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Ask HN: How Would You Build an Ethical Facebook Replacement?

2 points by howlinbash ↗ HN
If the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook incident[0] is an example of Facebook's negative affect on society it doesn't appear too far removed from its standard business model. However, With over 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook clearly provides a very useful service. I understand that Facebook being replaced by an ethical competitor is tremendously unlikely, that said, how would you do it?

How would you build a Facebook replacement without a Faustian deal with surveillance capital?

- Wikipedia: has built humanity's largest encyclopedia without it

- signal: has built a whatsapp clone without it

- mastadon: has built a twitter clone without it

- peer 2 peer: has solved many distribution and scale problems

- federation: has solved many single points of failure problems

- GNU & FOSS: has provided many thoughtful approaches to similar problems

I would love to try and keep this discussion positive and fairly technical.

Please don't just:

- list all the obvious obstacles

- point out that this will never happen

- get stuck too deeply in the 'what is ethical?' conversation.

Technically, how would you approach solving this problem.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm

3 comments

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onion2k
Each of your examples is headed by an individual who's both passionate about openness in their respective domain and who has a source of income that's made them rich enough not to really need to sell out (or by groups of people who don't need to in the case of P2P and OSS).

Even if you could find someone who fits the bill though, each of the examples is either irrelevant to the government or too small to have a significant impact on what the government do. I strongly suspect that any ethical Facebook alternative would find it very hard to operate if it got big enough to complete with FB and still refused to sell out.

sbinthree
Signal does 90% of what Facebook did that mattered, the only thing I miss is topical groups. I probably travel in unusual circles but everyone is on Signal and only half are still on Facebook.
howlinbash
I disagree.

Signal does a very important part but not 90%.

what about news feed, events, calendar, status updates, groups, pages, profile walls...

These are all mega useful tools that are used by 2 billion people for a reason!

I <3 Signal and I've converted many non-techies to it but I cannot easily inform everyone that I'm having a baby and they also cannot do this.

But I'm glad you're using it. it's a wonderful tool.