I like this idea. Actually, earlier today I set up a private Wordpress site that I will use to share photos of my kids to my family and relatives. One reason I wanted to this is that my dad doesn’t use Facebook. I could have chosen iCloud, but I prefer to use something that I control myself and is not tied to certain hardware. The site is hosted on a VPS on Digitalocean which is very convenient and the price is reasonable.
I've been looking for a solution to this for a while. How can I let my friends and family stay connected with photos videos & related metadata, but retain security and ownership?
I thought NextCloud might be a good solution, but I'm still searching.
Same here. I am continuously searching for such solution.
Previously, I used self-hosted WordPress blog for sharing photos, password protection was great but got tired of administering stuff. Also I wanted to backup my photos on VPS, so I was uploading full-resolution photos which of course, was not very price efficient for backup.
Then I switched to SmugMug with unlimited space. This was great because I can upload photos directly from Lightroom Classic 6.0. Photos stay synced. And easy automatic backup but photos are slightly compressed when you upload via LR plugin.
Now I have "upgraded" to Lightroom CC, it comes with 1TB of storage. Your photos/videos are available on laptop, phone, and web. It comes with Adobe Portfolio which you can use to share. You can share privately too but I haven't tested that.
However, it is not a true backup service, if you accidentally delete a photo on phone, it is gone everywhere. And there is no recycle bin. So I keep local copies and run a cron job to copy them to NAS.
So this is not a self-hosted decentralized solution but it seems to be best option so far.
The critical piece is running a stand-alone environment that has low friction for the users - my family.
I want my Significant other to be able to post as easily as Facebook. My parents to browse easily on their devices, and uploading pictures from my phone to be Facebook Simple.
Mastodon is pretty close to having all of this if you turn off Federation, other than not being able to run a fully private node. You can still access public pages for users.
That's a good idea. We need a decentralized facebook, where everybody hosts and shares their data.
It would need a registry or identity provider for the initial contact, but then it should replicate facebook functionality in a decentralized way. If you want to see posts in a group (like facebook group) - you query online members part of the group for their data, and download/share the latest version.
That’s an interesting idea but creating decentralised social networks seems quite hard. IMHO it’s easier to just use regular web sites running e.g. Wordpress, Discourse or SMF[0].
There exist various attempts at decentralized social networks. But when I googled to find an up-to-date list I find they're all unfamiliar to me. All the ones I heard of previously are apparently dead or zombies now.
Decentralized social networks can't or won't do the kinds of orchestration of social interaction that help lubricate getting a social network up to speed. Many of those mechanisms, like bots, are underhanded and exactly what people want to get away from in decentralized networks.
We likely have to live with the fact that social networks are artificial creations, and that they are hostile to many kinds of expression. They probably can and should be better at preventing propaganda manipulation by hostile national adversaries, and at protecting the vulnerable from bullying.
But they're never going to be a force for good. Just a less-damaging vice.
The issue is that you can't interact between profiles, or if you interact it's centralized. Looks like there is existing a decentralized social networking protocol: ActivityPub, having the features of social media (as mentioned in related comments).
there's activitypub.. it's a federated social networking protocol. the most prominent implementation is mastodon (joinmastodon.org). Counting almost 2 million users by now
Would you find an issue with user interaction though? If you provide a means of customization, then your site’s aesthetic depends upon a user’s incentive to change their page’s display. Once a certain fraction of ppl stop caring, then you’d see a visual degradation of the site that would cause a ripple effect.
A decentralized social network protocol is needed (ActivityPub is something like this), data stored in a neutral way, and the software. When exchanging data between users, you exchange only data, and you see it based on your software (protocol implementation).
The software would ideally be hosted on the cloud, so it's always online. You log in your software and see all your updates/interact with others.
Aspects of this already exist to varying degrees of polish. Conduct a search for pleroma, mastodon, gnu social, hubzilla, friendica, diaspora, etc. and you'll see a diverse ecosystem of platforms. By the way, this ecosystem is referred to as the fediverse (federated universe). Sure, the thousands (yes thousands!) of mastodon servers/instances receive most of the limelight, but mastodon is not the only platform. The old challenge used to be the network effect ("oh, but none of my friends are on network X...")...but with recent stats citing over 2.5 million users active on the above networks...it is just a matter of time when one of your friends will make their way onto the fediverse, pulling you and your other friends into it. So - perhaps a little prematurely - I welcome you to the Fediverse! :-)
Agreed. We need a common social media specification. Like Diaspora, but just the spec. Diaspora is a solution, and solutions would implement the spec. Then sites like Facebook/Neocities/Wordpress could comply with the spec. How you treat your own posts on your own site, with your own theme etc would be up to you. Your feed would exist within your own website and would consist of posts pulled in via RSS or some other syndication spec.
Blogger together with comment threads on Google+ (which could be embedded in more places than just Blogger) were supposed to be the magic elixer between personal sites and a feed that promotes discoverability.
Sometimes I think Google has killed G+ just as there was a reason to give it a second look, but I suppose they know how unlikely is a revival of G+. They have got a successful social network in the form of YouTube, even though YouTube comment threads often make Facebook look like the Promised Land.
I just read an old JS book that shows you an advanced IE only feature where you can insert elements in the middle of a page using eval('document.all.something something'). So nostalgic now </marquee>
>most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.
Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc).
Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have.
The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed rather than a 1999 Geocities personal website. (But that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database.)
When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple
Most people I add because I meet them in read life. Actually, 100% of the people I add on FB after I've met them in real life.
Maybe if there was a good search and easy add mechanism for people I've met, it would fulfill the discovery aspect. I agree with you, it does feel easier to find people on FB.
No, discovery of news & sources. Your friends who know about <your hobby> are a great news source/filter. Whereas with RSS there's not a good method to find new news you care about.
I found this out when I switched from Pocket to Instapaper. Instapaper has a curated list of articles updated about once a month, and I don't read half of them. Pocket recommends articles based on what you read, and it's not just more of the same. I'm probably going to switch back.
You can follow hn and other aggregators like reddit via rss. I have it set up for hn where I only get posts that have hit 100 points, otherwise it’s a firehose.
I'm surprised so few people here have picked up on the fact that "filter bubble" is a rhetorical trick about as obvious as the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" dichotomy.
People like getting good recommendations, and they'll always like them. "Filter bubbles" are here to stay.
Good recommendations are like a convenient browser that comes with your OS. The problems come in when it's just one company that has the public locked in to their particular solution.
Sure, we all want good recommendations, but how do we define "good"? I see some obvious problems with the way tech recommendations are playing out that have nothing to do with the filter bubble issue.
First, we are outsourcing recommendations to profit-driven corporations. At best, the recommendations I want to see will be mixed with the ones advertisers want me to see. Revenue expectations of social media companies currently ensure this is a non-trivial issue with no easy middle ground.
Even assuming the recommendations are reasonably good, you still have the problem that these ML-type recommendations require massive datasets and therefore it naturally gravitates towards a winner-take-all situation. Having one giant borg of a recommendation engine is bad.
We are replacing a rich tapestry of individual word-of-mouth and small-scale communication channels with a massive mono-culture. Scalability is worshipped in tech companies (it's great for getting rich!), but it's not a inherently a good thing. In nature we find diversity trumps scalability, and I feel the same way about culture.
Google News claims to include other sources in a story's feed, to expose the readership to other points of view. That sounds like a great way to burst the "social media bubble".
The nefarious problem with FB is the illusion of recommendation/discovery. They're not trying to find new and interesting things for you the way say, the cultural aspects of HN performs this feat; they're trying to define your profile and then serve up more of the same to increase engagement or capture your entire sphere of awareness so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'
That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.
Basically, serving you the content and ads you want can turn out to be pretty malicious. By doing so, a big company can manipulate and shape your perception. Year by year, data processing is making big companies ever more potent at doing just this. Is it any wonder that it eventually got to a point where we started seeing problems?
so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'..... then group you together with people like you and sell those groups to advertisers, claiming they have some exclusive access to groups like "yoga-loving cat owners"
RSS is really just the content/transport method. For a decentralized FB, you would move the intelligence into your local client and it would like more like a web-of-trust network.
1. You connect to friends and you either manually assign or "grow" a bunch of weights to your amount of trust in them and your interest in various topics they might post.
2. You and your friends make posts and assign "topic" metadata to the posts. The value of the system depends on your friends properly assigning metadata to posts. But it makes it easier to filter out extended families' political shitposting (based on trust and negging untagged posts).
3. Your feed is selected based on the weight of your friendship times the weight you base on the interest of the topic. If your best friend posts something about computers and you have positively weighed that topic it would bubble up.
4. Friends-of-friends can transitively receive a proportion of the trust score you have in your friend. Highly trusted friends will make you trust their friends more.
5. Down-votes and upvotes would train your local agent. They could also be fed back to the originator IF votes were signed by trusted encryption keys to prevent your friend from faking his vote count on the "post".
This decentralizes the network out of FB and democratizes the algorithms / system for what and how you want to receive your information.
I think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable:
1. Everyone makes a website.
2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes.
3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client:
3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes.
3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds.
3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed".
4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented.
There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services.
... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)
Like they did with email. Then you have companies come with robust AI tech and filter the spam, and also give good recommendations. A few of those companies come to dominate the market
... aaaaaand, there it goes; we're back to the situation we have now with Facebook and Google.
The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.
The situation you're calling out is exactly the point.
The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.
Some of the concepts you noted - specifically #1, #3, #3b, and #3c - form the basis of some of the stuff that the IndieWeb participants discuss/work on; see https://indieweb.org. In fact - and i think someone else might have already mentioned these guys - https://micro.blog already provides such a paid service. (There are free features of this service, but IIRC the paid parts fulfill some of the items you noted above.)
Follow feeds that post from a variety of sources. I follow a HN rss, a couple multireddit RSS feeds, and even newsletters from nyt and la times will include stories from a variety of places.
“Discover” hardly ever means, “check out what’s interesting,” usually it’s “check out this targeted ad”
For reddit you can get a feed for the top posts only, and for HN you can set a score threshold. I even follow newsletters over rss (killthenewsletter), which if you subscribe to some daily digests you get exposed to stories from a variety of sources on many topics. I can still run through like 250 headlines in about 30 minutes, reading or saving what I like to pocket and skimming over the rest. There is definitely set up and optimization with RSS, getting the right mix of feeds that you want, but I don't see any targeted posts or advertising when I browse the internet now.
Its also really good for following journal articles in my field. Pubmed has active search RSS, for instance, and every journal pushes their new articles to RSS.
The way I grew my feed was to look around any time an article in my feed linked to another site.
The thing is though we want to talk about the stories and ask questions. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? Comment forums on a million sites don’t work.
In the early days of the web someone had the idea that you should be able to run your own group commentary without the site aurhor’s permission. You’d register for the service and your browser would tell you or show you that there’s a conversation going about this page.
Can't you just have a website like Medium that acts as an aggregator (of RSS feeds) instead of a platform? The issue I have to whether stick with RSS feeds, which seem like it's dying, or to use ActivityPub, which doesn't seem to be developed that heavily.
I think in addition to this an aggregator, you also need a website that helps create an RSS feed for each user while simultaneously abstracting that notion away. Thanks for the pointer though :)
Maybe more of an email list than an RSS feed then? You can control who is a member of the list to receive content. It would be cool if social media could be done through email, sort of like Usenet.
Yes, but ideally it would be 2-ways, and there is still the problem with discovery, more in general i just think there shouldn't be social media sites, "social media" should be a protocol
Email/newsletters are a promising protocol, but you would have to rethink the UX to be more like a newsfeed, where a concise version of the message is shown once, and then automatically marked as read.
I have noticed friends reverting back to RSVP e-mails via Paperless Post Flyer. I'm still not sure if one person in this social group is not on Facebook, causing the change, but it has been a welcome adjustment. If Facebook Events can be replaced by an e-mail approach, I don't see why other products can't follow suit.
Twitter could be great if you could truly tune-out the stuff you don't want to see.
For a long time I held onto my account, trying to mute anything part of SJW or communist discourse, but to no avail. Twitter shows you stuff you didn't sign up for anyway, I suppose to maximise engagement.
When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content
That last phrase could add a lot of friction.
you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose
That would indeed replace Facebook. However, then you have a chicken and egg problem. Those clients won't be much good unless people provide data by using them, and people won't use them because they don't already have the data to provide good recommendations.
There's already a lot of aggregators which are partially-social. For example theoldreader tells me that someone likes a specific post from RSS feed. Not sure if they have recommendations, but they could certainly generate them if they wanted.
One thing that could be really cool, would be the UI of RSS readers applied to social media. Like, you could have the ads and recommendations in their own branch of the tree.
>When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple
Up until you get to "different clients" you're basically describing classic Google Reader.
It's based on the idea that you'd publish to your personal website either publicly or privately. The private posts can only be read by your friends (who own personal websites themselves and have established a friendship connection using a friend request).
The implementation is just a (not yet standardized) friend ship request REST protocol plus authenticated RSS feeds (using a secret key exchanged by the above process).
Since the whole decentralized social network idea is a chicken-and-egg game, I've constructed the plugin in a way so that it is useful to use by yourself: You can subscribe to RSS feeds, filter feeds with your own rules, and get full-content e-mail notifications for all or selected posts.
The plugin also implements Emoji-Likes on posts and allows recommending posts to your friends. It doesn't have an automatic recommendation engine (yet?).
Actually, there is no need to have this restricted to WordPress since it uses very much established technology, so it could interoperate with any other compatible platform. I just implemented it with WordPress for its ecosystem and that you can use existing mobile apps to read on it and share to it.
Overall the whole endeavor allows you to have your personal social network decentralized, ad- and spam-free since you select who you listen to.
The plugin is already well usable but it only progresses at side-project speed, so help is welcome (not only development work but also trying it out, posting about its features with screenshots/-casts, etc.)!
I think it would be helpful to specify which claims need data.
> Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have.
I thinks this is mostly a valid argument. The burden of proof for whether the problem exists is on the person proposing the solution; Solutions require action, and the side that requires action needs proof.
I do think the claim that “most people use facebook like an rss feed” needs some data to back it up though. I personally use it that way, but that is andecdotal and I also have many friends who use facebook to promote their life, which is more along the lines of a personal website.
There are also a number of people who primarily share content rather than create/write it as well.
Me, I personally treat it like a blog in the sense that I'm there to either "like" it, go past it, or go to the comments section.
Regardless, reproducing Facebook via personal websites would be daunting if not impossible. One, not everyone is going to feel comfortable doing HTML/CSS/JS or even working in a CMS w/ drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG. Two, if I know your name (and if it isn't unique enough, we either share connections or I know some other details about you you've posted), I can search for you on Facebook. How easily can that be created with personal websites when you're also searching against the broader web (good luck searching for your friend Mercedes's personal site. Have a friend named Mike Rowe and you guys joke about how his name is like that one guy with the tv show? Best of luck finding his site too).
And we can argue "but the user can take back control of their data" which on face value is true, the problem is that I think for a lot of people I know on Facebook, they don't care. At least the convenience outweighs the concerns. And that's fine, that's their right. They weighed the pros/cons and found Facebook to have agreeable compromises. As do businesses that sell on Amazon I'm sure.
I do want a solution that gets away from Facebook. The problem is it needs to be something that is easy enough for a non-tech user to manage and consume. If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche.
Maybe we need some kind of open specification for "the living web" so companies like tripod/angelfire can support the spec.
Maybe where you would sign into your own site and it would have polled posts from all the sites you follow (probably with rss) into a single feed. Your site IP is your identity, so commenting etc would be done as your site e.g., `MentallyRetired.com says: Hey these are cool!`
I dont know, just shooting from the hip, but it seems a lot of these technologies are possible. I remember signing into places with my website.
But it needs to be EASY. As easy as Facebook. And backwards compatible to avoid breakage.
>the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content...
And HN user "jsgo" wrote...
>If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche...
These are the sorts of common sense observations missing from so many "let's replace Facebook/Twitter/Whatever" debates. If we're serious about replacing FB/Snapchat/Twitter/Whatever then we need to consider realistic alternatives. Using the Mastodon-like distributed media and personal website ideas to get rid of Facebook/Twitter is like using the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front to get rid of the Romans. You just have to ignore a lot of reality to assume it would ever work.
I feel that most people are stuck with Facebook because of messenger and events. Core FB functionality is still its social network and ease of interconnecting everyone's personal social graphs.
We would need some sort of aggregator. Currently, you could call Facebook an aggregator of personal websites. Of course all of the personal websites are also hosted there, but it technically is an aggregator of those webpages. Let's not forget most of the people that I am friends with on Facebook would never be able to create their own personal website without a lot of help which is what makes something like Facebook so convenient and popular.
It could be a protocol, independent of the browser. But the browser could support it inline, so you could just click a button to follow a content stream. It shouldn't be complex, it should be simple. Really simple. Syndication.
Several years ago facebook gutted a lot of RSS features. You used to be able to follow your notifications via RSS, but that went away when facebook realized people wouldn't stay on the site as long.
"Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content."
It's funny when people paint such wide strokes for 2 billion people. I would assume people use Facebook for literally hundreds if not thousands(if you can imagine) of use cases.
Probably one of the most complex consumer products ever made from that perspective. I don't think it's useful to reduce Facebook to something as simple as "most people do X on Facebook".
For instance, Facebook in India has nearly 300 million users. They all use Facebook the same way as the 215 million in the United States?
The only people that know how Facebook is used by people is Facebook.
> because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database.
search engines solve that somewhat ... but you could have a directory that points to the correct address (a bit like a web directory or a phone book)... maybe the government could even host that...
Agree. And those who do post about their lives (on FB, Insta, Twitter etc.) Do it for the dopamine fix one gets when others react and respond to their posts.
> that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database
But that's the point, isn't it? Personal websites isn't what will "solve the customer's problem", persé, but it is what will allow Facebook to no longer be irreplaceable, which is the real reason why people stay on the platform. The question isn't whether personal websites can replace Facebook, but whether personal websites will allow room for a real Facebook competitor (which improves the passive consumption experience) to grow.
You’d think that if personal websites were a valid substitute for Facebook, the whole thing would have never taken off in the first place. Personal websites didn’t see massive adoption the first time around, and we can safely doubt they ever will.
Because they were obtuse to set up for 99% of people. Myspace basically made quick and easy personal pages for the masses, and everyone used it because it was quick and easy. If a company is able to do it right for the 99% of people who don't know what FTP is, then its got a shot.
None of the major web services (Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire) required anyone to know FTP, and they weren't any more difficult to use than Wix or Wordpress, which target non-technical users today.
Before the standard of "web development" became "learn the terminal, Git and some Linux, unit testing, install and learn Node, learn Docker or some other container, learn ssh, learn a framework and any of several languages that compile to javascript" it really was simple enough that plenty of "normal" people grasped it without any issue.
The trouble is, all of those "easy" website building services are still much harder and more customizable than Facebook. If you remember MySpace, you'll also remember that a pretty signifiant minority of pages were horrifically ugly and did super-annoying things. It seems most people are either terrible at web design or have no interest in it, even if you give them a pile of dead-easy templates. Part of the reason most of my social media use went to Facebook earlier on was that the user pages all looked reasonably nice and didn't play terrible music or blink or whatever. You could still post ugly pictures or stupid walls of text, but there's a limit to how unpleasant you can make a Facebook page. Sometimes, less customizability is better.
I don't think "customization" is necessarily a problem, even if people want to make butt-ugly sites. Part of what the web offers people is the opportunity to express themselves creatively, both in terms of design and content.
I can't complain about anyone else's lack of design skills... I once had all of the text on my website bright red Nosferatu on a black background in tables with 3d bevels and a background I swiped from a surreal art site.
But there's no reason some modern, stripped down and ultra-minimalist version of a self-hosted site service couldn't borrow from Facebook's UI design (which, all else considered about the service, obviously works for the general public) and have publishing a "page" be as simple as publishing to their Facebook feed, complete with some non-editable css.
But then that gives you none of the benefits (in my mind) to having your own site (complete control over code and content) as well as none of the benefits of Facebook (integration with your social graph and discoverability) and keeps all of the downsides of a third party host.
Squarespace? But still, a website isn’t worth $10/month to most folks.
I think the other user was right who commented that most Facebook users are content consumers, versus content creators. That is, they browse much more than they post.
> Personal websites [...] is what will allow Facebook to no longer be irreplaceable, which is the real reason why people stay on the platform.
No, you're making a common mistake of looking at the surface level of what Facebook shows to users (the so-called "webpage"). Therefore, the seemingly "obvious" solution to beat Facebook is -- Everybody Has Personal Websites.
Since I've seen many smart techies and programmers (e.g. the author of the article we're discussing) make that same claim, I think Mark Zuckerberg has (inadvertently) pulled off the most stunning "Keyser Söze"[0] type of misdirection about the real competitive advantage of Facebook. Programmers are mislead into looking at one thing (e.g. "personal websites") when they really should be looking at something else: The Real Names Lookup Database.
The Real Names Lookup Database is what makes the other features such as "point-to-point messaging", "chat", "calendar events", and finally "personal blog platform" aka "personal websites" -- all work so well with minimum friction.
To put it in more computer science syntax, Facebook has the following SQL table (approximate pseudocode) that's very valuable:
Facebook has accumulated approximately ~2 billion rows in that table with those special primary keys. The end users of Facebook also find that table very useful. (My previous comment about this.[1]) Do not get distracted by things like "personal webpages". It's that special SQL table that makes Facebook hard to replace.
To continue the Facebook analysis via psuedo SQL, when a user wants to see something relevant from somebody she knows, it's:
SELECT posts FROM real_ids WHERE real_name = "Jane Doe";
Getting relevant calender events & invites is the same idea:
SELECT event_invites FROM events,real_ids WHERE real_name = "Jane Doe";
Here's where some observers get sidetracked: Even though the SQL columns "post" and "event_invites" are eventually rendered in HTML, this does not mean that "personal websites of html" is the solution to supplant Facebook. The real issue to analyze is the SQL WHERE clause. Making that WHERE clause work for real names is not trivial to build.
Another company that has a similar real_ids database is LinkedIn. But because they cater to professionals, they have mostly white-collar workers looking for jobs; they're missing blue-collar plumbers, or grandparents that are retired, etc. In any case, the same "flawed solution" can be misapplied here: "The solution to replace LinkedIn is to make it easy for people to make personal websites of their résumé and job history."
If you still have doubts whether Facebook's special sauce is the real_names database or if it's the "ease of personal websites", consider what Mark Zuckerberg chooses to spend billions on: Instagram ($1 billion), WhatsApp ($19 billion), and attempt to acquire Snapchat ($3 billion).
Notice that MZ does not bother with acquiring "easy-to-use website builders" such as Wix[2], or Squarespace[3].
What does Instagram/WhatsApp/Snapchat have in common that Wix/Squarespace does not? Those competitors' smartphone apps have a database of real_phone_numbers of their users!
On a related note, thinking that a protocol like ActivityPub can replace Facebook is also misguided analysis. ActivityPub is not a "real names lookup database" so it can't replace the actual thing that makes Facebook useful. Instead of focusing on protocols, think of how to make an alternative database of real_names-lookup that is...
Surely a new social network could use others' authentication providers (Facebook Connect, Google account, etc.) to get real names/numbers of users and their friends. Smartphone apps could use contacts from the phone itself. I don't think FB's social graph is as hard to replicate as its overall reach. Users think, "If everyone I know is already on FB or one of the other established networks, why use anything else? "
Right, Facebook themselves took roughly 10 years to build it, and they used a lot of psychological tricks to do it (first mover advantage, early FB was "exotic" and "invite only", late FB was an avalanche of FOMO and network effects, etc).
Similarly, the history of the White Pages and the Yellow Pages is a fascinating read and took decades for those books to be accepted. (Nowhere near as fast as they declined in the internet age.)
This is interesting. Literally the one thing that prevents me from using social networks is the real names database. I refuse to give my real name so I don't get the full experience other users do. I would never use facebook, but I would be interested in an anonymous distributed 1:1 social network (like email, without servers). Currently I do use email and minimize my exposure by changing addresses from time to time, however, I'd prefer a full control version. Running an email server is too hard.
Back in the old days I was on IRC. I loved IRC. It was anonymous and everyone could have their own server and you could have individual chat and direct file share instead of broadcasting to everyone. But it's not asynchronous. I would do this thing where I would send my IP and a passcode to my IRC friends and with the IP and credentials they would have access to a specific folder on my home server. I put occasionally a diary or some photos on there and they could leave me messages. (OK it was a very crude solution. I was very young.) I liked it because it did not commit me to having the stuff up all the time but at the same time it wasn't gone forever if I didn't get to it right then.
I realize I am something of an anti-market and nobody would find my dream social network viable. Maybe I should make one for myself. I only have a dozen people I talk to really so there's no "all my friends are here" effect to consider for me.
> That "connection" is easiest and more scalable when it's based on real names
Is it though? People I know refer to their pages with short urls and nicknames all the time because nobody wants to scroll through bazillion of John Doe profiles in Facebook search.
When YC experimented with applying/voting with YC applicants on HN, this was a part of my idea...tomorrowbook ;)
It’s part domain registration, web builder (simple website with fees you add content to via text message), part automated dns records, part social media/search engine.
So imagine these personal websites are all connected, one website can follow another, that’s it. You own the content, traffic, ad revenue. You could search content across these distributed websites with the tomorrowbook search engine, you could use tomorrowbook to register a domain (built in dns/website for the nontechnical) or use your own registrar and embed the tomorrowbook feed into your site.
Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content.
Is that true? I would have thought it's mostly used for chatting with people they know, or commenting on things people have shared. But I'm just guessing.
At some point of ease, you pretty much just have MySpace/Facebook.
And that's what I always think about these conversations... What separates hassle-free push button website creation and publishing from MySpace/Facebook?
Going to throw our hat in the ring here. We built Universe (http://apple.co/Universe) for precisely this reason: to enable everyone to build their place on the internet, without touching code, all from a phone.
We are open to opensourcing Circles. What if anyone could start their own Facebook-equivalent site using opensource? What if we could splinter FB into 10,000 sites?
- maybe simple intro to git to make updating and deploying to netlify easier
anyone can learn basic html / css (in 6th grade we did a week long "build a website" project and everyone did it -- this was back in the late 90s), and with frameworks like bootstrap anyone can make an attractive looking site.
with just basic html / css knowledge and netlify, you can:
- self-host and write a blog
- post photo albums
- share videos and audio (link to youtube)
- share status updates
- create an online course
- create a curated list of interesting articles, photos, recipes, food (a la pinterest)
- conduct surveys (link to google forms or other free survey tools)
- create a mailing list / online following (link to google forms or use mailchimp)
- get creative and personalize your site's appearance
- create links to your friends sites
- publish short stories or even e-books
- communicate with people via email (just create an email address for your site and publish it). posting publicly doesnt have to be the normal way to socialize online
- and probably much more
the only downside is if you don't want everything to be public you'd need a simple backend / auth framework, and youd have to host on heroku or something (idk if netlify only does static sites?)
and if you can do this stuff, and find html / css interesting, it isn't that hard to learn enough python or js to build stuff like forms, comments, like buttons, RSS feeds, or simple CRUD apps
the open source software and free-tier saas products we have today make so much of this so easy
To us this seems very easy and I too have designed my own portfolio webpage for instance, but really do you think my nearly 80-yo grandpa or even my peer and best friend from high school who has those pesky 12-hour nursing shifts between all of her downtime has the ability or more importantly cares to do this? the desire and wherewithal to design a webpage is still a very niche interest.
There is this project which has the goal of building a decentralized Facebook - https://www.scuttlebutt.nz
I think it will eventually happen, but I don't see how mass adoption will occur. Facebook grew a lot by getting our complete address book on signup and sending invitations to the whole list.
The author's thesis is fundamentally flawed. They say it isn't clear why everyone was so excited to have a Facebook, but that's exactly the answer - because everyone had a Facebook. One of the biggest appeals of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (which is arguable even more useless than FB), etc. is that every nobody has direct access to an audience of millions. They can scream their offensive, unoriginal, spontaneous, nuanced thoughts into the void and instantaneously get sympathy, disgust, praise, and simple acknowledgement with little to no effort.
Contrast this with maintaining a personal website. Even in a world where FB doesn't exist, it's still a chore to get people to memorize yet another URL and regularly visit it, especially if it isn't updated on a consistent schedule (which most personal websites aren't.) Furthermore, given that the author seems to be advocating for self-sufficiency as much as possible and avoiding centralized platforms, assuming you're hosting your own website and not using a cookie cutter template, you're now fighting Google for search engine visibility and that's a battle that is absolutely not based on merit of content.
This is not to mention the unpleasantness of using most personal websites because they're poorly designed (light text on a white background), or they try and guilt-trip me into supporting them with Patreon/Paypal popups, or the only consistent content produced is content promising to produce more content in the future, etc.
I'm probably reading too much into the author's article, to be honest. It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but at the same time the thing I don't understand about the recent trend of publishing articles on mainstream news sites preaching the life benefits of going cold turkey on social media is that it isn't a binary choice. I know it's a novel idea, but you don't have to quit FB to pick up that hobby you once loved again! You don't have to quit FB to maintain your personal website! In fact, you can probably use FB and your audience on it to grow your readership on your personal website! Even if you accept the author's argument that personal websites fulfill the purpose that FB does (strongly disagree), they give no reason why you have to pick one over the other.
Yeah the idea of everyone setting up a personal website with their real name and a recognisable photo of themselves is pretty laughable. Are people going to upload photos and implement an account system to restrict access too?
That was Facebook's original raison d'etre (and the source of its name).
I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a developer"-hard either.
Tangent:
I've now talked four friends who wanted to start blogging out of spending money on AWS instances and VPS providers because they were convinced this was the path they absolutely had to take just to start writing things using WordPress. These are not technical people.
Which makes me wonder where that impression is coming from. Surely it couldn't have been Wordpress.com because the site goes out of their way to show how easy it is to sign up and start blogging on their platform, but I've long wondered why they were all so eager to avoid taking the simplest path to their goals since none of them were above spending money to realize their goals of having a blog.
Awhile ago I was digging through Pinterest on topics related to blogging, finance, online business, etc.
A lot of these pins target millennials and moms (wow, especially moms).
The point of most of these sites is affiliate marketing; they've got deals with hostgator, bluehost, godaddy, whatever, and get kickbacks when users sign up.
So all these pinboardss about blogs about blogging advocate for the VPS route because it's how they make cash.
While you don't need to implement things, as a developer, I gave up on self hosting. Having N self-hosted services, and having to keep them up to date for security purposes (and worry about updates breaking things) was really not worth the effort.
Self hosting is a pain. Let's not kid ourselves. It seems easy initially, but over the years, you really feel like it's better just to pay someone to manage it all for you.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Dispora* yet: https://diasporafoundation.org/ I looked into it a while ago and it was a little cumbersome to set up, but I really like the idea.
Hmmm. Doing a little research myself now and I think there's a whole bunch of different servers but they all seem to communicate? Dispora* is just one of them.
Hence it will never be popular. Sorry, that's just how it works. If you want non-technical people on the platform (i.e. the general public) it needs to just work right away.
Well, it's not easy to set up your own "pod", but it's easy to join someone else's pod. You could set one up for your family or company or at whatever level you want.
6. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users are fine with it.
Good or bad, monolithic networks save a lot of ordinary users the pain of having to learn. The reason they might not want to learn varies greatly, but I'll go out on a limb and say it's related to a lack of time and basic backgrounding, in equal measure.
It's not always only about the technically qualified.
> 6. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users are fine with it.
Right. Tell that to the people that slowly come to the realization that their politic decisions and destiny have been heavily influenced through tools that built on and benefited from this very centralization.
"Inexplicably" except for the fact that it doesn't actually work - outside purely charitable and socially-oriented efforts (e.g. Wikidata), there's no incentive for web sites to provide machine-readable, "semantic" information, and quite a bit of incentive not to. And Google didn't "create" the world's largest ad platform, either - they bought it (DoubleClick) and merged it with their technically-superior advertising offer.
If you can't solve the cost (free) and the on boarding (technical aptitude) then it isn't going to replace Facebook. Additionally, a great deal of Facebook use is shifting from photos and writing to video, which makes the cost problem even greater.
Perhaps also consider that thousands of people working at Facebook are not on the mission to the evil things. Mistakes have happened, and this could be the wake up call for FB to turn around and employ that massive brain power for truly life changing things.
We should replace facebook with a version of facebook where you get control over all your data in exchange for a subscription. Meaning that nobody, app developers or advertisers alike, gets access unless explicitly allowed, there's no tracking, and you can actually permanently delete things.
Unfortunately, I suspect that FB makes a whole lot more money offering a free service than they ever would with a subscription model. And though I very much like the idea: if you look at email, you see how few people are actually prepared to pay for an online service...
(Email has the added advantage of being a public standard that anyone can implement - free or charged. Social media has no such universally accepted standard.)
The author makes a decent point about what drove membership to Facebook in the first place - the "cool" aspect via exclusivity and cool kids leading the charge to make the switch. But he completely misses why having a personal webpage is completely different from Facebook or Myspace or even Tumblr and Reddit - the aspect of community. It's not just about sharing, it's about the "strong connections" vs "weak connections" of finding content within a community; this is simply not something that would exist if everyone had their own page. Almost by definition it wouldn't be a community - in a weird way it's as if the internet alone is too big to allow all these individuals to have a balance of strong and weak connections. What's needed are these pages that establish community rules, and not just "in group" and "out group" dynamics. Myspace had the bulletin board and a Top 8 which gave it some sort of culture; Facebook has the standardized news feed and Apple-esque one-size-fits-all profile structure. A rag-tag libertarian group of individual websites, no matter how many there are (and there are already plenty), are not going to establish the same sense of community because they won't foster a community culture.
Yes, I agree we should move away from Facebook, but the answer has to be a better culture. So far from my prowling of alternatives, my only conclusion is that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution because that's exactly what Facebook is trying to do by catering to lowest-common-denominator of culture in the most powerful (psychologically) way: allowing content that gets the most clicks. It's tautological. What we need isn't to break up Facebook or wait for a disruptive alternative, what we need is a better sense of the internet as groups of communities, of which you should be a member of several.
This is a good time to point out Micro.blog, an independent publishing platform designed to empower publishers and protect privacy. (Not my work, but I'm a fan)
I have being thinking about the same idea for a long time. Search can be externalized, and hosting is very cheap these days. Actually, with right approach, hosting might be virtually free, if we use cloud drive providers
This is so crazy, I love the idea but the world isn't going back to how it was in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I've been in web hosting for a long time and I love the idea of everyone creating their own little website. The truth is people don't have the skills or care enough to do something like that, FB, Quora, Twitter, all these services that are walled gardens work because they make it EASY to share/create and CONNECT people easily with others and easy to use apps that do x. WordPress is about the closest you get and it is a nightmare to manage and $$$ on the hosting side compared to closed gardens.
We need to just accept the new world and keep innovating inside it, there isn't going back to how it was.
And stop this nonsense about privacy, either pass a big federal law or accept that your info is how free sites are funded :).
I agree with your comments except for (respectfully) the part about: "We need to just accept the new world..." I firmly think this all represents opportunity. Opportunity for technologists to develop open platforms that are NOT cumbersome to setup nor to host by the layperson, and that - at least over some time - are extremely inexpensive. Maybe i'm an optimist, but i firmly believe there will be an open platform - or multiple complimentary open platforms working in concert - which will fill all of these needs (independence of/control of online presence, privacy, networking opportunities, etc.). I don't think we should merely accept this fate. For the technologists who read hacker news, I think all of this should be a call to arms - or better said a call to service. What is that phrase I've heard, something about being the change you want to see in the world?
Totally agree, I just don't want people to think it is going back to what it was in the late 90s and getting trapped thinking that was some type of golden age. Going forward there is tremendous opportunity to do new things that give people the ability to express themselves online.
The thing about social media which is slightly different from everyone having their own site (tripod, geocities ..) is that its more interactive.
There is some messaging built into the "new social" that wasn't as available back then (we didn't all have smart phones, and internet was charged by the hour.). There wasn't as much content either which did make it slightly more manageable to surf through the pages you wanted.
Yeah it's funny; I remember back when blogs first became popular, but before comments-on-posts was a common thing. Most community and discussion happened on message boards or newsgroups (whenever a link to said link was posted). That's what led to the backlink (quickly taken advantage of by spammers), which led to the on-premise comment thread.
My sentiments exactly. Well-said. I've experimented with distributed/decentralized social tools as they've come along since back to 2005 or so and even tried my hand at making "easy" interfaces to them. So far, it's all exciting but nothing has stuck in a way that looked mainstream to me. Nonetheless, I still have a lot of energy for it because I think something will come together.
Except having a legitimate personal website is a challenge you can't automate away. Even if you managed to produce a rugged installer script for, say, Mastodon so you can one click deploy a working instance you still need to somehow A. get a domain and B. host it somewhere that will stay online for others to use.
There is no real way to automate domain procurement.
Most people don't leave a PC they own all the time to run a website.
So you end up hosting it. But now its centralizing again. If everyone were hosting their own mastodon instances on the same cloud provider thats barely any different from that cloud provider being a Facebook with all the data access they have. Even with a federated site like that few simply have a computer to leave on all the time to have their own site, let alone asking your average person to setup dynamic dns records if they did.
The fundamental name system of the Internet is too manual to enable average people to have personal sites. And any solution involves centralization which defeats the exercise.
Wha? I leave my PCs on for years at a time. Except for natural disasters (storms, cut power lines) they operate 24X365. A personal website is pretty straightforward.
I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.
> I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.
Said as a true developer who no longer realizes how hard some of the things we do are to the average person who can barely operate their computer or smart phone.
Think of all the things you have to learn in order to host your own site. I still have to explain the basics of what a domain name is to potential freelance customers, and why they need hosting in order to have a website online. This is knowledge that is not common outside of the developer ecosystem.
lol ... this seems to be a theme today in several different threads. Literally anyone on this website should take their own behavior as the opposite of what they assume the average user can or will do.
Is the bandwidth on a typical home ISP connection really viable for serving a website, and don't most ISPs forbid customers running servers on their accounts?
Really my standing is that what we need to accept is different - that it is okay to be a technically sophisticated niche but that it will certainly have lesser traffic. That sort of experience is much of what people bemoan about with the 'old internet' anyway.
The internet is built for that sort of specialization anyway - it isn't a pure broadcast medium in the first place so accept that it isn't all conglomerates - if you don't want it for profit in the first place you don't need the crowds.
I can see potentially setting up a good 'seed kit' to distribute but generally they've had the trap of being too technically sophisticated for the lowest level and too simple for those with more expertise.
It is probably more hard on a social level than a technical level given things like UX consistency. Not to mention the infamous 'classic angelfire 90s website' tackiness that nobody tends to want to visit anyway.
This is basically what myspace used to be.
People decided the well organised, in seperate data-pieces and better presented Facebook way was the preference. How little did they know that well organised data can lead to where we are now...
The article mentions how Myspace wasn't able to monetize its users as well as data-driven Facebook does. I wonder if 2006's Myspace could have survived if given more mature toolchains for users' pages to not look as though they were made by a teenager. Or Facebook made an early decision that having less customization is better for growing a userbase such that people will use a service with posts in a format they can be more familiar with across all pages.
Who is talking about going back technologically, though?
Before the sponsored updates.
Before the terms of service changed.
Before data stopped being private.
Before we sold our memories.
Before we forgot our rights.
Before everything that made media
Less social and more cynical,
There was one simple idea:
Our lives are our own.
What we share and who we share it with,
Our memories, our secrets,
Our lives are our own.
That idea is important
So we’re going back to before.
And in going back to before,
We’re going forward.
The idea is still valid IMO. I don't care about "the world", that's just a word; the internet worked fine when there wasn't even 100 million people using it, so a better web doesn't have to be used by everybody, either.
Ehh, wordpress is a mis-step along our path of digital expression. There's this new thing called flat HTML files that are very easy to maintain and much more flexible (and secure). If you don't mind a complete mess, like me :P
I might be looking at this too simply, but I think FB's "current" success is related to the fact that it's simple to use and "everyone" is already there. It's just not worth the effort for a non-technical person to set up a personal website that involved selecting a platform, configuration, hosting, space restrictions, fees, access restrictions, etc. FB is like an "all-inclusive" resort for those wanting to easily connect/share with friends, family and acquaintances quickly. It's free (at least in direct financial costs) and there's very little friction and decision-making involved.
As a web developer, I see the value in owning your web space, but it's a very hard sell for others due to the extra work involved.
This conversation always devolves, or evolves into a discussion about RSS.
I actually think there's an opportunity for the "website builders" namely WordPress, to create "consumer" app(s) that pull in feeds from WordPress powered blogs (with RSS) This consumer / consumption app would compete with Facebook/Twitter directly.
WordPress powers a significant % of the web and combined with the market share of some of the other large providers like Wix & Squarespace I think they could mount a legitimate challenge to FB/TW
I hope you're kidding about 1 and 2 (although 3 kind of makes sense).
I'm not sure how they should handle authentication, or if it's even needed at all. Kids don't use email, and in order to differentiate from FB/TW, the less info you ask for on signup the better.
I figured, thanks for the information. I've used the app to "play" with my own sites but never explored the Reader tab.
I think obviously, they'd need a standalone or new app that puts the focus on this feature. Split the site management app out or re-engineer to compliment the user consumption app.
Run the webserver on your home computer (apt-get install nginx, etc). Make a static site out of html files. Tt's as easy as <html><head><title>my site</title></head><body><h1>first post</h1><p>some content</p></body></html>. For HTTPS you can use the LetsEncrypt easy setup packages.
317 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadI thought NextCloud might be a good solution, but I'm still searching.
https://chrishardie.com/2017/03/wordpress-private-website/
Previously, I used self-hosted WordPress blog for sharing photos, password protection was great but got tired of administering stuff. Also I wanted to backup my photos on VPS, so I was uploading full-resolution photos which of course, was not very price efficient for backup.
Then I switched to SmugMug with unlimited space. This was great because I can upload photos directly from Lightroom Classic 6.0. Photos stay synced. And easy automatic backup but photos are slightly compressed when you upload via LR plugin.
Now I have "upgraded" to Lightroom CC, it comes with 1TB of storage. Your photos/videos are available on laptop, phone, and web. It comes with Adobe Portfolio which you can use to share. You can share privately too but I haven't tested that.
However, it is not a true backup service, if you accidentally delete a photo on phone, it is gone everywhere. And there is no recycle bin. So I keep local copies and run a cron job to copy them to NAS.
So this is not a self-hosted decentralized solution but it seems to be best option so far.
I want my Significant other to be able to post as easily as Facebook. My parents to browse easily on their devices, and uploading pictures from my phone to be Facebook Simple.
Mastodon is pretty close to having all of this if you turn off Federation, other than not being able to run a fully private node. You can still access public pages for users.
On my list to check out are: HumHub & Hubzilla.
It would need a registry or identity provider for the initial contact, but then it should replicate facebook functionality in a decentralized way. If you want to see posts in a group (like facebook group) - you query online members part of the group for their data, and download/share the latest version.
[0] http://simplemachines.org/
Decentralized social networks can't or won't do the kinds of orchestration of social interaction that help lubricate getting a social network up to speed. Many of those mechanisms, like bots, are underhanded and exactly what people want to get away from in decentralized networks.
We likely have to live with the fact that social networks are artificial creations, and that they are hostile to many kinds of expression. They probably can and should be better at preventing propaganda manipulation by hostile national adversaries, and at protecting the vulnerable from bullying.
But they're never going to be a force for good. Just a less-damaging vice.
The software would ideally be hosted on the cloud, so it's always online. You log in your software and see all your updates/interact with others.
Sometimes I think Google has killed G+ just as there was a reason to give it a second look, but I suppose they know how unlikely is a revival of G+. They have got a successful social network in the form of YouTube, even though YouTube comment threads often make Facebook look like the Promised Land.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
For all your gif needs.
Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc).
Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have.
The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed rather than a 1999 Geocities personal website. (But that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database.)
Most people I add because I meet them in read life. Actually, 100% of the people I add on FB after I've met them in real life.
Maybe if there was a good search and easy add mechanism for people I've met, it would fulfill the discovery aspect. I agree with you, it does feel easier to find people on FB.
I'm not sure how to monetize this, but it would add some discovery to rss.
Make it good enough to pay for.
Yep. When it decentralized you can control how strong are the bubble walls and can try different bubbles from time to time.
I'm surprised so few people here have picked up on the fact that "filter bubble" is a rhetorical trick about as obvious as the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" dichotomy.
People like getting good recommendations, and they'll always like them. "Filter bubbles" are here to stay.
First, we are outsourcing recommendations to profit-driven corporations. At best, the recommendations I want to see will be mixed with the ones advertisers want me to see. Revenue expectations of social media companies currently ensure this is a non-trivial issue with no easy middle ground.
Even assuming the recommendations are reasonably good, you still have the problem that these ML-type recommendations require massive datasets and therefore it naturally gravitates towards a winner-take-all situation. Having one giant borg of a recommendation engine is bad.
We are replacing a rich tapestry of individual word-of-mouth and small-scale communication channels with a massive mono-culture. Scalability is worshipped in tech companies (it's great for getting rich!), but it's not a inherently a good thing. In nature we find diversity trumps scalability, and I feel the same way about culture.
That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.
Malicious sounding, indeed.
Basically, serving you the content and ads you want can turn out to be pretty malicious. By doing so, a big company can manipulate and shape your perception. Year by year, data processing is making big companies ever more potent at doing just this. Is it any wonder that it eventually got to a point where we started seeing problems?
1. You connect to friends and you either manually assign or "grow" a bunch of weights to your amount of trust in them and your interest in various topics they might post.
2. You and your friends make posts and assign "topic" metadata to the posts. The value of the system depends on your friends properly assigning metadata to posts. But it makes it easier to filter out extended families' political shitposting (based on trust and negging untagged posts).
3. Your feed is selected based on the weight of your friendship times the weight you base on the interest of the topic. If your best friend posts something about computers and you have positively weighed that topic it would bubble up.
4. Friends-of-friends can transitively receive a proportion of the trust score you have in your friend. Highly trusted friends will make you trust their friends more.
5. Down-votes and upvotes would train your local agent. They could also be fed back to the originator IF votes were signed by trusted encryption keys to prevent your friend from faking his vote count on the "post".
This decentralizes the network out of FB and democratizes the algorithms / system for what and how you want to receive your information.
1. Everyone makes a website.
2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes.
3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client:
3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes.
3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds.
3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed".
4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented.
There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services.
It's what happened with blogs and RSS anyway.
... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)
Like they did with email. Then you have companies come with robust AI tech and filter the spam, and also give good recommendations. A few of those companies come to dominate the market
... aaaaaand, there it goes; we're back to the situation we have now with Facebook and Google.
The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.
The situation you're calling out is exactly the point.
That's also my point.
“Discover” hardly ever means, “check out what’s interesting,” usually it’s “check out this targeted ad”
Its also really good for following journal articles in my field. Pubmed has active search RSS, for instance, and every journal pushes their new articles to RSS.
How does one do that? I'm interested.
Shameless plug: Binaries here: https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/
The thing is though we want to talk about the stories and ask questions. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? Comment forums on a million sites don’t work.
In the early days of the web someone had the idea that you should be able to run your own group commentary without the site aurhor’s permission. You’d register for the service and your browser would tell you or show you that there’s a conversation going about this page.
I still feel like we need this.
but instead of following "feeds" you follow people, and it queues up links they've shared on twitter
I have noticed friends reverting back to RSVP e-mails via Paperless Post Flyer. I'm still not sure if one person in this social group is not on Facebook, causing the change, but it has been a welcome adjustment. If Facebook Events can be replaced by an e-mail approach, I don't see why other products can't follow suit.
So like a rule to push it into your newsletter folder?
For a long time I held onto my account, trying to mute anything part of SJW or communist discourse, but to no avail. Twitter shows you stuff you didn't sign up for anyway, I suppose to maximise engagement.
That last phrase could add a lot of friction.
you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose
That would indeed replace Facebook. However, then you have a chicken and egg problem. Those clients won't be much good unless people provide data by using them, and people won't use them because they don't already have the data to provide good recommendations.
Up until you get to "different clients" you're basically describing classic Google Reader.
It's based on the idea that you'd publish to your personal website either publicly or privately. The private posts can only be read by your friends (who own personal websites themselves and have established a friendship connection using a friend request).
The implementation is just a (not yet standardized) friend ship request REST protocol plus authenticated RSS feeds (using a secret key exchanged by the above process).
Since the whole decentralized social network idea is a chicken-and-egg game, I've constructed the plugin in a way so that it is useful to use by yourself: You can subscribe to RSS feeds, filter feeds with your own rules, and get full-content e-mail notifications for all or selected posts.
The plugin also implements Emoji-Likes on posts and allows recommending posts to your friends. It doesn't have an automatic recommendation engine (yet?).
Actually, there is no need to have this restricted to WordPress since it uses very much established technology, so it could interoperate with any other compatible platform. I just implemented it with WordPress for its ecosystem and that you can use existing mobile apps to read on it and share to it.
Overall the whole endeavor allows you to have your personal social network decentralized, ad- and spam-free since you select who you listen to.
The plugin is already well usable but it only progresses at side-project speed, so help is welcome (not only development work but also trying it out, posting about its features with screenshots/-casts, etc.)!
You can read more about some technical details at https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/03/decentralized-social-ne... and take a look at the presentation: https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/08/wordpress-meetup-presen...
EDIT: Specifing the claim
Plus asking for data about a long post without referencing which part you even want data on is unconstructive.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and how do you know to what standard the parent poster holds the author? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Plus asking for data about a long post without referencing which part you even want data on is unconstructive.
There was one claim made in the five sentence GP post.
> Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have.
I thinks this is mostly a valid argument. The burden of proof for whether the problem exists is on the person proposing the solution; Solutions require action, and the side that requires action needs proof.
I do think the claim that “most people use facebook like an rss feed” needs some data to back it up though. I personally use it that way, but that is andecdotal and I also have many friends who use facebook to promote their life, which is more along the lines of a personal website.
EDIT: Spelling
Me, I personally treat it like a blog in the sense that I'm there to either "like" it, go past it, or go to the comments section.
Regardless, reproducing Facebook via personal websites would be daunting if not impossible. One, not everyone is going to feel comfortable doing HTML/CSS/JS or even working in a CMS w/ drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG. Two, if I know your name (and if it isn't unique enough, we either share connections or I know some other details about you you've posted), I can search for you on Facebook. How easily can that be created with personal websites when you're also searching against the broader web (good luck searching for your friend Mercedes's personal site. Have a friend named Mike Rowe and you guys joke about how his name is like that one guy with the tv show? Best of luck finding his site too).
And we can argue "but the user can take back control of their data" which on face value is true, the problem is that I think for a lot of people I know on Facebook, they don't care. At least the convenience outweighs the concerns. And that's fine, that's their right. They weighed the pros/cons and found Facebook to have agreeable compromises. As do businesses that sell on Amazon I'm sure.
I do want a solution that gets away from Facebook. The problem is it needs to be something that is easy enough for a non-tech user to manage and consume. If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche.
Maybe where you would sign into your own site and it would have polled posts from all the sites you follow (probably with rss) into a single feed. Your site IP is your identity, so commenting etc would be done as your site e.g., `MentallyRetired.com says: Hey these are cool!`
I dont know, just shooting from the hip, but it seems a lot of these technologies are possible. I remember signing into places with my website.
But it needs to be EASY. As easy as Facebook. And backwards compatible to avoid breakage.
And HN user "jsgo" wrote...
>If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche...
These are the sorts of common sense observations missing from so many "let's replace Facebook/Twitter/Whatever" debates. If we're serious about replacing FB/Snapchat/Twitter/Whatever then we need to consider realistic alternatives. Using the Mastodon-like distributed media and personal website ideas to get rid of Facebook/Twitter is like using the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front to get rid of the Romans. You just have to ignore a lot of reality to assume it would ever work.
We would need some sort of aggregator. Currently, you could call Facebook an aggregator of personal websites. Of course all of the personal websites are also hosted there, but it technically is an aggregator of those webpages. Let's not forget most of the people that I am friends with on Facebook would never be able to create their own personal website without a lot of help which is what makes something like Facebook so convenient and popular.
It could be a protocol, independent of the browser. But the browser could support it inline, so you could just click a button to follow a content stream. It shouldn't be complex, it should be simple. Really simple. Syndication.
It's funny when people paint such wide strokes for 2 billion people. I would assume people use Facebook for literally hundreds if not thousands(if you can imagine) of use cases.
Probably one of the most complex consumer products ever made from that perspective. I don't think it's useful to reduce Facebook to something as simple as "most people do X on Facebook".
For instance, Facebook in India has nearly 300 million users. They all use Facebook the same way as the 215 million in the United States?
The only people that know how Facebook is used by people is Facebook.
search engines solve that somewhat ... but you could have a directory that points to the correct address (a bit like a web directory or a phone book)... maybe the government could even host that...
But that's the point, isn't it? Personal websites isn't what will "solve the customer's problem", persé, but it is what will allow Facebook to no longer be irreplaceable, which is the real reason why people stay on the platform. The question isn't whether personal websites can replace Facebook, but whether personal websites will allow room for a real Facebook competitor (which improves the passive consumption experience) to grow.
Before the standard of "web development" became "learn the terminal, Git and some Linux, unit testing, install and learn Node, learn Docker or some other container, learn ssh, learn a framework and any of several languages that compile to javascript" it really was simple enough that plenty of "normal" people grasped it without any issue.
I can't complain about anyone else's lack of design skills... I once had all of the text on my website bright red Nosferatu on a black background in tables with 3d bevels and a background I swiped from a surreal art site.
But there's no reason some modern, stripped down and ultra-minimalist version of a self-hosted site service couldn't borrow from Facebook's UI design (which, all else considered about the service, obviously works for the general public) and have publishing a "page" be as simple as publishing to their Facebook feed, complete with some non-editable css.
But then that gives you none of the benefits (in my mind) to having your own site (complete control over code and content) as well as none of the benefits of Facebook (integration with your social graph and discoverability) and keeps all of the downsides of a third party host.
I think the other user was right who commented that most Facebook users are content consumers, versus content creators. That is, they browse much more than they post.
No, you're making a common mistake of looking at the surface level of what Facebook shows to users (the so-called "webpage"). Therefore, the seemingly "obvious" solution to beat Facebook is -- Everybody Has Personal Websites.
Since I've seen many smart techies and programmers (e.g. the author of the article we're discussing) make that same claim, I think Mark Zuckerberg has (inadvertently) pulled off the most stunning "Keyser Söze"[0] type of misdirection about the real competitive advantage of Facebook. Programmers are mislead into looking at one thing (e.g. "personal websites") when they really should be looking at something else: The Real Names Lookup Database.
The Real Names Lookup Database is what makes the other features such as "point-to-point messaging", "chat", "calendar events", and finally "personal blog platform" aka "personal websites" -- all work so well with minimum friction.
To put it in more computer science syntax, Facebook has the following SQL table (approximate pseudocode) that's very valuable:
Facebook has accumulated approximately ~2 billion rows in that table with those special primary keys. The end users of Facebook also find that table very useful. (My previous comment about this.[1]) Do not get distracted by things like "personal webpages". It's that special SQL table that makes Facebook hard to replace.To continue the Facebook analysis via psuedo SQL, when a user wants to see something relevant from somebody she knows, it's:
Getting relevant calender events & invites is the same idea: Here's where some observers get sidetracked: Even though the SQL columns "post" and "event_invites" are eventually rendered in HTML, this does not mean that "personal websites of html" is the solution to supplant Facebook. The real issue to analyze is the SQL WHERE clause. Making that WHERE clause work for real names is not trivial to build.Another company that has a similar real_ids database is LinkedIn. But because they cater to professionals, they have mostly white-collar workers looking for jobs; they're missing blue-collar plumbers, or grandparents that are retired, etc. In any case, the same "flawed solution" can be misapplied here: "The solution to replace LinkedIn is to make it easy for people to make personal websites of their résumé and job history."
If you still have doubts whether Facebook's special sauce is the real_names database or if it's the "ease of personal websites", consider what Mark Zuckerberg chooses to spend billions on: Instagram ($1 billion), WhatsApp ($19 billion), and attempt to acquire Snapchat ($3 billion).
Notice that MZ does not bother with acquiring "easy-to-use website builders" such as Wix[2], or Squarespace[3].
What does Instagram/WhatsApp/Snapchat have in common that Wix/Squarespace does not? Those competitors' smartphone apps have a database of real_phone_numbers of their users!
On a related note, thinking that a protocol like ActivityPub can replace Facebook is also misguided analysis. ActivityPub is not a "real names lookup database" so it can't replace the actual thing that makes Facebook useful. Instead of focusing on protocols, think of how to make an alternative database of real_names-lookup that is...
Similarly, the history of the White Pages and the Yellow Pages is a fascinating read and took decades for those books to be accepted. (Nowhere near as fast as they declined in the internet age.)
Back in the old days I was on IRC. I loved IRC. It was anonymous and everyone could have their own server and you could have individual chat and direct file share instead of broadcasting to everyone. But it's not asynchronous. I would do this thing where I would send my IP and a passcode to my IRC friends and with the IP and credentials they would have access to a specific folder on my home server. I put occasionally a diary or some photos on there and they could leave me messages. (OK it was a very crude solution. I was very young.) I liked it because it did not commit me to having the stuff up all the time but at the same time it wasn't gone forever if I didn't get to it right then.
I realize I am something of an anti-market and nobody would find my dream social network viable. Maybe I should make one for myself. I only have a dozen people I talk to really so there's no "all my friends are here" effect to consider for me.
Is it though? People I know refer to their pages with short urls and nicknames all the time because nobody wants to scroll through bazillion of John Doe profiles in Facebook search.
Very true and Twitter is better for this in general. I keep a Twitter feed running at all times on 2nd monitor.
For many it's become more of an address book
It’s part domain registration, web builder (simple website with fees you add content to via text message), part automated dns records, part social media/search engine.
So imagine these personal websites are all connected, one website can follow another, that’s it. You own the content, traffic, ad revenue. You could search content across these distributed websites with the tomorrowbook search engine, you could use tomorrowbook to register a domain (built in dns/website for the nontechnical) or use your own registrar and embed the tomorrowbook feed into your site.
Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11473190
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
But yes that seems to allow websites to link to one another.
Is that true? I would have thought it's mostly used for chatting with people they know, or commenting on things people have shared. But I'm just guessing.
Things to get started with:
- https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages
- http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well
- https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m
- https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near one-click wordpress for near 5$
- https://yunohost.org/ - easy self-hosting, even on top of a raspberry
- https://indieweb.org/WordPress - make your site communicate with other sites
- https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ - decentralized, sneakernet friendly, private social system
- https://gohugo.io/ Static site generator written with Go-lang - https://jekyllrb.com/ static site generator written with Ruby
I don't think anyone who taken web development a bit seriously have any problem to publish something online independently.
And that's what I always think about these conversations... What separates hassle-free push button website creation and publishing from MySpace/Facebook?
One can get Microsoft Office or LibreOffice and export to HTML.
Or write a text file and upload it with SFTP.
On the other hand, HTML is really not that hard, and a bit of sweat put into your creation is not bad either in my personal opinion: https://petermolnar.net/internet-emotional-core/
You can see some of the sites created with it here: http://showcase.onuniverse.com
Here's more about us: http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-design-doe...
You basically made a CMS and web designer app for the web on mobile, which is 90% with the users, this is a wonderful concept.
Is this the new Tumblr? :)
We are open to opensourcing Circles. What if anyone could start their own Facebook-equivalent site using opensource? What if we could splinter FB into 10,000 sites?
- Decentralized YouTube (1M+ monthly visitors) https://d.tube/
- P2P Reddit (260K+ monthly visitors) https://notabug.io/
Both built with GUN :)
- https://www.codecademy.com/learn/make-a-website
- host for free on netlify
- maybe simple intro to git to make updating and deploying to netlify easier
anyone can learn basic html / css (in 6th grade we did a week long "build a website" project and everyone did it -- this was back in the late 90s), and with frameworks like bootstrap anyone can make an attractive looking site.
with just basic html / css knowledge and netlify, you can:
- self-host and write a blog
- post photo albums
- share videos and audio (link to youtube)
- share status updates
- create an online course
- create a curated list of interesting articles, photos, recipes, food (a la pinterest)
- conduct surveys (link to google forms or other free survey tools)
- create a mailing list / online following (link to google forms or use mailchimp)
- get creative and personalize your site's appearance
- create links to your friends sites
- publish short stories or even e-books
- communicate with people via email (just create an email address for your site and publish it). posting publicly doesnt have to be the normal way to socialize online
- and probably much more
the only downside is if you don't want everything to be public you'd need a simple backend / auth framework, and youd have to host on heroku or something (idk if netlify only does static sites?)
and if you can do this stuff, and find html / css interesting, it isn't that hard to learn enough python or js to build stuff like forms, comments, like buttons, RSS feeds, or simple CRUD apps
the open source software and free-tier saas products we have today make so much of this so easy
I think it will eventually happen, but I don't see how mass adoption will occur. Facebook grew a lot by getting our complete address book on signup and sending invitations to the whole list.
Contrast this with maintaining a personal website. Even in a world where FB doesn't exist, it's still a chore to get people to memorize yet another URL and regularly visit it, especially if it isn't updated on a consistent schedule (which most personal websites aren't.) Furthermore, given that the author seems to be advocating for self-sufficiency as much as possible and avoiding centralized platforms, assuming you're hosting your own website and not using a cookie cutter template, you're now fighting Google for search engine visibility and that's a battle that is absolutely not based on merit of content.
This is not to mention the unpleasantness of using most personal websites because they're poorly designed (light text on a white background), or they try and guilt-trip me into supporting them with Patreon/Paypal popups, or the only consistent content produced is content promising to produce more content in the future, etc.
I'm probably reading too much into the author's article, to be honest. It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but at the same time the thing I don't understand about the recent trend of publishing articles on mainstream news sites preaching the life benefits of going cold turkey on social media is that it isn't a binary choice. I know it's a novel idea, but you don't have to quit FB to pick up that hobby you once loved again! You don't have to quit FB to maintain your personal website! In fact, you can probably use FB and your audience on it to grow your readership on your personal website! Even if you accept the author's argument that personal websites fulfill the purpose that FB does (strongly disagree), they give no reason why you have to pick one over the other.
¿Porque no los dos
That was Facebook's original raison d'etre (and the source of its name).
I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a developer"-hard either.
Tangent:
I've now talked four friends who wanted to start blogging out of spending money on AWS instances and VPS providers because they were convinced this was the path they absolutely had to take just to start writing things using WordPress. These are not technical people.
Which makes me wonder where that impression is coming from. Surely it couldn't have been Wordpress.com because the site goes out of their way to show how easy it is to sign up and start blogging on their platform, but I've long wondered why they were all so eager to avoid taking the simplest path to their goals since none of them were above spending money to realize their goals of having a blog.
Awhile ago I was digging through Pinterest on topics related to blogging, finance, online business, etc.
A lot of these pins target millennials and moms (wow, especially moms).
The point of most of these sites is affiliate marketing; they've got deals with hostgator, bluehost, godaddy, whatever, and get kickbacks when users sign up.
So all these pinboardss about blogs about blogging advocate for the VPS route because it's how they make cash.
Self hosting is a pain. Let's not kid ourselves. It seems easy initially, but over the years, you really feel like it's better just to pay someone to manage it all for you.
There's quite a bit of talk about Mastodon lately, but not about Diaspora...
Hence it will never be popular. Sorry, that's just how it works. If you want non-technical people on the platform (i.e. the general public) it needs to just work right away.
1. Google creates the first noteworthy current gen search engine.
2. The web slowly starts moving towards a semantic platform with separate presentation.
3. Google creates the world's largest ad platform.
4. The semantic web inexplicably dies (see 3).
5. The web painfully and lossily becomes a series of dense monolithic networks.
6. People realize this might be a bad thing.
6. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users are fine with it.
Good or bad, monolithic networks save a lot of ordinary users the pain of having to learn. The reason they might not want to learn varies greatly, but I'll go out on a limb and say it's related to a lack of time and basic backgrounding, in equal measure.
It's not always only about the technically qualified.
Right. Tell that to the people that slowly come to the realization that their politic decisions and destiny have been heavily influenced through tools that built on and benefited from this very centralization.
They are (and will be) very fine with it.
"Inexplicably" except for the fact that it doesn't actually work - outside purely charitable and socially-oriented efforts (e.g. Wikidata), there's no incentive for web sites to provide machine-readable, "semantic" information, and quite a bit of incentive not to. And Google didn't "create" the world's largest ad platform, either - they bought it (DoubleClick) and merged it with their technically-superior advertising offer.
The free tier would be as it is now.
(Email has the added advantage of being a public standard that anyone can implement - free or charged. Social media has no such universally accepted standard.)
Yes, I agree we should move away from Facebook, but the answer has to be a better culture. So far from my prowling of alternatives, my only conclusion is that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution because that's exactly what Facebook is trying to do by catering to lowest-common-denominator of culture in the most powerful (psychologically) way: allowing content that gets the most clicks. It's tautological. What we need isn't to break up Facebook or wait for a disruptive alternative, what we need is a better sense of the internet as groups of communities, of which you should be a member of several.
Check it out: https://micro.blog/
We need to just accept the new world and keep innovating inside it, there isn't going back to how it was.
And stop this nonsense about privacy, either pass a big federal law or accept that your info is how free sites are funded :).
There is some messaging built into the "new social" that wasn't as available back then (we didn't all have smart phones, and internet was charged by the hour.). There wasn't as much content either which did make it slightly more manageable to surf through the pages you wanted.
polite and interesting exchange though.
There is no real way to automate domain procurement.
Most people don't leave a PC they own all the time to run a website.
So you end up hosting it. But now its centralizing again. If everyone were hosting their own mastodon instances on the same cloud provider thats barely any different from that cloud provider being a Facebook with all the data access they have. Even with a federated site like that few simply have a computer to leave on all the time to have their own site, let alone asking your average person to setup dynamic dns records if they did.
The fundamental name system of the Internet is too manual to enable average people to have personal sites. And any solution involves centralization which defeats the exercise.
I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.
Said as a true developer who no longer realizes how hard some of the things we do are to the average person who can barely operate their computer or smart phone.
Think of all the things you have to learn in order to host your own site. I still have to explain the basics of what a domain name is to potential freelance customers, and why they need hosting in order to have a website online. This is knowledge that is not common outside of the developer ecosystem.
Your IM client is already doing that.
The internet is built for that sort of specialization anyway - it isn't a pure broadcast medium in the first place so accept that it isn't all conglomerates - if you don't want it for profit in the first place you don't need the crowds.
I can see potentially setting up a good 'seed kit' to distribute but generally they've had the trap of being too technically sophisticated for the lowest level and too simple for those with more expertise.
It is probably more hard on a social level than a technical level given things like UX consistency. Not to mention the infamous 'classic angelfire 90s website' tackiness that nobody tends to want to visit anyway.
> Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue
The idea is still valid IMO. I don't care about "the world", that's just a word; the internet worked fine when there wasn't even 100 million people using it, so a better web doesn't have to be used by everybody, either.
As a web developer, I see the value in owning your web space, but it's a very hard sell for others due to the extra work involved.
I actually think there's an opportunity for the "website builders" namely WordPress, to create "consumer" app(s) that pull in feeds from WordPress powered blogs (with RSS) This consumer / consumption app would compete with Facebook/Twitter directly.
WordPress powers a significant % of the web and combined with the market share of some of the other large providers like Wix & Squarespace I think they could mount a legitimate challenge to FB/TW
1. login with Facebook (no signup needed)
2. share articles & post comments on Facebook
3. model the app after Facebook to hijack existing neural pathways
I'm not sure how they should handle authentication, or if it's even needed at all. Kids don't use email, and in order to differentiate from FB/TW, the less info you ask for on signup the better.
They don’t promote it. But it’s there.
I think obviously, they'd need a standalone or new app that puts the focus on this feature. Split the site management app out or re-engineer to compliment the user consumption app.
Provide me with the tools to create a cheap, mobile friendly, HTTPS website and I'm in.
2) Create a new HTML file
3) Hit ! and press tab
4) Type in some well thought out content :)
5) Sign up for Netlify and drag&drop your file.
6) Set up that domain
On the serious side, look up static site generators. Netlify covers all the complexity for you.