Replacing functionality is the easy part. How do you replace volume of people using the system? Scandal or not - Facebook is still where "everyone is". And until "everyone" are not there, there is no "replacing" Facebook - just replacing some functional aspects of it. I use Facebook for one main purpose - to keep in touch with people around the world whom I know from different periods of my life. Unless all of them pack up and move to an alternative, leaving Facebook means leaving them.
Another _problem_ with these suggestions is that they suggest +5 services to replace one. It's difficult enough to have a coordinated migration to a single new service. This just compounds the problem.
To have a good chance at becoming a viable replacement, all of this functionality would have to be replicated in a single service. Taking on a multi-billion dollar company's cash cow product head-on is quite a difficult task.
> Replacing functionality is the easy part. How do you replace volume of people using the system? Scandal or not - Facebook is still where "everyone is".
I actually do know people who strongly prefer their friends not to have a Facebook account. So this is a feature and not a bug, since it is a strong opportunity to sort out to whom of the Facebook "friends" one really wants to stay in contact with.
Or to give another argument why this is a feature and not a bug: About everybody who has used Facebook for a long time also has collected "friends" that one would love to drop from the friends list, but has not done for politeness. This is finally an opportunity to get rid of them in a much more socially accepted way.
> come on you're a tiny minority, most people's friends are on Facebook
My impression is that this strongly depends on the social circle the respective person is.
You first have to keep in mind that in Germany many people indeed use Facebook, but it is not not that deeply integrated into the life as it is my impression that it is the case in the US. Also in Germany it is often the case (at least in my impression) that people that come to some gathering explicitly say that don't desire that anybody puts some photors that were made of them on Facebebook.
In this case: if I were living in the USA, I probably were in a tiny minority. I am also probably a minority in Germany, too, but it is not my impression that this minority is tiny.
> that don't desire that anybody puts some photors that were made of them on Facebebook.
Can confirm, coming from festivals I'm not allowed to upload some pictures to FB and have to send them via email to a bunch of different people who'd still like them.
are you doing anything to get them off Facebook? recommending alternatives at al? I gave up fb long time ago, suggested telegram to all my friends and have looked back...
No I'm not. I don't have spare time to go on campaigns like that nor am I interested. Pretty much all my friends on Facebook are there for a reason. I don't have any "cull" moments. There is no service currently that offers all that Facebook does AND has all those friends on it. When that is available, I'll reconsider. Until then, I am, and always has been aware to what data facebook has and how they use it. I'm on the net since the early 90s. The second most important lesson I learned from the internet is "What you do not want them to know, don't put online". Once anything is online, it's potentially public.
I can do just fine without "news" from newsfeed. Their alternatives don't let me see pictures of, for example, my sister and brother's families. Random thoughts of people And so on. I'm sure my family would occasionally send me pictures, but it is hard to inconvenience everyone else. Not only that, but it would be more inconvenient for me. The main reason I joined facebook was because it was a simple way to keep in touch when moving overseas, after all. I can give updates and pictures without sending to so many people.
Groups are a weird thing. I find things like Reddit to be a different sort of feel.
Lastly: I think for a lot of people, alternatives need to be able to communicate with facebook and have be compatible in some ways. Right now, facebook is more akin to a phone company that only lets folks speak with others in the same network. If they would allow "friends" outside the network, allow public posts to be viewed by anyone, messenger coordinates with other messenger services, there would be more chance for folks to actually switch. In addition, more folks would switch to other services if there were an easy way for people to port some things to a new service: Profile information, pictures, and so on.
Marketplace misses the point as well. I occasionally sell artwork, for example. I don't advertise or self promote much, but do keep up an art page. The sales I get are generally from facebook. There are a few social networks dedicated to artwork, but it definitely isn't the same.
Someone else commented that facebook is great for finding events - I, too, use this.
Sometimes the biggest problem with replacing messenger is that others still use messenger. My experience from pre-facebook times is that no, most people don't change for you. They simply talk to you less. Not having messenger on my phone (desktop only) causes some issues here and there as it is.
> Right now, facebook is more akin to a phone company that only lets folks speak with others in the same network. If they would allow "friends" outside the network, allow public posts to be viewed by anyone, messenger coordinates with other messenger services, there would be more chance for folks to actually switch. In addition, more folks would switch to other services if there were an easy way for people to port some things to a new service: Profile information, pictures, and so on.
I wonder if there is already legislation for this situation.
You're right! They did miss the larger point about centralization.
With that said, is it perhaps possible that they're writing for a more general audience that isn't particularly interested in the overhead that comes with administration and decentralized platforms? People want one, simple, clear, drop-in replacement for a given use. They want it to be one that's as easy to use as possible and trivially easy to get their friends to use.
Most of all, people want to use something their friends are already using. Isolated, un-federated systems that require some level of technical skill (i.e., my late-90s grandma can't figure out in two minutes) to use are a hard sell.
Of the above, only Nextcloud generally needs some sort of hosting (which is reasonable given what it does), but there are plenty of low overhead options. It's not expected that normal people host their own Diaspora or Mastodon instances, there are plenty of open instances for people to choose from.
I wish there was GNUbook or something that is run by a non-profit organization like Wikipedia that provides a service that serves as a social ID(think like a portable phone number), and then let people use whichever "messaging service" they like by bringing their ID with them. This way the messaging services become replaceable and users a avoid the network lock-in.
So [matrix] seems to fit the bill: federated network, bridges to other services (like IRC), encryption, you can write your own client or run your own server...
Also hubzilla (nee red/matrix, unlrelated to matrix; descending from friendica which DID federate with Facebook and Twitter for a while, until FB & T closed off the federation API bridges)
I wish there was one good messenger. Signal can't be it, because not federated, uses phone number. Riot can't be it because network effects. Google and facebook are abominable. WhatsApp and telegram are worse versions of signal. Who will save us from this efficient market competition?
(a previous version of this comment incorrectly claimed signal was closed-source)
This isn't a reasonable rejection of Matrix / Riot. Every time you want to move a lot of people, you need to have network effects in order to make it work.
I believe that Matrix / Riot are going to be the best way going forward if you want something that is accessible, is actually privacy preserving in many ways, and doesn't require lock-in. Same goes for ActivityPub / Mastodon, which has a real possibility to replace ordinary social media with a federated system that is privacy-preserving in similar ways (with the note that we need to have some large instances people can use -- similar to how many people use the main Matrix instance).
I agree with you completely. As I mentioned in a cousin-comment, I think Riot is probably missing non-technical aspects that it takes to go mainstream. I'd love to be shown otherwise though.
I'm sure someone years ago said the same of facebook back when friendster was on the decline (not assuming Fb is on decline here, just sayin'). But have you really used or even seriously considered riot/matrix? There are so many vibrant communities! Do you feel that such communities are not worth your time unless they are visited by at least millions of users? Not trying to be facetious, merely a rhetorical question. I suggest you try other things, yes riot/matrix, but also other platforms...who knows, perhaps you will find satisfaction in smaller communities...then you tell YOUR friends, and then they gravitate to those other platforms, and boom you have your network effect - at least to your satisfaction. Again, not trying to be facetious...just trying to nudge you to push beyond the "normal", and hopefully find a good, satisfying alternative to the proprietary silos (like facebook, twitter, etc.).
I think this is for the best. This means you can seamlessly add contacts you already have on your phonebook to Signal. No need for emails or separate user accounts. If you're worried about this, you can buy a prepaid SIM card for pennies, or use an online service. It's not an issue.
The matter of federation is by no means settled. Many experts do not agree with Signal's conclusions and suspect ulterior motives, myself included.
It is open source, though, but Moxie has definitely made decisions that are harmful to open source. Again, ulterior motives may be at play.
I feel that it's unlikely that ulterior motives are in place, given that Signal's core user base consists of privacy conscious folks, thereby preventing an easy pivot towards a closed ecosystem once critical mass is reached. It's likely that if this were attempted, someone would just fork Signal, with support for some kind of decentralization, and split the user base in two.
However moxie seems to have an outdated form of federation in mind when he gives examples of IRC and email. While it is true that these technologies have been quite rigid, there are other examples of distributed technologies that are quite flexible in implementation. Bitcoin and Mastodon are examples where changes and updates are pushed through regularly.
The determining factor seems to be the amount of control the principal developer holds over the ecosystem. Mastodon instances basically all run the same code, and (mostly) everyone is happy with the direction they are going. Thus, Eugen pushes a new release, everyone runs it, and protocol changes can propagate throughout the network. Old nodes get left behind. However, say Eugen (or Signal) massively screws up, and they get forked. Now, any protocol changes must be adopted by both camps (who by definition have differing philosophies) to be fully applied.
It's already a closed ecosystem. The software is open, not the ecosystem. Moxie toes the line so that Signal's strengths always outweigh its faults for most people, which prevents an alternative from reaching a critical mass. By not federating he locks users into his ecosystem - a fringe group of upset users can't draw the rest of the users out if they have an incompatible platform. I think he's a smart guy who knows exactly what he's doing, but he puts on a nice face for PR because he can't exactly come out and admit his design choices are self-serving.
Also, Mastodon is built on open standards that have several competing and compatible implementations (GNUSocial and Pleorma are the main two), which are run by their own maintainers.
Moxie toes the line so that Signal's strengths always outweigh its faults for most people, which prevents an alternative from reaching a critical mass.
Signal is released under the GPL, meaning that if something did happen to shake user faith (data breach, data mining) a fork pointing at different servers could be instantly created with complete feature parity.
Every traditional barrier to user migration is removed. Features are the same. UX is the same. Compatibility is the same.
That's a precarious line to toe.
Also, Mastodon is built on open standards that have several competing and compatible implementations (GNUSocial and Pleorma are the main two), which are run by their own maintainers.
Yes, Mastodon is inter-operable with OStatus and ActivityPub. However I do not know of any significant user base that interacts with Mastodon through an alternative platform. Given the will, Mastodon could implement its own extensions to ActivityPub and break compatibility, with most users unaffected due to the strength behind the core development team.
>a fork pointing at different servers could be instantly created with complete feature parity.
But not federation. No one can talk to people on other servers. Such forks already exist, none of them are successful.
>Yes, Mastodon is inter-operable with OStatus and ActivityPub. However I do not know of any significant user base that interacts with Mastodon through an alternative platform.
I know of many people on both of the platforms I mentioned. Collaboration between all of these platforms is frequent and they drive improvements in each other.
>But not federation. No one can talk to people on other servers. Such forks already exist, none of them are successful.
They are not successful because Signal has not yet done anything particularly egregious. If they do, I believe that a fork would quickly gain popularity.
>I know of many people on both of the platforms I mentioned. Collaboration between all of these platforms is frequent and they drive improvements in each other.
We've both given anecdotes; user counts would be more conclusive. I've found +1 million [0] for Mastodon. Do you know how many users GNU Social and Pleroma have? I can't find these numbers from a quick Google search, but they might be somewhere.
>They are not successful because Signal has not yet done anything particularly egregious
Like I said: Moxie toes the line. He doesn't cross it. Well, everyone has a different line. He's crossed mine but not the lines the average user sets.
>We've both given anecdotes; user counts would be more conclusive. I've found +1 million [0] for Mastodon.
I question the methodology behind this figure. The nature of the decentralized network makes it difficult to get good estimates. All I have are anecdotes. Yes, the overwhelming majority of users are on Mastodon. However, I personally interact with several users on several different Pleroma instances and a couple on GNUSocial instances, and I did not seek them out for this purpose.
>I question the methodology behind this figure. The nature of the decentralized network makes it difficult to get good estimates. All I have are anecdotes. Yes, the overwhelming majority of users are on Mastodon. However, I personally interact with several users on several different Pleroma instances and a couple on GNUSocial instances, and I did not seek them out for this purpose.
However they are the exception. Because the overwhelming majority of users are on Mastodon, the Mastodon developers have the power to modify protocol implementations. If it was closer to an even split, any breaking changes would fracture the community, while in this case some smaller groups may be lost.
Come on. You can say the same thing about Chrome's effect on web standards. In reality that's not how it works, and the situation is far better than Signal.
Gmail is using their influence to modify email standards[0]. This is exactly how it works in reality. If a certain service provider holds most of the user base, they can implement breaking changes without fracturing the community. In some cases it's a net positive, helping protocols evolve, and in some cases it's a net negative.
> If you're worried about this, you can buy a prepaid SIM card for pennies, or use an online service.
In many countries you cannot buy a prepaid SIM card without showing identification. The seller must take a photocopy of your identification or enter your details into a government website. Consequently, any global network based on telephone numbers will force usage of real names just as much as privacy-violating commercial services.
You seem to be listing different criteria for each of the reasons you dismiss the various alternatives -- the reason against Riot / Matrix is not at all like the other (reasons), and is a bit self-defeating.
Just having a GitHub doesn't make you open-source. All the same it looks like I was wrong, and they are open now. They previously required clsed-source components for voice and video afaik.
I thought signal was open source?
"Signal is developed by a software group called Open Whisper Systems.[123] The group is funded by a combination of donations and grants,[124] and all of its products are published as free and open-source software." -wiki
A service requiring a telephone number for registration verification cannot deliver on security. Spoofing 2FA is a thing. Trawling contact lists creates implication where a bad agent is one.
This is how it seems, I may be wrong.
Anonymous unfederated secure communication via email or other methods... PGP/GPG remains unfriendly.
The core of all of these recommendations is that you need an identity online. It almost seems like if you solve the identity problem (like how various blockchains deal with it with addresses and wallets) you can get all the rest as easy follow ons.
Mastodon still ties identity with a machine online much like email. Even SSB ties identity to your machine. Even what Sir T.B.L. is proposing - a "data pod" per person - seems to tie identity with a machine online.
They missed the point with the Events alternatives.
The problem isn't creating/inviting; you can do that with email. Facebook is great at finding events, and there aren't any competitors that have anything close to their reach.
Why nobody mentions the social connection functionality? To stay connected with my extended family, to be able to see their wedding pics and share my kids pics, there is no alternative to Facebook. I can not ask my elderly mom to start using something else on her precious ipad.
And RSS feeds. I have a list of people who's opinion I trust after 10+ years of reading everything they write. I value their opinion on politics and economics rather than my aunt or some co-worker from two jobs ago.
The problem with blogging in 2018 is that it can be difficult to actually draw readers to your blog unless you retain your Facebook and other social media accounts so that you can advertise your content there. The sheer amount of content out there means that even with SEO tweaks people might not find you through Google, you are simply lost in the noise. Even if people find you once through a search engine, the decline of RSS means that they are unlikely to subscribe to you and see what you write in future.
I blog myself on a niche-interest topic, and I pride myself in writing substantial, specific and useful information. Unfortunately, my blog doesn’t get read by many people. And then you see lots of successful content farms out there, whose posts are actually devoid of content, but their empty posts are just packaged neatly to serve as clickbait and get advertising revenue. It is awfully dispiriting.
Remember that handful of friends who weren't on FB and so you hassled us to join for a while and then kind of lost touch? Many of us still have the same phone numbers.
Seems like a key missing piece is the "staying in touch with people" part. That's by far the biggest feature for me, once I've added someone on facebook, I know I can message/call them forever. No lost phone numbers/email addresses.
If there was a network that automatically updated my contact for a person when they changed their phone number, I'd no longer have an excuse to stay on facebook at all.
Facebook (and most social media) have a fatal flaw - they have not built products that people are willing to pay for. So they grow to the point where they need resources to keep running, and have to monetize in unfriendly ways. Open source or not, to successfully scale, there must be a funding model that isn't evil. Whether that is fees, donations, or something else... it has to be there.
I do agree that now is a good time to start something. I've got my design put together to stay simple, lean, and keeps costs down while still handling the basic needs people go to social media for. I'm sure most of us could whip out their own flavors of that. And many of us could code it, too. Which is the reason that I am hesitant to start building -- too many competing projects will steal each other's thunder.
Diaspora was meant to be it - launched in 2010 it had one million users by 2014 (according to the wikipedia page). I can't find numbers for current active user counts, but it didn't win much mindshare, by any measure.
FreedomBox was being pushed heavily by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee (I saw them doing a FOSDEM presentation on this back in 2011) but it was more about the hardware platform (to support a free software social network suite) but it's also not really very popular, unfortunately.
Mastodon, as freehunter notes, is well known, but only in niche circles - and seems to be positioning itself as a twitter-alike only.
Searches for 'free software social network' will return a huge list of projects, but even for the most popular <sic>, federated, relatively painless to setup & maintain (or with paid hosted options available) systems ... the network effect combined with most people's inertia / apathy / ignorance means we're not going to be ridding the world of FB any time soon.
But there are alternatives, and they're thriving...alternatives include the very popular mastodon of course, but also gnu social, hubzilla, friendica, movim, pleroma, postactiv, etc. Mastodon alone has about 800,000 users across all of the servers, and the other platforms have many user communities as well.
The approach is usually a federated system using an open-source platform. Less people using these services, however, in general the content quality is way higher and less political.
I dream of an open source linkedin. A system where recruiters can reach you only if they provide the info you specify, thereby reducing information asymmetry.
Recruiter wants to reach job-hunters with vague info: can reach 1000 dev;
Recruiter wants to reach job-hunters with salary info: can reach 2000 dev
... more information more reach
Actually, Mastodon can be set up on your own hardware, with only people you know IRL and be exactly a feed from your friends. You can disable the federation if you want as well.
If one wants to start a new social network, open source or not, or any other product dependent on network effects, they have to market it appropriately. You have to segment the market, and work your way out. The open competitors up until now haven't realized that.
The most insidious aspect of FB is their inference engine capability - that they can inherently track aspect of the activity of non FB users based on their relationships proximity and activity with those who do have FB accounts.
Even if you choose to actively do no fb - they can still track you to a certain degree.
Most of that inference actually comes from the pervasive "like" buttons -- essentially all of the websites you use are happily and freely giving the information about you to facebook - who gladly correlate it across sites and with your shadow profiles.
Your friends who uploaded their addressbooks and phonebooks to Facebook and WhatsApp are obviously helping to associate that data with a real identity, and by tagging you in pictures make it even more complete.
But the vast majority of info Facebook has on you that YOU did not provide directly actually comes from the embedded Facebook bugs ("like buttons") all over the internet. And it's not surprising that the media doesn't mention it -- they rely on those bugs to get traffic, so they can't complain about it without taking it off, and they can't take it off without losing traffic.
I’ve created a simple app for myself that lets me keep track of all my conversations, and it encourages me to keep in touch with all my friends, family, (ex)colleagues.
If you like friendly contact reminders or like to recall what you talked about with friends whom you don’t meet every so often, give it a try. You can create your own timeline with conversations, photos, and other important things. As well as general background information. It can send you reminders to talk, and birthday reminders.
The data is in your control, stays on your phone, is not synced. An internet connection is not required.
> You can sync the app to other social networks you might use, like Twitter and LinkedIn
LinkedIn is in my experience is as bad as FB. I really can't take anyone seriously that is recommending syncing with it. It uploaded my friends contacts which I did not want.
I had a bunch of legacy contacts inside my hotmail account that I hadn't touched in years. Shortly after MS took over LinkedIn, it started bugging me to add them all to my LinkedIn network, by listing them all on a special LinkedIn page and automatically ticking the checkbox on each one. Took ages for the penny to drop, as to where these contacts were coming from!
Needless to say, my hotmail/outlook.com account now no longer has ANY contacts in it.
Maybe we'd all have been better off on Google Plus.
I avoid giving Google information about myself that it doesn't need, but I do trust them more than I trust Facebook. Although maybe that's naive of me.
> Maybe we'd all have been better off on Google Plus.
Haha, probably not. G+ enforced a "real names" policy, then tried to merge accounts across search, YouTube, etc. It's the same Panopticon, though slightly less amoral.
If we want to solve this, we need to make it easier for non-tech people to decentralize their data. Distributed communication was solved long ago: email (private 1-1), mailing lists (private many-many), weblogs (public 1-many), Usenet (public many-many). All of this can be self-hosted, or hosted on a shared server for a few $/mo, i.e. less than 10% of your phone bill.
Since that will never happen, the least-bad way to do this is to silo your online activity among separate entities and identities.
The younger generation is more IM focused than social network app focused. InstaGram / SnapChat / etc are going to do to Facebook what Reddit did to Digg.
News Feed -> Nuzzel, Digg, Apple News
Messenger -> Signal
Events -> Paperless Post, Doodle
Birthday Reminders -> Google Calendar, etc...
Marketplace -> Nextdoor
Groups -> GroupMe
3rd Party Logins -> 1Password, LastPass
2) What made Facebook interesting and addictive is the "variable reward" of small information snacks. The smaller the information snack is, the easier it is to produce (and consume). And the dumber society gets as a whole (Twitter)
I feel like now — after the recent furore — is a great time to be on Facebook. They know they’re under the microscope for privacy issues, and have the time and treasure to find real solutions. Also, naive as it might be, I think Zuck genuinely cares and wants to fix what he’s broken. I am less inclined to trust any other service to get both security and intentions right.
The media pile on against facebook is reaching absurd proportions. And it's getting harder to distinguish between news and advocacy or journalism and propaganda.
When a journalist is leading a #deletefacebook movement and when news is pushing alternative products over facebook does it cross a line from news/journalism/reporting to advocacy/advertisement/pay for play/etc?
I hope one day we get to the bottom of what this is really about. Because it isn't about privacy or data protection. And the scale and scope of the facebook campaign is rather unsettling also. Maybe real journalists are out there and hopefully we can get some answers.
