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The great thing is that we already have several worthwhile alternatives; open source, privacy-and-security-focused, often federated alternatives. Such as...

https://diasporafoundation.org... - Diaspora: Full featured, open source and federated. Not a bad transition for Facebook users
https://friendi.ca/ - Friendica - Evolving and interoperating with most other open social networks here, federated. Lots of plugins and even those to let it work with proprietary networks too
https://gnu.io/social/ - GNUSocial: : Microblogging alternative to Twitter. Federated, open source etc . Most of the "quitter" instances are based on GNUSocial.
https://joinmastodon.org/ - Mastodon : Another microblogging alternative to Twitter. Also interoperates with GNUSocial so those registered on one can follow/post on instances of the other. UI and implementation makes it really really easy to switch from Twitter.
http://retroshare.net/ - Retroshare is an open source, private, invite only social network. This is the kind of thing people can use to share pictures with their friends/family, make plans, and do "facebook stuff", without anyone else being able to spy on them

There are some other alternatives out there too (BuddyCloud, etc) but the above are some of the best.

You forgot to mention that you can even start YOUR OWN social network site with open platforms. Two years ago I setup a social network for the dearest Brazilian football team fans. We got to get 70,000 users [I'm not saying that bots weren't involved] on the first two days! We pulled the plug because of conservative members of the team's board. Not being technically savvy they did not believe it would be a success [in spite of all evidence to the contrary].

Captcha: member

There is no real technical hurdle that is keeping others from being a "real" competitor for Facebook. There have been those who have tried, but they just haven't been successful "enough". There are lots of alternate social networks out there, even other Facebook style proprietary ones - some are for general use and some are for one particular group of people or another. LinkedIn of course is supposed to be a "serious professional networking" social network, but we see how it becomes headhunters, ads, fakes, and other nonsense. Google Plus had a chance to dethrone Facebook but they made some foolish decisions at a crucial point in time etc.

Facebook exists where it does more or less for two reasons. Money, and "first-ish mover momentum". They have an obscene amount of money thanks to generally unscrupulous and monopolistic decisions (big data sales, advertising, etc) and because of that became one of the de-facto ways people communicate. Consider that not that long ago many businesses would have personal web pages and if you needed to sign up with them, you'd send your email. Now they all have Facebook pages and Twitter handles, and you need to use those media to be able to communicate with them with any degree of haste . Hell, I can remember about the time signing up for promotions even for video games and the like no longer took an email address (because that's too easy to make a throwaway) but instead required you to like/friend them on Facebook + Retweet/Friend them on Twitter etc. Then these companies install social media managers to deal with this presence! Thanks to Facebook (and to some extent, Twitter in a kind of duopoly) they have centralized lots of the communication on the Internet - a major problem. This brings me to the second, major reason that Facebook competitors have'nt been ultra successful - Inertia.

People stay and use Facebook (and Twitter, and Instagram/WhatsApp..owned by Facebook by the way) because their friends and relatives do. These sites have taken such deep root in our communication that to break away from them takes a sort of social escape velocity - you have to be the kind of person who 1) knows of other alternatives 2) has reason to use them 3) and is willing to switch, despite the fact that others might not. Facebook became the dominant major social network in succession to MySpace as it was dying off, which in turn arose when Friendster sort of prototyped the whole thing for the average person. Now its the place people go to make sure the know about all their friends and relatives....but they also stay to do things like play games, check out "apps" (including that cool personality test..), and read the news which they then not only absorb with little question to the source, but forward the message to everyone. Getting people to give up on the social network where their old friends, new friends, family members, those in their political "bubble" etc... exist, takes real momentum.

Hopefully this national spotlight on the problems of Facebook (and I hope, Twitter. Honestly, the President of the United States should not be making proclamations or communicating with the electorate primarily through a proprietary, centralized, corporate medium) will combine with a number of other sociological phenomena (such as Facebook perhaps finally not being "cool" with the younger crowd as their parents are on it, so they'll consider switching to the next thing etc) to power an exodus. The great thing is that we already have several worthwhile alternatives; open source, privacy-and-security-focused, often federated alternatives. Such as...

https://diasporafoundation.org... - Diaspora: Full featured, open source and federated. Not a bad transition for Facebook users
https://friendi.ca/ - Friendica - Evolving and interoperating with most other open social networks here, federated. Lots of plugins and even those to let it work with proprieta

https://diasporafoundation.org... diaspora* is based on three key philosophies: Decentralization Freedom Privacy

Why would anyone run one of your "standardized" social networks? Real companies run real social networks to mine data and sell advertising.
Protip: Diaspora already exists.

People don't want to have a say. People like being in a leash. That's why Facebook is a success and diaspora isn't.

What's the end-user alternative?

What we really need is to make a concerted effort towards replacing all these centralized web services with distributed equivalents:

• Google Search -> YaCy
• Gmail, Google Drive, etc. -> OwnCloud
• Google Maps -> OpenStreetMap
• Hangouts -> XMPP
• Youtube -> ???
• Facebook -> Diaspora
• Etc...

What we need is a concerted effort to develop Free Software distributed/federated/p2p alternatives to all the major centralized services. Not just social networks, but even things like search.

Let FB alone, and promote decentralized alternatives under user control, like diaspora*.

Too bad that the only option is Facebook.

Actually, that's not true. It's because of people like you that distributed/non-commercial social networks don't make much headway.

This is essentially what I was going to post. I set up a pod on a VM, and while I finally got it working (after assistance from one of the devs via IRC), if there's going to be real acceptance of Diaspora, it needs to deploy cleanly and automatically. This is not currently the case.

Another point that doesn't get enough attention is the lack of symmetrical bandwidth on consumer ISP links. This will limit both the utility and acceptance of any distributed app/protocol (social networking or otherwise). It's unlikely that will happen anytime soon, as that props up the status quo for the content arms of the big ISPs, so I think we're mostly SOL.

This is really a shame, as moving away from centralized models can allow greater flexibility and privacy. Others have mentioned privacy on this thread, but only in the context of which "friends" or others can see what and what sort of advertising is shown.

I'm a lot less concerned about which people I know can see photos of me smooching the giraffe at the zoo. I'm much more concerned that the folks who run these sites have access (and analyze such information ad infinitum, ad nauseam) to everything I might post, and even the sfuff I don't.

Who knows what folks would do with the opportunities provided by high-speed symmetric links?

You may not be aware of it, but you have technically strayed off-topic a bit. Or at least there is need for clarification. There are two quite different kinds of symmetry being discussed here. What the article was talking about was not symmetric bandwidth links (e.g. 10Mbs upstream and 10Mbs downstream), but rather the symmetry in being allowed to use your data transfer (upstream and downstream) to act as a webserver, instead of a webclient. If the FCC version of Net Neutrality was only updated to reflect the latter, then I believe the market would sort out the former. In all likelyhood it doesn't make sense to architect the last mile presuming symmetry which we know doesn't exist at this point in the evolution of the net. The key is to at least allow the current asymmetry to be fully utilized. I.e. allowing full non-discriminatory freedom for all end users to use their share of traffic resources in an application/service/device agnostic way. Myself, 15 years ago, had dreams of getting a full 1.5Mbs/up/down T1 and being able to host something like the 1999 version of slashdot. The fact that 15 years later, GoogleFiber allegedly offers 1Gbs up and down, yet terms of service forbids any commercial server hosting is the problem. It leads to a skewed supply/demand scenario where Google and the rest of the established players tilt the rules of the game in favor of the servers they operate.

While the FCC may be focusing elsewhere -- and on the wrong issues, IMHO, that doesn't mean I can't address the real issue and the real promise of the Internet. In my initial post on this thread I said:

It's like that because of the artificial restrictions placed on upload speeds by the DOCSIS and ADSL protocols. Which is just the big boys trying to protect their business model by keeping us from being creators and sharing on a peer-to-peer basis.

The "evolution" of the last mile is being hobbled (via technology and, yes, as you correctly point out, via abusive terms of service) by those who benefit from such hobbling.

I'm exceptionally lucky on the TOS side, as my ISP connection is server friendly and I even have multiple free static IPV4 addresses. Now, if only I could get decent upload speeds....What's more, my ISP has been absorbed into larger and larger organizations over the years. Said companies have consistently reduced the services offered and and engaged poorer and poorer quality tech support. I expect that they will try to slap me into line in the near to medium term. Sigh.

You are quite correct in talking about the need for "full non-discriminatory freedom" in terms of directionality on internet links. I believe, however, that that can be forced upon the ISPs once a critical mass of folks have symmetric links. Why? Because then there will be much more interest and an actual market in true P2P versions of applications which are now completely centralized. Such centralization aids the corporate thieves in propping up their dying business models as well as the the government law "enforcement" TLAs (Federal, state and local) to log everything we do online.

As I said elsewhere, let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Once symmetric links are out there, tools for maximizing the links will be developed (for example, the Diaspora Project is mostly a failure in that regard because most people don't have the upload speeds to support those activities -- so there's no real value in making it simple to implement and use) and should use strong encryption as well. Once enough people see the value in P2P (as the TCP/IP suite is peer-to-peer by design) and can secure their connections to others, it becomes much more difficult (yes, I understand how traffic analysis works so encryption isn't an end solution) to control how people use the

"Fair" is a very subjective word. Who says it is fair to have everyone paying for service that they wont' use? Most people don't need the same upstream speed as they need down. Not even those who are using Netflix or downloading large Linux distributions need the same up as down. Only those sending out large amounts of data will see any difference, and that's only if the transmission is monitored in real-time and not just a background task.

As someone else pointed out, this change will make very little difference in the load imbalance at the peering points since most people aren't hitting an upload limit to start with.

It seems to me that providing symmetric high-speed connections is critical to the future of free speech, innovation, creative output and communications the world over.

When I can serve up my documentary on government malfeasance and allow dozens, if not hundreds of other people to pull my content easily -- and those folks can then host it for tens or hundreds of thousands more people, it becomes much harder for the "big lie" to succeed.

When I can host my own "social network" that links to those people I give a crap about, and there's no corporate slime drooling all over my personal data because I own *and* host it (think Diaspora) and my friends and connections host their own servers that I can connect or not connect with -- at my discretion, some semblance of privacy is recovered.

When I can write my own software or music or literature and distribute it without the (economic) censorship of the corporate world stifling me or that same crowd sucking up most of the profits, innovation and creativity will blossom.

I could go on, but if you don't get the idea by now, you're probably brain-dead.

Better compare it with Diaspora or Movim, that are more in the same league, descentralized social networks. at least for the upper layer. If you want to go to the transport protocol, is afaik the bitcoin network protocol, so no darknets or i.e. Tor implied there. And as based on bitcoin, should imply no anonimity neither (what is a good thing in a social network)

Go ahead and build one, the base is already there.

Grab a cheap set-top box, add a customized Linux distro that preinstalls Diaspora pod and uses a web browser as primary desktop, add TV friendliness...

And then see whether there are enough people who care about that. Not holding my breath for huge success though.

Hi AC try http://prism-break.org/
Under Social networking the site lists https:buddycloud.com, https://diasporafoundation.org/ http://friendica.com/ http://movim.eu/ http://pump.io/ and the https://tent.io/ protocol.

Or utilize a social network like Diaspora and control your own data.

Look, the response to every "omg FB = teh evilz0rz" article is NOT "just use Diaspora." Sure, it may be great. But it's also not what the vast majority of regular people use, and despite your fantasies to the contrary, it never will be. Like it or not, FB has won the social networking war. Bringing up a latecomer only reeks of desperation at this point, and the "but it's open source!" angle as a selling point earns it the nerd stigma. I wish it didn't, but that's the way it is.

Or utilize a social network like Diaspora and control your own data.

More info here :

http://www.diasporafoundation.org/

http://diasporafoundation.org/ and http://noserub.com/ ...but don't kid yourself that these things will take ever over the mainstream without widescale support from a leading corporation.