via a messaging service or email or whatever. I didn't notice it happening, and I'm not really sure why it happened. Presumably it's a critical mass sort of thing, plenty of people don't use facebook anymore and so it's not as good of a way to get things set up.

geek_at 3y ago
Oh yes and I remember a time where people who were not on facebook kind of stopped existing in your mind. Where "I don't have facebook" was feeling like an insult on the community. Times have changed now my facebook feed is only ads (from facebook or people in my list promoting their own thing) and news articles where people are writing things to each other that they would be ashamed for if read to their parents
- notpachet 3y ago
  > Where "I don't have facebook" was feeling like an insult on the community Now LinkedIn is like that.
rimeice 3y ago
The network crumbling effect
Aurornis 3y ago
Depends entirely on the group. I still have some activities that organize primarily via Facebook. And honestly, it’s fine. HN talks about Facebook with out of control hyperbole, but I have no problem logging in and finding what I need. I could see how it would be a problem for people without impulse control or with social media addictions, but then again HN is a well known time waster website with social features as well.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  HN is a time waster all right, but I guess one reason why I still keep using it despite it technically being a Silicon Valley platform is the lack of social features.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>15 years ago every party and community meeting was a facebook event. It's still like this in Europe. Comedians, bands, bars, cafes, basically any kind of venue and enternatiner, organize and announce their events mainly on Facebook. There isn't another alternative that's as seamless and all encompassing as Facebook for this. With one facebook account I can follow all the bands, bars and cafes in my city without them having to build their own website(they don't even bother) and me having to subscribe with an account to each of them separately. Also, the marketplace is great for selling old crap and for finding plumbers, electricians and various handymen as Facebooks is their main free advertising avenue. SO IMHO, it's far from dead, its just not the cool new thing anymore that gets you hooked, like TikTok, but unlike TikTok it's actually more valuable.
deleted 3y ago
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roody15 3y ago

My take… Reddit clones .. Facebook clones get shut down pretty quickly by the government as soon as they start to gain any traction.

deprecative 3y ago
If it's infringing then they're not viable. However, there are plenty of Reddit-like sites that are out there. The issue isn't functionality. As always in these matters it's that they cannot reach a critical mass of users.
CRCPowershroom 3y ago
You can't shut down a decentralized alternative, which already exists with the Fediverse.

skrbjc 3y ago

I'll say that groups on facebook for various interests still seem quite active, but these are more targeted for a shared interest, like espresso machines, rather than a group of people that know each other and are interacting in a group, like XYZ High School Class of 2024.

pests 3y ago
I have a bunch of the latter group types too.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Totally agree with this. I remember when I first got on Facebook (it was when they just started opening it up to non-college students), and I was so excited about an easy way to keep up with old friends I cared about but had lost touch with. I remember the very first update that I hated, when Facebook moved to much more of a "Twitter-like" interface, and the feed felt like much more disjointed, "stream of consciousness" stuff. Now it's all that on steroids - none of the social media platforms actually care about keeping you connected with your friends and family. My current FB feed is a joke, 95% of my friends rarely/never post anymore, it just got too exhausting.

bluGill 3y ago
I make it a point to hit "block all from" everytime a friend shares something from someone else. Then after two hit blocks from I'd done and log off. It had made my feed better, but not by much. It makes my life better though because it stops me from endlessly scrolling in hopes that maybe the next post will be what my friends are doing. I encourage everyone to do the same - if enough do maybe facebook will notice and hopefully get back to what makes them valueable: what my real life friends are doing.
- blowski 3y ago
  I don’t check the Facebook feed at all. I have to use it to post and read updates in a community group, and nothing else. Never had Instagram or Threads. I use WhatsApp as little as possible. I mostly rely on email and SMS.
- optimalquiet 3y ago
  I used to do the same. And I got it to a point where my feed was great, I could check it every few days and get updates from people I know and community organizations. But the issue is, it seems Facebook is now injecting algorithmic content into the feed, so suddenly my feed was full of random internet drama (that the algorithm obviously pushed because it was maximally controversial, leading to more engagement). I deactivated my account not long after, and don't miss it.
- 3y ago

cynicalsecurity 3y ago

I wonder why people don't want to give their private data to yet another platform. Absolute mystery.

mcphage 3y ago
I think the question is not "...give their private data to yet another platform" as "...give their private data to a different, possibly less hostile platform"
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Or possibly more hostile. We're talking about something which doesn't exist. It'd be reasonable for people to be skeptical, and assume at least an equal likelihood of the new Facebook also not respecting their privacy, given the precedent. But I don't think the median social network user cares much about privacy at all, so that's probably not why there is no new Facebook, one way or the other.

PaulHoule 3y ago

For one thing this is the mother of all two-sided markets. I made my own content-based recommender which only needs 2000 judgements from me to work really well. If I wanted to make a social network of some kind I am going to need thousands if not millions of users, with the exception that there is some room for products like discord where somebody makes a private instance which will not need to get that big. In the past, people who started social networks and communication apps of various kinds would use spammy tactics to get enough users to have a scene. Today I think it’s a lot harder to do that and when companies try to jumpstart the process, like TikTok or Temu, they spend hundreds of millions or more on advertising.

pixl97 3y ago
"Network effects" is pretty much the default answer to the question in the headline.
- dopeboy 3y ago
  Which begs the question, is there a way to dethrone something like Facebook? Because those network effects are increasingly strong. Perhaps if the AVP reaches the masses, Apple will layer a social layer there and that will become our new social network.
  - AdrenalinMd 3y ago
    Instagram and WhatsApp could have remained independent, but they were acquired by Facebook. This suggests that anti-monopoly laws may not be effective.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      It's funny. There have been narrow time and place windows where investors have been willing to bet on social media, roughly the 2005-2010 era in Silicon Valley and the 2017-current period in China. It's conjectured that one factor is the size of the cultural zone, it is easy for a site to get established in a big country like India and then move to a small country like Belgium, but to go to the other way is thought to be impossible. There was a time when it seemed the route for a social media startup was to go public, after Facebook went public that window seemed to close and the next business plan became "get bought by Facebook". On one hand, events like this https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whatsapp-best-facebook-purchase-ever.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whats... seem like an orderly way for Facebook to keep ahead of the next big thing, bit I think if they had to do it every year for some new startup they'd start to feel that it is like extortion so I imagine Facebook has used whatever pull they have with VCs to suppress investment in this sort of company in SV. (I wish I had some evidence and/or specifics!) And of course Facebook can't keep buying competitors forever because eventually the antitrust cops will wise up. I found this article https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-twitter-facebook-alternatives-funding-rises-vcs-2022-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-twitter-faceboo... but it strikes me as pretty silly. Since Twitter has shown some weakness the competitors we've seen move in are not scrappy commercial startups but instead Facebook with Threads, Bluesky by the founder of Twitter and Mastodon which is whatever it is but it sure isn't commercial.

NoblePublius 3y ago

Old Facebook now exists in group chat

KaiserPro 3y ago
Pretty much this. Apart from friend discovery, group chat pretty much fills that niche. It has the advantage that you are more likely to get normal social feedback (don't be a dick, or shit thats nice) Old facebook is a function of its time. Like london coffee houses were the ferment of social, commercial and political change, they were only that because of time, place and social conditions. New facebook will need to be mobile first, more about personal connections than one sided showing off.

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago

They did already. It's called VK. The last time I logged in it looked exactly like original Facebook.

patates 3y ago
VK is much better but still has a lot of recommendation in the feed going on.
- noja 3y ago
  This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(service)
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    Yep. Russian facebook clone.

simbas 3y ago

because it exists mbasic.facebook.com

zwieback 3y ago

Sometimes I ask myself "why don't we have Windows File Manager or Norton Commander anymore" but then when I find an old version and try it out it's always "ah, right, time has moved on and nostalgia is tricking my brain". I think it's a mixture of three things: 1) nostalgia, it wasn't actually that great 2) someone eventually had to pay for the initially free infrastructure 3) many other options

yreg 3y ago
The commanders are still good, I use one.
Aurornis 3y ago
> but then when I find an old version and try it out it's always "ah, right, time has moved on and nostalgia is tricking my brain". Easy to forget that the software and sites we enjoyed were a product of their times. The novelty and excitement of something new can sometimes be remembered, but it can’t be recreated because we’ve all moved on. Interestingly, the closest I’ve come to rekindling the feeling is having kids. Introducing them to fun things, including retro things, and watching the spark of excitement and novelty is far more fun for all of us than I ever would have guessed in my pre-kid years. Underrated part of parenting.

byyoung3 3y ago

It's called Instagram

dr_dshiv 3y ago

It’s called LinkedIn

jdnordy 3y ago

> That would explain why messaging, which is mostly based on phone contacts and therefore more in the user’s control, would be the place people now trust for their social graph. This is the reason the I wouldn't be interested in an new old Facebook. I'd add that Messaging Apps have significantly improved since the time old Facebook was relevant. They allow Group Chats that function like a "feed" and include images, videos, memes. You can even search your chat history. Group chats are basically old Facebook feeds with a select part of the social graph. I never thought about it this way, but they totally are. This is actually where Messaging Apps improve upon the old model. A Facebook feed was your entire social graph and your "posts" went out to that entire graph. I don't want this. I never did, really. I like the scoped social graph my "posts" reach in a Group Chat.

babypuncher 3y ago
I think you're right. I recently came to the realization that Discord has functionally replaced Facebook for me and most of my peers. We use it to chat, coordinate events, share pictures, etc. And it gives us all the tools we need to organize this stuff how we want, with no algorithmically curated feed. Discord is essentially group chat on steroids. And because it's a chat app first, it is fundamentally incompatible with the various "features" that ultimately enshittified Facebook.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Yeah, Discord is it. One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think). Everybody has taken a few loops around the merry-go-round at this point, we don’t need to do the whole thing where we try to make it look grown-up and serious. The solution is somewhere in the ballpark of MySpace, AIM, and IRC.
  - tobymather123 3y ago
    I'm really curious about Discord for social, because literally _no one_ I know uses it here in the UK for anything social. is it a US thing? Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?

lenerdenator 3y ago

Because the network effect that Facebook has isn't present and even if it were, it'd be like visiting your university after graduating: you remember it but you can never go back. Facebook's now a dead mall for the original userbase, people born between 1980 and 1995. It was a great place to hang out when you were young but now it's just kiosks of shitposting groups and old people walking around saying insane things. Most of the Millennials I know are on a combo of other social media, usually a mix of IG, Meetup and Discord. I guess there's no market interest for an old FB.

rightbyte 3y ago
> it'd be like visiting your university after graduating: you remember it but you can never go back You are quite literally back there though. And you could probably do another master if you wanted. Your friends are gone but the university is still there. You can't go back to old Facebook even if you wanted.

Solvency 3y ago

Because it's literally not needed. If I want to see endless photos of your baby, I'll ask to follow your private Instagram. If I want to message you, I'll either text you or IG message you. Hell, if I want to group message I'll text or IG group message. If I want to share photos I have iCloud shared albums. Besides that I live my life out in the real world. I don't need some weird monolithic Jurassic era social network to maintain relationships with people. So yeah, tastes change. The basic functionality of an old Facebook has been atomized and woven into the fabric of my regular phone usage.

seydor 3y ago

There's like 10 social network websites like this. They are probably greatly enjoyed by their users, but they are not as many as the author thinks they are

baxtr 3y ago

Asking this question misses the point. What needs to be asked is: how would one attract users to a revamped version of the original Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg, despite being a nerd, excelled in the distribution strategy of “The Facebook”. He strategically expanded it campus by campus, effectively mapping local social networks into a digital version. It's pretty uncertain whether this approach would succeed today or if anyone would invest the same effort as Zuckerberg did.

yreg 3y ago
MySpace attracted users without zuck.
- tcmart14 3y ago
  And Tom is a genius. Made his money and now he just travels the world doing photography, living life.

nostromo 3y ago

Privacy preferences have shifted pretty dramatically. People now understand that sharing their personal information and personal opinions in an open platform is high risk low reward. So we now scratch our social itch with group chats and private groups.

avgDev 3y ago
I disagree, maybe in tech circles. From my experience normal people don't care like at all.
- nostromo 3y ago
  Young people care and are very aware of what they share and don't share. That's why Facebook is only popular with boomers now. Young people are in private chat groups, using alts on Instagram, and then only sharing the most anodyne content publicly under their real name.

grumple 3y ago

If you allow people to freely post messages, it will just devolve into the same sort of facebook/twitter/tiktok/instagram toxicity. Big companies will still overwhelm you with ads on the platform. Facebook was great for a few things when it started and was exclusive to college students, like: 1) connecting with new friends at college - it's still pretty good for this as far as I know, as long as you share exactly the same sociopolitical beliefs as the people you befriend (no longer on it). 2) organizing events (usually parties, but also dorm events or others for school) - it stopped being great after the first 2 years, when police across the country started using it to shut down parties. The culture around parties also changed. Now it's not great because a lot of people no longer use fb, and because they made changes to make it harder to actually use this feature effectively. 3) documenting how you met someone - they removed this feature around 2006 or so, there's no replacement for it on any platform that I'm aware of. 4) sharing photos with friends - Instagram is better for this. Nobody wants to look through a whole album of poorly taken photos anymore. Also normal people learned that having a ton of photos of you online could be a bad thing.

octacat 3y ago

FB is a result of slowly AB-tested mutated app. By the way, FB is dead. The people I care about I want to keep away from FB. Oh, we have IG, which is an absolute mess right now. But really, the answer is pretty simple, just compare what people post now and 8 years ago... Now we need "perfect" stuff to post, because we got auto-curated by the algorithm. TikTok is even worse, it basically gives you a demo version of attention for some random post and from now on you have to work on each post, because there is no followers on the app (just random people who could maybe see your post again, if algo will like it). So, TLDR: very low expectations for social networks to be useful in any kind of form for most of people, so there is zero interest to invest anything into it (i.e. post coffee/cat/travel image? maaybe to instagram stories - these are still alive).

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nostrademons 3y ago

"Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel The success of the old Facebook was very much rooted in a particular time and place. The leading edge of the Millennial generation (which was raised to be both more social and more trusting than previous generations) was in college. The Internet was new, and people were figuring out what it was for. The economy was humming along, and recovering from the dot-com bust, and people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and food would be taken care of. A website where the point was to throw sheep at each other was a nice idle diversion for that time surplus. It also helped that Facebook was started in one of the highest social-status dorms, in the highest social-status college, among the highest social-status demographic (college students), in a generation that was tightly socially connected. I'd remarked to a coworker, when Google was just starting Google+, that we were replicating all the technology in Facebook (and many good ideas not in Facebook that had been pioneered by LiveJournal), but we were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg capitalized on. In short, yes, consumer preferences have changed. Consumer preferences are always changing. The new Facebook is messaging, or hanging out in person, or maybe TikTok. Replicating the old Facebook won't give back the moment in time that lead to its ascendance.

deleted 3y ago
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threeseed 3y ago
Also it was before many parents were on the internet. Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them. And so they instead prefer messaging apps for these relationships. And then for communicating within their age group it's much more about trends and what is new and different as every young generation is enticed by.
- xela79 3y ago
  > Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them the amount of young people who realize this and actually take action, if a very very small part, majority is just spoon-fed the new normal of these "social" apps

protomolecule 3y ago

It's called vk.com if you don't mind FSB reading your private messages :)

stainablesteel 3y ago
im confused by this because its basically open information now that social media websites have very close relationships with the federal government, is this not already done?
- reaperman 3y ago
  AIUI the NSA has had direct warrantless access to unencrypted domestic social media correspondence since perhaps 2008 or so.
- protomolecule 3y ago
  I'm not sure what you are confused about. NSA is American, FSB is Russian. Which government has more power over you?
  - stainablesteel 3y ago
    gotcha, i mistook it for being an american bureau

tacostakohashi 3y ago

Because if they made a new version of old facebook, it would be subject to the same growth/enshittification forces they turned old facebook into new facebook, so better to just cut to the chase. It is weird how different facebook is now compared to when it started. In a few of the small towns I have lived in, there are very active Facebook groups with basically the whole town in, all the businesses, tradespeople, etc elected representatives, and the Facebook group takes the place of a local newspaper/classified ads or personal/business dedicated webpages. It's quite practical, but unfortunately how much ad and other drivel content gets mixed in. Meanwhile, the actual person-person "friend" stuff is almost completely hidden/unusable behind dark patterns.

rightbyte 3y ago
> In a few of the small towns I have lived in, there are very active Facebook groups This is so annoying. If I wanna know if the local library has a child story hour or whatever I need Facebook. But believe it or not, I managed to make them add a Facebook group feed to their homesite so I don't need Facebook! But many smaller less ambitious events from other actors are just announced on Facebook. And the only way I get to know is via my wife.
- Intriq 3y ago
  you will like qstudy.ai

bonney_io 3y ago

It seems to me that Mastodon, tumblr, Wordpress, Threads, and any future platform's support of ActivityPub could theoretically make the entire internet "old Facebook". Facebook is/was two things: 1) a microblog (your personal page) 2) an interface for following other's microblog posts This sounds an awful lot like a following, say, a bunch of WordPress blogs in your Mastodon feed. We just need the interface over it all. Heck, if Threads does what they say it will, Threads very well may become that interface for many folks.

echelon 3y ago
I certainly hope Threads has no future in the internet of tomorrow. We need to move away from centralized systems. ActivityPub is dangerous too! The protocol suffers from federated cabal censorship. Entire Mastodon instances will ban over the prettiest rationales, just like Reddit moderators and their little fiefdoms. It's quite fascist. I'm hoping BlueSky's protocol of distributed opt-in filtering and extensions wins. I don't want anyone deciding things on my behalf. You're free to filter me out, you're free to subscribe to someone who filters me out, but I get angry when the means of communication and those chosen to rule over it do it without recourse. The reasoning, despite being mostly petty, shouldn't even matter - it's authoritarian and awful.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Who moderates the moderators has always been an issue. Still, there is no way around it. If that community has toxic mods, you probably don't want to stick around there anyway : go to a different one or make a new one yourself ! This is still better than being in a situation where there are only giant platforms like Facebook/Reddit/Discord/Xitter and no hope of starting a community outside their walls.
CRCPowershroom 3y ago
A facebook ActivityPub alternative already exists with Friendica. https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/
- 3y ago

dividefuel 3y ago

I don't think a 'new version of old Facebook' can succeed in the medium term, for a few reasons: 1) I don't think a platform can get enough critical mass like Facebook did. It's much easier to get a smallish circle of people (5-20 people) to align on one platform and use a group chat than it is to get everyone you know to align on the same platform. 2) The rise of mobile. Things like having an individual profile made more sense when sitting at a laptop/desktop PC and actively browsing someone else's content. With mobile, there's more friction to viewing profiles, so the feed model tends to win out. 3) I think many people are more apprehensive about posting content to a wide audience than they were in Facebook's prime.

tobymather123 3y ago
Hasn't LinkedIn kind of maintained 2 & 3, but in a work specific context? Which maybe feels safer, armed by the suit of a corporate identity...
- dividefuel 3y ago
  Yes, I was thinking how LinkedIn may be the one exception. "Profiles" though only stick around because they're effectively resumes, and users hope that keeping their profile up to date improves their chances of landing a job. I'd also suspect LinkedIn has a lower percent of its traffic on mobile than many other social network sites do currently.

phatboyslim 3y ago

My attempt to speculate on potential obstacles which exist today over the (I believe, 2009) version shown: - Eroded public trust in (all) social media - Increased regulatory scrutiny today vs 2009 - More competition today (i.e. TikTok) - Changing demands from advertisers

manbitesdog 3y ago
- Huge cold start disadvantage vs conglomerates like Meta

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thih9 3y ago

> Either: billions of people who used to find old Facebook useful have changed their preferences in the last few years, and no longer need something like that Yes. To elaborate, these people have gotten used to Facebook’s new UI, are now relying on its new features, and are accessing it in different ways.

octacat 3y ago

Reality is that facebook hit the jackpot of era of digitisation of social groups. Which means groups are online now, but also extremely radicalised (politically). Tiktok algo knows what stuff to show you and what stuff you will never ever see, because you are from a different social group (but cat videos would be shown to anyone). IG was showing you stuff from people you follow, but it does not work anymore, once people start posting controversial opinions (which they do, once they use TikTok long enough, because the algo pushes radical opinions to the top, they catch attention). Offline groups would have to be less radical for its members, because of fear of rejection from a group. So, the answer is "there is nothing to digitise, the only way to go: A. build offline groups - nobody wants it. B. Do the same as Facebook/Twitter/Reddit - but good luck competing). If the old way of Facebook worked, FB would use the old way.

godshatter 3y ago
> If the old way of Facebook worked, FB would use the old way. Not necessarily. If the old way of Facebook worked (i.e. was profitable) but it wasn't as profitable as the new way, FB still wouldn't use it. But some other company might be able to get away with it.
- octacat 3y ago
  Not necessarily, but most likely. If there is a way to make more profit, any company would try to do it. The moment service stops growing, aggressive monetisation kicks in. Otherwise, investors/shareholders would blame CEO for incompetence.

sfmz 3y ago

"Every empire carries the seeds of its own destruction" FB let you connect with friends -- but that's also its fatal flaw -- friendships are trending towards zero. TikTok enters the scene and now friendless people can have parasocial relationships with their tiktok subs.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Here is the fallacy that so-called "tech" company-dependent commenters will propagate: If no one is making it, then no one would use it if someone made it. It's fine for "developers" to hypothesise about other "developers", but making conclusions about computer users who are not "developers" is nonsense. Yet some HN commenters will do this ad nauseum. Unless and until someone makes "a new version of old Facebook" and forces it upon computer users to the same extent as "new Facebook", then no one knows which option computer users would choose. Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-competitive tactic.

spit2wind 3y ago
> Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-competitive tactic. Other people's points about network effect and the Goldilocks Moment are valid and surely play a part. In reality it's more likely laws and enforcement have changed to skew the game in Facebook's favor. There is no "free market." Never has been, never will be. Markets function according to the environment they operate in, including but limited to law.

sandworm101 3y ago

Am I the only one here who remembers when a "facebook" was made of paper and glue? they used to be a tool used by professors in at least new England and probably many other areas at the time. That's where the name came from.

atemerev 3y ago

Here's your free Facebook-like open source social network server: https://github.com/FreeFeed/freefeed-server https://github.com/FreeFeed/freefeed-server Works in production at https://freefeed.net/ https://freefeed.net/.

mariusor 3y ago

They do, or rather not old Facebook, but old VK: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen As a bonus it's an ActivityPub enabled application, so any specific instance of it requires less work to get a network effect going. :)

INTPenis 3y ago

I mean there are fedi alternatives like mobilizon right?

hateful 3y ago

Like a lot of other comments here, I agree that it's been moved to private chats, but I would add that what's missing is: - everyone having a "Profile" that can be passively looked at at any time. Having an old classmate or a friend from your friend group (kind of solved in group chats) that's not a direct friend, but you still want to be part of that community - or have a sense of their life without having to the whole social interaction part. - events - the ability to "look up" someone before actually interacting with them - the ability to "post on someone else's wall". This is something that many Facebook clones got wrong. I don't want to tag someone, I want to put something on their page that their friends can see that I put there.

randomdata 3y ago
Nobody on the other side of the fence wants those things, though. In the beginning the implications of allowing others to take a look into your life weren't well understood, but it soon became creepy knowing that others are taking a look into your life, hence why Facebook had to change gears and focus on more private spaces and lean on 'professional' content creators who are happy to let others watch them fill the void.

axegon_ 3y ago

For starters, there are like 100k platforms for "sharing" stuff. Where I live, facebook and to some degree instagram completely dominate the social media market: think 95% and above. People are creatures of habit and they get used to the platforms they use as they evolve. In addition, most users use a smartphone most of the time. And by extension, most of the time they spend on their smartphone is distributed among a certain number of apps(low, single digits). If anything new comes along, you first need to gain some market share by squeezing yourself into that time slot, which is nearly impossible. I spent most of my career at a company that solely developed games for smartphones and I did countless studies on the matter. The South Park episode about freemium games couldn't possibly be more accurate. So much like no one on HN wants any updates from the board itself, people get what they want and so long as it works, they will complain but keep using it unironically. I got a chance to speak to reddit admins a few months ago and they admitted that till this day, they all, till this day use old reddit, even though new reddit has been around for more than half a decade and now there's new-new reddit. Same reason no one has made a new myspace - it was great back in the day. By today's standards, it would have been a security black hole but it did it's job back in the day and if not else, it taught a large number of people some basic html and css skills. Today, no one cares about shiny profile pages with sparkles and music. That's kinda the first rule in monopoly: you are either first or you are last, along with everyone else. It doesn't matter if you have 100, 1000 or 10000 users - you are still at the back of the pack, not even getting scraps for dinner.

nkotov 3y ago

About 10 percent of the people I follow post regularly via stories or less often through posts, the rest just view or post once or twice a year. Most people don't even use a desktop any more for personal computing. The online culture has shifted to highly specific group chats and consumption since most are afraid of putting themselves out there as they previously did when they were younger. I use Facebook nowadays only to post life events once or twice a year for my parents and in laws and cringe at the memory posts from 10+ years ago. I consume most of my friends lives through Instagram. For entertainment, I have TikTok and YouTube.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

Creating a new version of old Facebook is easy. Getting people on it is hard. I think these days, the attention limit is the biggest problem, not just in what people see, but in being seen. A true "old Facebook" is going to be considered boring to today's audience. They don't want to post a silly video to their friends, they want to post it to the world and hope it gets millions of views because they think that will lead to monetization. It sucks, tbh. I really wish there was a good social network site that truly existed for the sole purpose of keeping up with friends. NO public posts. NO groups or business pages. Every post is available only to friends, or optionally, extended to friends of friends to one level. Discord is not the answer I'm looking for. Group chats aren't it, either. If I have something I want to share with all my friends, I don't want to have to post it in 5 different places, especially when 3 of them have overlaps in friends. I just want to see what all my friends are up to in a single feed.

captainmuon 3y ago
Just do what the German Facebook clone StudiVZ did back in the day. Find a couple of people in every college town and make them multiplicators, who invite other people and spam every place with flyers. Spend a few hundred thousand $ if neccessary and hire a couple of them or pay venues for putting their events on your site. I think there is still a big hole in the social landscape left by old Facebook. One thing is it is not just about keeping up with close friends. That's easy, you can just message them or call them. It's for connecting with not-quite-friends, people in your extended social circle. If your class mates are going to that party and you don't know if you are welcome, it might be scary to ask directly what they're up to and face rejection, but it's easy to connect over some website. It's a form of social lubricant. I think all the chat apps haven't replicated that effect.

atum47 3y ago

I find it hard to find users. I just built an app to share memes with my friends. It's invitation based. I invited the first users and they each got 3 invites when registering. I got 7 of my friends to join (similar sense of humor) but that's it. They don't seem to be using it all the much also, and also haven't invited any of their friends.

onthecanposting 3y ago
A more successful model is to launder a DoD project into a private company (Lifelog to Facebook, for example) and then a leviathan of media flaks can promote the product as the Next Big Thing.

Jedd 3y ago

There's a chrome extension called Fluff Busting Purity [0] that seems to still be alive, but evidently struggles to respond quickly to the ever-increasingly user-hostile coin-chasing changes coming out of the mothership. It doesn't get you the 'old Facebook' (of which there are many variants) but does help with suppressing the 'recommended for you' en masse along with what feels like several hundred other things it can tweak or suppress in the UI. Ultimately 'the feed' as generated by Facebook's algorithms remains monumentally janky, and it's hard to believe it matches any user's actual preference. [0] https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/

yallpendantools 3y ago

I've personally considered doing something along these lines but one thing simply stopped me on my tracks: moderation. I feel like twenty odd years ago you can just open the gates to a web community and get by with little moderation; you can still cultivate a community from which participants derive some value. Nowadays, moderation would have to be no less than someone's full-time job. And I believe this has been the case for a good few years #before# generative AI came into the scene. Maybe for a good while you can hold down the fort with technical moderation solutions like fail2ban or Captcha but I bet you will run into problems within your first half a million users or so. Maybe projects like Mastodon have more robust solutions to this but, still, moderation will be a problem if and when you make it big, just like your server costs. Finally, don't even get me started about CP, which is a whole other level of low and rotten. Maybe if you restrict your community to niche topics it would (a) deter malicious outsiders and (b) be self-moderating to a degree. The thing is, a niche discussion forum old Facebook ain't.

seltzered_ 3y ago

"a huge unmet demand currently exists for a social network which is based on the social graph, instead of the content graph, and which is pre-enshittification*" I would argue this hasn't disappeared, but merely moved. There's a number of other platforms people are using for seeking a certain social graph: Social networking style: - Mighty Networks ( https://mightynetworks.com https://mightynetworks.com ), Hylo ( https://hylo.com https://hylo.com ), Circle ( https://circle.so https://circle.so ), etc. Chat Style: - Discord, Slack, etc.

thrusong 3y ago

I hesitate to post this here because I probably can't handle a rush of traffic if it gets attention, but I've been working on this at prezince.com. Just launched an MVP on February 1st and it is very much alpha software. It's a social network generator, essentially Wix or Squarespace for social networking. You go through a simple wizard to choose what type of feed your network is based around (like Facebook/Twitter/Insta, YouTube-like streaming, TikTok-like vertical videos, or classic chat), how connections work (follow/follow back, request friend/confirm friend, or automatic for teams), what it looks like (fonts and colours), what features it has (right now, like button, comments on posts, and trending topics), and who can access it (public or invite only). I very much learnt PHP and MySQL back in 2007 because of how cool I thought Facebook was, and I miss the early way the site operated. I also just see how it can be a solution to a lot of different problems. My family is using one as a replacement for group chat on Signal— we can keep discussion centred around posts in the feed which only we have access to.

Megustatrw 3y ago

We all learned that people actually don't care for using Facebook the way it was intended. It's just easier to share the few images you care for through Whatsapp (or whatever else people use, at least for my family chat it's what app for years now). It's effort to curate through holiday pictures and people don't want to go through 10 or more. They are happy with 1 or 4 or so.

aaroninsf 3y ago

If you want to know, study the market for new versions of the old Twitter. Many are super close to the "new" Twitter, indeed some are nicer. Which have been successful, with whom, why? And what are their prospects? Oh and it's a good moment to take a refresher look at the foundational business model for these networks. Facebook succeeded by giving users some stuff for "free," in exchange for agreement(?) to be subject to total surveillance. And it turned out, also in exchange for being subject to sentiment steering. C.f.. Cambridge Analytica's collaboration with the GRU and Facebook: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/origins-russias-broad-political-assault-united-states/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/origins-russias-bro... Given the catastrophic consequences, does the same devil's bargain succeed today? Are voters more educated or more skeptical? Are legal protections stronger? They are in the EU. Or has enshittification so defiled the entire social space that users are as OP suggests "burned out"? Anyone trying something in this space today had better keep a close on eye on the movement to repeal section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as well. That would instantly kill most any social media worth participating in.

weare138 3y ago

Elgg is pretty close... https://elgg.org https://elgg.org

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Wouterken 3y ago

I spent some time last year exploring similar ideas. I assumed that an application that bridged the divide between public feed-first models and private group messaging apps by allowing control of post visibility across your network, was bound to be an attractive proposition. I put something together but was surprised at just how few people signed up, even if just to take advantage of it as a private social network between small friend groups. Interestingly, the few users that did join, tend to never bother to use the more public social aspects of it, and exclusively post privately. I think this is likely representative of the big shift of the more genuine social media interactions we first enjoyed in old Facebook, all now having migrated to private messaging apps and that the original experience we all remember fondly, may simply not be repeatable in today's social media landscape.

nitwit005 3y ago

Cohost is pretty close to that, minus the use of real names and photos. It's pretty much a dumb feed of people you've chosen to follow.

salad-tycoon 3y ago

I logged into Facebook for the first time in a very long time. Most of my feed is of plain clothed porn actors I guess, Simulating sex. Posted by people I don’t know. What is going on?

wkat4242 3y ago

A lot of people have tried. But they failed to gain momentum. There's been openbook for example, later renamed to okuna. Completely gone, they went on to make some kind of NFT style scam (which I regretted deeply because I helped kickstart them). But that also failed quickly. But there were many. I think there's just no point anymore because the whole concept of social media has been perverted so much that nobody believes in it anymore. Too bad because the original Facebook that just let me follow my friends instead of all this suggested crap was really nice. There was also mewe. I think that still exists. But personally I'm no longer interested in anything that has a business objective. It has to be federated for me to be interested. Any business goal will eventually lead it to be perverted and enshittified.

unsignedint 3y ago

To me, the issues stemmed not from the platform itself, but from its users. Facebook was enjoyable until I encountered individuals compelled to comment on every post I made, regardless of its significance. The situation worsened during the 2016 election season, when Facebook became a battleground showcasing the worst of humanity. This turmoil prompted me to take an extended break from the platform. Although I've recently returned, I'm now much quicker to use the "block" button to safeguard my peace of mind.

pseudocomposer 3y ago

I am (sort of), but it's decentralized and AGPL-licensed, and has more chat-oriented features that old Facebook didn't. Chronological sorting, no likes, a heavy focus on events. I hope to get some local businesses and/or municipal governments deploying it in the next year or so. Last time I posted it to HN (earlier in development) it got hugged to death pretty quickly. But this is only a comment rather than a full post, and I've made Jonline a bit more resilient (and stuck its HTML and media behind a CDN), so let's see how this goes :) https://github.com/jonlatane/jonline https://github.com/jonlatane/jonline https://jonline.io https://jonline.io https://bullcity.social https://bullcity.social https://oakcity.social https://oakcity.social