Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is There a Good Alternative to Facebook? (washingtonpost.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein argues that fixing Facebook may be impossible because "Facebook's entire ecosystem is predicated on encouraging the manipulation of its users by third parties who posses the skills and financial resources to leverage Facebook's model. These are not aberrations at Facebook -- they are exactly how Facebook was designed to operate." Meanwhile one fund manager is already predicting that sooner or later every social media platform "is going to become MySpace," adding that "Nobody young uses Facebook," and that the backlash over Cambridge Analytica "quickens the demise."
But Slashdot reader silvergeek asks, "is there a safe, secure, and ethical alternative?" to which tepples suggests "the so-called IndieWeb stack using the h-entry microformat." He also suggests Diaspora, with an anonymous Diaspora user adding that "My family uses a server I put up to trade photos and posts... Ultimately more people need to start hosting family servers to help us get off the cloud craze... NethServer is a pretty decent CentOS based option."
Meanwhile Slashdot user Locke2005 shared a Washington Post profile of Mastodon, "a Twitter-like social network that has had a massive spike in sign-ups this week." Mastodon's code is open-source, meaning anybody can inspect its design. It's distributed, meaning that it doesn't run in some data center controlled by corporate executives but instead is run by its own users who set up independent servers. And its development costs are paid for by online donations, rather than through the marketing of users' personal information... Rooted in the idea that it doesn't benefit consumers to depend on centralized commercial platforms sucking up users' personal information, these entrepreneurs believe they can restore a bit of the magic from the Internet's earlier days -- back when everything was open and interoperable, not siloed and commercialized.
The article also interviews the founders of Blockstack, a blockchain-based marketplace for apps where all user data remains local and encrypted. "There's no company in the middle that's hosting all the data," they tell the Post. "We're going back to the world where it's like the old-school Microsoft Word -- where your interactions are yours, they're local and nobody's tracking them." On Medium, Mastodon founder Eugene Rochko also acknowledges Scuttlebutt and Hubzilla, ending his post with a message to all social media users: "To make an impact, we must act."
Lauren Weinstein believes Google has already created an alternative to Facebook's "sick ecosystem": Google Plus. "There are no ads on Google+. Nobody can buy their way into your feed or pay Google for priority. Google doesn't micromanage what you see. Google doesn't sell your personal information to any third parties..." And most importantly, "There's much less of an emphasis on hanging around with those high school nitwits whom you despised anyway, and much more a focus on meeting new persons from around the world for intelligent discussions... G+ posts more typically are about 'us' -- and tend to be far more interesting as a result." (Even Linus Torvalds is already reviewing gadgets there.)
Wired has also compiled their own list of alternatives to every Facebook service. But what are Slashdot's readers doing for their social media fix? Leave your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
Is there a good alternative to Facebook?
But Slashdot reader silvergeek asks, "is there a safe, secure, and ethical alternative?" to which tepples suggests "the so-called IndieWeb stack using the h-entry microformat." He also suggests Diaspora, with an anonymous Diaspora user adding that "My family uses a server I put up to trade photos and posts... Ultimately more people need to start hosting family servers to help us get off the cloud craze... NethServer is a pretty decent CentOS based option."
Meanwhile Slashdot user Locke2005 shared a Washington Post profile of Mastodon, "a Twitter-like social network that has had a massive spike in sign-ups this week." Mastodon's code is open-source, meaning anybody can inspect its design. It's distributed, meaning that it doesn't run in some data center controlled by corporate executives but instead is run by its own users who set up independent servers. And its development costs are paid for by online donations, rather than through the marketing of users' personal information... Rooted in the idea that it doesn't benefit consumers to depend on centralized commercial platforms sucking up users' personal information, these entrepreneurs believe they can restore a bit of the magic from the Internet's earlier days -- back when everything was open and interoperable, not siloed and commercialized.
The article also interviews the founders of Blockstack, a blockchain-based marketplace for apps where all user data remains local and encrypted. "There's no company in the middle that's hosting all the data," they tell the Post. "We're going back to the world where it's like the old-school Microsoft Word -- where your interactions are yours, they're local and nobody's tracking them." On Medium, Mastodon founder Eugene Rochko also acknowledges Scuttlebutt and Hubzilla, ending his post with a message to all social media users: "To make an impact, we must act."
Lauren Weinstein believes Google has already created an alternative to Facebook's "sick ecosystem": Google Plus. "There are no ads on Google+. Nobody can buy their way into your feed or pay Google for priority. Google doesn't micromanage what you see. Google doesn't sell your personal information to any third parties..." And most importantly, "There's much less of an emphasis on hanging around with those high school nitwits whom you despised anyway, and much more a focus on meeting new persons from around the world for intelligent discussions... G+ posts more typically are about 'us' -- and tend to be far more interesting as a result." (Even Linus Torvalds is already reviewing gadgets there.)
Wired has also compiled their own list of alternatives to every Facebook service. But what are Slashdot's readers doing for their social media fix? Leave your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
Is there a good alternative to Facebook?
https://mewe.com/
just hang out on cdreimer's YouTube; there's no one there.
Look it up.
Anything that is centrally controlled is no damn good. Whatever pops will have to be P2P, something that can't be shut down or controlled.
Is there a good alternative to Facebook? Only if you want one...
Slashdot? Ahahhahahahahaaahah I crack me up.
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
"Every day we give the world little hostages to use against us."
Stop posting every little bit of minutiae of your life online & then be outraged when it is used against you later.
Go OUTSIDE and give it a try. Did you know the sky is still blue?
Honestly apart from keeping track of friends who live far away (some of whom are now leaving Facebook), most of what I use Facebook for is messages in groups....
It would be great if everyone as a whole could be brought back to some USENET like system, the thing that is important though Is moderation...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If I can't run it on my GoDaddy shared hosting plan, I don't want it.
Since YouTube is going to increase censorship of gun videos we need an alternative. I'm not a gun nut but I am a free speech nut.
Facebook's main staying power is that two apps handle everything. Groups, messaging, calendaring, blogs, file downloads, movies, pictures, and many other items.
None of this was invented by them. Messaging could be done by XMPP, IRC, or many other ways. Groups could be handled by a web forum. Calendaring, similar. File downloads could be done by the usual means. Movies, pictures, etc, could be done by websites, even easy to use packages like WordPress. However, what FB does is bring all that together, where it is the standard as the "watering hole" everyone goes to.
There are other social networks, be it Diaspora or MeWe. However, people don't want to have a ton of social media apps; they just want one, and someone isn't on it, that person is persona non grata.
This isn't to say Facebook isn't original. Their zstd compression algorithm is a very top notch achievement, and almost is as good as lzma, with a fraction of the CPU usage. However, were it not for the fact that even businesses depend on it for communication, it can be superseded, just like Myspace was.
First of all, place an advertisement in the classified section of your local newspaper: "young man seeks others with similar interests" generally will provide plenty of interesting responses. But these days, I often find my best gay hookups in bus station restrooms.
The smell of stale urine and and toilets clogged with heaps of feces and toilet paper enhances the forbidden excitement. Most stalls in the bus station have a glory hole which is ideal fun for the discrete and bashful. Be sure to bring a sharpie so that you can write your phone number on the wall for other gay cabaleros to "keep in touch". Meeting other femmes at the palm bar just doesn't compare to the raw energy of a transit terminal restroom.
I think we're beyond critical mass. Facebook is where everyone goes online to find everyone else, at least in north America and western Europe. People wanna go where their friends, family, and acquaintances are. How are we gonna convince everyone to migrate to the same service at the same time? Advertise it on Facebook?
I say it would be more practical to regulate Facebook. We could start by making their data gathering, usage, and redistribution practices transparent in ways that are meaningful to users (i.e. so as to achieve true informed consent). Then we could look at ways to hold Facebook and its clients accountable for misuses, abuses, and incompetence.
Regulate Facebook in the same way that we've decided it's a good idea to regulate government: Transparency and democratic oversight. It sounds boring and not very techie but you know, it's not really a technological problem, it's a political one.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Not instant gratification but it is a bit more private. Calling family on the phone is nice too. You life existed before the iPhone.
I don't know what people use it for, I just use email.
Should you bank in outer space when doing a 180, or do you only need to give it left rudder? Wondering because I always see space ships banking while turning. In case it comes up, that's why.
Does anyone actually believe that?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
humhub.org looks promising. AGPLv3 and Commercial licensing.
Keybase.io for messaging. It uses PGP. Keybase does not hold the private keys. Only you and the other person know what you're saying to each other.
Facebook has me trapped because of the network effect. I do standup comedy as a hobby and all the shows and calls for spots are announced on Facebook. I also do some sketch and improv, and yep... all the auditions and shows are announced on Facebook.
My music teacher has a Facebook group for announcements for all her students. I need to be on Facebook to get those.
And until a critical mass of people finds something else, Facebook will continue to have its stranglehold in situations like this.
Personal servers are the future of privacy. Browsers will nicely render most any format presented to them, so readership is universally enabled on any operating system.
ANYTHING, other than Facebook, is an excellent alternative to Facebook.
My advice, Go out and meet people face to face. Concerts, bars, clubs, look for things like http://www.eventsandadventures... get exercise whilst meeting new people and enjoying life and really being social. beats the hell out of text, memes, and hundreds of "friends" that probably don't really care about you. Life is out there, you just have to find it.
Yeh, and you got these two apps on the promise of privacy, then not-so-much privacy, then 'control your information' instead of privacy, then 'not-so-much' control, until now.
Yet here we are, 2018, and Zuck's selling people's call logs TWICE removed from any permission to a bunch of St Petersberg Russians. Not just your private family shared moments, but the private shared moments of the families of your friends.
Worse, they come default installed and enabled on Smartphones approved by the blanket agreement that pops up. So the person twice removed from you, that's used as an excuse to sell your data, never actually agrees even to their own privacy invasion!
And gee wizz, looks like they also wrote FB in Android 4.0 so they could slurp down calls and messages too. I'm sure that was by accident right? Also provided for sale to the Russians.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/facebook-scraped-call-text-message-data-for-years-from-android-phones/
It was all based on deception. You never had privacy and never had control.
Google are not innocent in this either, their APIs intentionally hand over private info on a single click and hide what's going on. They intentionally downplay "full network access' as if its nothing. They intentionally pop up misleading "Cancel / Agree" dialogs as if to use a service you have to agree to the loss of privacy.
This a social media site, right?
What I hear about twitter and facebook doing for folks, I get right here!
Who needs more?
(old shipwrecked noid aporoaches screen) IT'S...
The GTE White Pages//Pac Bell Smart Yellow Pages//Donnely Directory.
The Book... the Facebook company doesn't want you to read.
Is the logical follow up.
It's called "not using Facebook". Works 100%.
I think the future will hopefully be something like steemit, blockchain has given us an alternative payment model that does not have to be based on manipulation.
Even with paid model i.e. windows/apple they still want to mine our private data.
I think the only answer is decentralised with the server power coming from individual pc's with the reward mechanism coming in the form of a crypto currency.
Polygon reports that Pornhub is considering expanding its safe-for-work section for videos with grown-up themes that aren't erotic, such as demonstrations of firearm operation or maintenance.
That said, you could get a VPS and install GNU MediaGoblin as an alternative to YouTube. One drawback is MediaGoblin's lack of compatibility with iPhone and iPad clients, as to my knowledge, iOS supports no royalty-free video codecs. Even once AV1 is final, I don't see it coming to older devices.
There's already a possible replacement, Instagram, if facebook the web site fails. There's no way Zuckerberg will let the Facebook company disappear. There's a need for a social network the problem is that no one is willing to finance it. So as long as it has to be free to the user the companies that create one will always sell the user's data.
The Usenet model is a good one where the data is distributed and there are thousands of servers and it's own by no one. But without a way to finance it will never be.
The Wikipedia model is probably the only way a Social Media site will survive without the user's data being sold.
Who wants to take the responsibility to lead it?
I won't die in prison a traitor though, so I've got that going for me. He's fucked.
There was MySpace, which was amazing for meeting people with similar interests, then Facebook bought them and killed the search functionality exposed to end users so that made it completely worthless. There was Yahoo 360, but they took a way too isolated approach to things and never really had interconnected profiles unless you knew someone's name beforehand. Google+ is just garbage (even if they weren't every bit as evil as Facebook.) The big issue is there's no way to monetize it without selling the user data since noone wants to pay for it and it requires way more bandwidth between the media rich content and the ADHD attention whores constantly hitting refresh than advertising can hope to recover. If they brought the old MySpace (2005-ish era) back that would be about as close to perfect as it could get, but Facebook or Google would just buy out anyone that tried to make that level of data available to the average pleb.
Good luck sending a video over email. Both the sender's message submission agent and the receiver's mailbox have to support the attachment size, and I don't see that as likely for all common combinations of sender and recipient.
Has anyone tried Minds, the open source social network?
www.minds,com
In fact, nobody uses Facebook. You don't use Facebook; rather, Facebook uses YOU!
Different writers use the terms "personal server" and especially "cloud" to refer to different things. Would you consider leasing a virtual private server (VPS) from a VPS provider as "personal server" or "cloud"?
For use of a home server to be practical, both a home ISP's acceptable use policy and its technical architecture have to allow it. An AUP that bans home servers is unacceptable, and inbound connections require a dedicated (even if dynamic) IP address as opposed to a carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) layer. Good luck moving both you and your contacts to a location where a home ISP allows the use of home servers.
I won't lose sleep over the fact I'll never get the chance to fuck up on that scale, no.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
So no. The outlook is bad. RSS Feeds and email will have to do.
In fact, the first dozen or so twitter users all came from Slashdot.
If I could be a billionaire and then President, and then off myself at 70+, yeah, Iâ(TM)d do that in an instant. Much better then whining about Trump on Slashdot everyday.
There are not. But you should know that you do NOT *need* facebook. At all.
Here's how it's been explained to me: Google and Facebook generally do not make a habit of selling members' personally identifying information (PII) to third parties. Instead, they safeguard members' PII and offer services, such as Google's AdWords and DoubleClick, that use members' PII and click stream as an input.
As for the Cambridge Analytica/SCL incident: Facebook sold nothing. Cambridge Analytica collected Facebook members' PII through Facebook's API and then disclosed (i.e. sold) the PII in violation of Facebook's terms of service.
I've always been able to sign up for facebook (since it existed anyway) - but I still haven't seen a reason to.
It was old to me when it was new - chat interfaces, friendly reminders that always tend to linger on advertisers and lingering invitations to third party fees/services. I couldn't see any difference between it and basically every thing it was imitating, And always, always demanding you provide it a method of hooking into you with what I saw as shallow database references.
It's not a matter of privacy or security paranoia - I just had no desire to play that game since I saw those same games played in the BBS era, and the early national networks. They're all the same kind of scummy, and for my tastes, I found I was better catered to as the 'odd man out' in groups than as another contestant in the facebook game.
From every video I've seen and friend-on-a-phone using time on the service I've ever seen, I've never seen a hint of anything more to it. Any examples of content on Facebook that anyone has ever seen that are actually more than promotional contest giveaways, and chat/email/scheduling analogues?
Life is about focus - Facebook always seemed the wrong thing to focus on, after seeing every other social network. I was always looking for a 'need' that justified it, just never found any - and I enjoyed every second I did not use with it.
Oddly enough, I did see the movie - and I didn't really seen to miss any reference.
Ryan Fenton
+1 for Secure Scuttlebutt. It's decentralised, encrypted and works well enough. I can see it working well for quasi-static groups.
Put the video up on youtube, vimeo, or one of the other similar sites, and email just a link to it?
That would not work for all videos. Even if you mark a video as private, these services still perform fingerprint-based preemptive censorship at the behest of the Music And Film Industry Associations. Besides, the list of things that YouTube's guidelines ban has become longer over the years.
Have we forgot how to communicate and unass the couch.
My distant family, college friends and other people I like keeping up with aren't available by going outside. I can contact them individually, but I love being able to keep up with them, see what they're doing/sharing, and letting them do the same with me.
Subscribe to the blogs written by "distant family, college friends and other people" using RSS, Atom, or the IndieWeb stack's WebSub. Encourage them to subscribe to yours.
Try forums on topics on interest.
Web sites and web pages.
Create your own forum, blog and web page.
Anything to get back to a diversity of sites that no one social media company can censor.
Enjoy the freedom of speech over the internet. Not just what one brand allows on their network.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Self-hosting doesn't work if your home ISP issues you a private IP address in 100.64.0.0/10, reserved by RFC 6598 for carrier-grade network address translation in countries with an underallocation of IPv4 addresses.
Even if you do have a publicly routable IP address, self-hosting doesn't work if your home ISP blocks incoming port 80 or 443.
Even if you do have a publicly routable IP address that accepts incoming connections, self-hosting is dangerous if your home ISP's acceptable use policy bans self-hosting.
Even if you do have a publicly routable IP address that accepts incoming connections and a home ISP that allows self-hosting, self-hosting still costs money for a Raspberry Pi or other server left on all the time as opposed to suspending when not in use, recurring money for a domain, and time to learn how to configure and secure said server.
Try forums on topics on interest.
Web sites and web pages.
Create your own forum, blog and web page.
Who pays in both money and time to host, maintain, and secure these?
And prior to that was myspace/livejournal groups, and prior to that was mailing lists (still in use, but far more niche than they used to be, and often secondary to facebook or whatever else, finding themselves neglected in always offering notification about up to date scheduling.)
I don't forsee this issue getting fixed because the problem is societal not technical. Until society changes we can't effectively fix or replace the technology. There have been dozens of open source attempts that tried, but even if they were technically acceptable, society still prefers the proprietary alternative, whether it is facebook, microsoft, kik, or google. The only thing that got close to refuting this was Mozilla with Firefox (which they coopted, rather than developing internally themselves.) and their biggest enemy is themselves, followed closely by their attitude towards their userbase.
You can kill yourself now, I mean, you could... if you weren't such an all talk nothing little traitor apologist bitch. Too bad, you'll never grow a pair. You'll just have to watch Trump die in prison instead. With his bitch beta sons too.
And a few of his dumber lawyers.
anonymous - the hacktivist group created a great full functioning alternative called MINDS. I have used it and the concentration of users are more toward power user/activists. very nice crowd.
The source code is opensource and they use encryption in the entire pipeline for security.
https://www.minds.com/
Usenet was great before AOL made it accessible to so many idiots.
If you've just started asking, the answer is "not yet." Now you can help change or you can go back to Facebook and friends.
Mastodon is pretty reasonable at this time, but your friends aren't on it, and if you want to follow celebs, you'll have to hope someone's setup a proxy bot. Mastodon is only useful to me because a large group of us joined together. That was enough to bootstrap into meeting some people who were already there—there are some cool personalities there.
I haven't used other similar services, but the hope is ActivityPub will tie these things together, breed strength between them, and eventually create a great alternative to owned, centralized networks.
will turn into Facebook eventually. Only non-profit, decentralized social networks will prioritize privacy and security. However these will be likely gain market share on par with linux desktop.
Fixing Facebook is very easy. All it takes is some regulation. Problem solved
Fixing Facebook is too hard as long as the GOP is in power. US politics is a complete mess, and the republican swamp dwellers in Washington would not lift a pinky finger to make a move against their biggest lobbyists, and more importantly - the main vehicle of social network idiocracy and a key mechanism they kan use in meddling with elections.
Facebook fixing itself, and Suckerberg's "apologies" suggesting they are going to do anything to hurt their revenues? Ha ha ha. Anyone who thinks so has obviously yet to experience the harsh realities and brutally cynical pragmatism of white collar corporate life.
We have this pretty great thing called democracy. And in the US, the people use this to say "hey, why don't we just let the aristocrats rule". The thing that people fought so hard to get, and you guys are just wasting it away, falling prey to this amazingly effective brainwash propaganda that the market force is somehow the fifth fundamental force in the universe, and the most fantastic one because it somehow magically solves everything. Plenty people died in the fight to get unions, which are a key factor in labor life in Europe and a force for good compromises between capital and worker interests - whereas in US the brainwashing machine has successfully painted it as a bad thing and turned the people who would benefit from it, against it.
It's just amazing. Unfortunately, US failure to regulate its revenue making beasts like Google and Facebook is heavily affecting the rest of the world. In what is an incredibly narrow sighted vision of the world limited to next quarter financials, and an inability to see how this basically contributes to destroying society.
Sorry if I sound bleak and pessimistic, but that is because that is what the world currently is in some areas. Either that, or I am tired from losing one hour sleep as we switched to summer time in Europe tonight ;-)
Get a life punk!
It's called Pornhub. Duh !
It's an amazing alternative to Facebook and is how all of the human race got by without Facebook before Facebook came along. It's how millions of your fellow humans get by in life even today. I do not have, and never have had, a Facebook page. No members of my family have Facebook pages. My business has no Facebook page. I prefer not to employ people who have Facebook pages; I consider having such a page to be a warning marker for people who are too self-absorbed, too easily distracted, and/or not sufficiently tethered to the real world.
This is really insane, as recently as the 1990s most people were not on the internet at all, Myspace and Facebook are both post-9/11 entities. Now we have huge numbers of people who spend their time with their faces smashed on phone screens and constantly on Facebook who seem to think they will suffer some sort of medical emergency if they have a bad cell phone signal strength.
Go to work/school. Have a meal with your family. Ride a bike. Go for a swim/sail/run. Build a boat. Build a model airplane. Ride a horse. See a movie. Play poker with some friends (you know, those biological things that walk around like you do and look kinda like those images on your screen you call wour "friends"). Get a pet. No, not some CGI animation on an app on Facebook, but a REAL one that needs food and water and makes messes that need to be cleaned up, and that will happily curl up with you on the sofa while you READ A BOOK or watch TV.
EVERYTHING ON EARTH, and most things that are actually worth something, are alternatives to Facebook.
Read a book, discuss it with a friend face to face.
You mean Google hasn't killed Google Plus yet? And it's free?
If something's free then you're the product.
For someone on a tech site, you seem remarkably ignorant of the basics of how FB works. Ghost profiles are a thing so, no, staying off FB does not prevent them from doing things you don't like that directly involve you and your data. And obviously, with nearly 30% of everyone in the world using FB, just waiting for FB to be out-competed is not going to prevent a ton of public harms happening in the meantime, and assuming that a startup can compete if the government would simply clear out of the way is wilfully naive. Network effects are an economic thing, you know.
Do you want to talk to your friends? Use email or simply call them.
And if you are old-fashioned as I am, go meet them!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
NO. there is not and there never can be. it's far too much data for one company or entity to be trusted with.
Try meeting real people, talking with them while sipping a coffee, go with them doing real life activities. You will be amazed to see how it works, and you do not ever need a smartphone!
Facebook is not inherently bad, anymore than a gun is inherently bad. It is the way in which people choose to implement it that is at fault. Any 'thing' can be used as a force for good or a tool to oppress. Look at what we did with the split atom. It is a great source of energy or a massive engine of destruction. TV is the same way, it COULD be perhaps the greatest vehicle of knowledge and enlightenment, and yet it is a source for corporate enrichment. Mankind doesn't have such a good history of not abusing anything for the short term enrichment of a few to the detriment of most...
Jesus preached tolerance love, peace and acceptance, and yet religion has been a tool for some of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Stormy?
Literally. By that I don't mean Facebook is indispensable. I mean we should replace it with nothing. If we can't manage that, perhaps about 20 million independent things with an average of 100 users each that can't be mined as one entity would suffice.
We've had Facebook for less than a thousandth of human history. Obviously we can live without it. It's a very brief, failed experiment. Sure, a couple of billion people have had it. More than that have had the common cold but there's no reason to keep that either.
No mention of https://www.gab.ai? How sad. Probably only place where you can actually have a honest conversatiuon and exchange of ideas. It's not like twitter, where ADL tells you what you can and can not say or even think.
A 'blog' and a 'social media platform' before those terms were invented. and the only oneworth sticking with. (although I miss the preMurdoch Myspace.
Yeah - im old
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
nm
I avoid Reddit until recently, i saw it as being mostly troll driven with a few interesting posts, but i find it pretty much the opposite.
They is pretty good news coverage and minimal trolling that i have seen.
Its pretty usless for posting anything except links to news stories as you need a plugin to be able to see pictures inline, so it has a nostaligc feel to it. News feed from 10 years ago...
No thanks to Google Plus.
You're going from one evil to another evil.
Stick to the free-software projects hosted by real-people with no financial motivations.
My frustration with Facebook, etc is that we had all this before. Email + Uesnet + RSS + IRC / XMPP provided the same services social media provides, albeit in a more fragmented way. Mastodon at least brings things back to standards-based, but it's not a complete solution.
What I'd love to be able to do is engage with a platform that keeps me up to date with news, with the bands that I'm into, with what friends and family are up to - without being marketed to or having the threat of my personal information being effectively sold off.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I understand Facebook's need to monetise - how else is it going to provide the services? - but the personal cost and risk (for me) is too high. Maybe it's a matter of running my own Mastodon or Diaspora service, but that feels like a lot of mucking around. Perhaps there's a market opportunity here - to be able to pay someone to provide "ad-free" social media services.
Dunno.
Open source for obvious reasons (no hidden algorithms). Non-profit, so advertisers can't buy into it and so the incentive to push the most sensational (generally the worst things that are actually even fake) items at everyone does not exist. I would pay what I guess would be at the most $25 a year for that. Maybe even get a billionaire to donate startup funds. Takers?
It seems fairly simple to do. As a somewhat privacy nut that isn't forcefully compelled to use FascistBook I have always said I would consider it under those conditions.
Other things:
A conscious decision to feed people not just scaremongering down the rabbit hole, but good things. More in line with what real life gives you. I may not be interested in knitting, but I don't want a feed that constantly gives me fake Russia born hate. So skip the knitting and Russian hate and it is already better than FB and well on the way to learning how to keep this user happy.
Allow users to change the settings to e.g. "just puppies and kittens" (without the Z-Nation reference), maybe even have that for a default. Don't even allow settings that a white supremacist would want. They need to cool down for a decade or two to see if they can become part of society. Say a slider from "just puppies and kittens" to "real world" without the excursion past real world into "best psychographics to keep the user as wound up as possible to maximize his connect hours".
And there are things they can do today. And Zuck has just been weaselling around making any real commitment because it means less addvert dollars and more humans to pay. Listen to his interviews. He spends a lot of very careful words to promise exactly nothing. People need to start listening to all interviews through a filter that constantly asks "Now how can he use those exact words to legally mean something different than it sounds." Like Trump saying "I don't have financial ties with Russia." when he does have financial ties with many bad Russian entities besides the actual government.
If I were president FB would be handled immediately, even if shareholders revolted. While I am at it, robo calls and other sales calls would stop within 30 days. So what if Zimbabwe can't call me (or anyone in the USA) direct because they still allow calls without a traceable origin.
Nice sir. thank you General Knowledge
Nice sir. thank you General Knowledge http://www.studentscaring.com/
I've held this opinion ever since social networks became a thing, and Facebook is no different:
The problem a social network solves is basically a protocol problem. Facebook by and large is nothing other than the world latest replacement for Usenet, Mailinglists and IRC. If email weren't so shitty, Facebook wouldn't stand a chance.
Diaspora is some awkward attempt at solving the problem, but it thought Facebook was a website, so it started copying a website. But FB isn't a website, it's a social network. It just uses the web as it's universal platform.
What we need to do is design a portocol/service, then build low level tools to handle it and *then* the UIs. Diaspora is a hack by the web camp. It's the WordPress of solutions. A badly designed stopgap, that sort of kinda works but could be done better.
We should get to it and replace email along the way while we're at it. That thing is from the steam age of computing and it shows at all corners.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Facebook has got where it is because of 2 main reasons: (a) it has achieved a 'critical mass' ie: if you want to do this sort of thing with friends the most likely place where you will find them is facebook; (b) facebook does not facilitate connecting to people on different social networks - which means people must choose which social network to use and because of (a) the best choice is facebook, this is the 'network effect' - the most interconnected wins.
The way of breaking this is a facebook RFC that describes how social networks can interoperate, so that people can choose which one they use and be able to link, find, chat, ... to friends on other social network providers. Ie the RFC would provide a means of breaking facebook's effective monopoly. These social networks would then compete on other features, eg: human language, regionality, special interest (eg fishing, music, model aircraft, ...) - while not losing the network effect.
Facebook will not do this - it would be commercial suicide; unless many, many FB-RFC interconnected alternatives attracted a significant proportion of humanity.
I cannot see this happening, unfortunately.
Having large and powerful entities like facebook is clearly a bad thing, they have far too much influence and control... A distributed system is obviously a much better idea where users or groups of users host and control their own content...
However, what about the security implications of random people suddenly running their own servers? that's gonna end up as a mess...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Ok, well there's not, but I'd be happy to start a web site that whores your personal data that you share with it for free in a slightly less unlikable way than Facebook does. That's what you want, right? Because really the only reason Facebook exists is to convince you to share your personal data with it for free so it can whore that data to anyone with a large enough briefcase full of cash. So if you'd just share some personal data about what exactly you find unlikable about Facebook whoring out your personal data, we can get this party started!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You jumped into a classic IT trap of trying to replace a platform without ever defining your requirements. To that the only answer is to replace Facebook with Emacs, since VI isn't up to the task.
More seriously though, what do *you* get out of Facebook? ....
Do you use it to just post pictures? There's platforms that do that. e.g. Flickr
Do you use it to share short rants? There's platforms that do that. e.g. Twitter
Do you use it for personalised messaging? There's platforms that do that.
Do you use it for finding events near you
Wait let's address this for a moment. One of the most powerful features of Facebook is the network effect, it's widespread use. There are many platforms but the question is are they of use to you? Can you contact your local airline on Google+? Does your local underground music festival announce details of its events on Twitter? Are those things you want to buy available for sale on Craigs list? Is your family using WhatsApp? Are the pictures of your daughter that you're trying to monitor to ensure she doesn't do something silly on Instagram?
Those are the only kinds of questions you need to ask when trying to figure out how to replace Facebook. No one uses Facebook because it's a good service and they thing the app is awesome. ... Except maybe Zuckerberg.
Corporate has already all moved from FB to Yammer. It's good enough.
Pity Microsoft bought it. Clone it, maybe?
What has that to do with FB?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
For those of us living in the privileged western societies, we can of course replace Facebook with something else. But that something else is just going to end up in the same place, because the content provided by these services is financed by marketing money and it's crucial to keep that going - because of quarterly economic reports and the stock market - it's a vicious circle we've created and now have to keep feeding.
In other parts of the world, Facebook is synonymous with Internet access. They don't use computers - Internet is mobile - and Facebook offers free access to that mobile network - if you sign up with them and use their apps, of course.
It's the worst kind of digital colonialism you can think of.
Nothing has changed in the world - the Internet didn't make information free. We in the west are still slaves of the system - and we're still exploiting the developing world.
The only sensible move is not to play. The only way to fix it is to change the system. But we're not going to do that. We love our toys.
Facebook is free for the end user so I am not sure anyone should expect a social site like Facebook to not look at using your data to its advantage or other third parties because of its broad user base to work from. After all the money to operate does not come from users but if it did and users paid for a Facebook social site. Then they could argue more about how their data is used. The option is always there to not use it and delete your account?
That depends on how you define successful. Indeed he has in some areas of personal success by society standards, though some are self induced beliefs or achieved by poor behavior. Is that good for the future? I certainly do not envy the mind of Donald. What exactly is the good to envy? Money, power, fame? These do not equate to happiness. Go deep and find something of actual value. Nothing to date has shown to benefit mankind. Just Donald. There in lies the classic path to a self consumed ruler.
I haven't actually deleted FB, I login a couple of times a month. Same for a number of other sites, e.g. if you want the timeline-newsfeed model there are or were: tsu (now dark), globallshare (dubious buy-in, now metastasized into livetalkie), ello, skyrock... And along with the likes of reddit, tumblr or twitter there are lesser variants, voat, gab, livejournal... of varying POVs. The key point is: different names/nics and different birthdays (all fictitious), entered via a number of browsers with differing useragents, from a number of devices, geolocation off or spoofed, and linked to any of at least 6 or 7 email accounts. Each site for a specific use, one for music, another for NSFW, another for technical/STEM, another for chat, for art, for politics, for literature... You do NOT need to give anybody a full picture of yourself and your set of interests. As for those who try to monetize or scrape your info, I can only say: good luck.
Good old times.
Some of us amateur radio people will tell you that ham radio was the first social network. That may be a stretch, but there are some points to think about.
It's good to have a medium that's free to use by the message, but still has a price. You have to qualify by taking an exam, or by putting up some capital funds, or by paying a monthly fee.
The problem of FB, G+, Reddit, /., etc. are that they are free. So the purveyors have to find revenue from corporate sources - selling your info, your preferences, and your friends.
If a service has value to you, and you want to have control of your data, why aren't you willing or even eager to pay $10 a month?
Fiat Lux.
The original social media
For you kiddies that don't remember AOL, facebook is your generations AOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL
Before that it was Prodigy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
Before that it was Compuserve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
If you really need what Facebook does, there's no alternative, because Facebook can do what it does not because of what it is, but because so many people already use it, and nobody else has even a fraction of Facebook's user base.
"You never get something for nothing after you leave Mom and Dad's," was something one of my college professors said quite frequently. Unless we pay money for a social networking service, our data will be the revenue stream, not our wallets.
Are any of the services suggested in the summary supported by cash from subscriptions?
It'll all blow over in a week. People have memories like goldfish. Remember how the electronic throttle problems were going to kill Mercedes, or the emissions scandal spelled game over for Honda?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If step one of your plan to replace Facebook is everyone running family servers, your plan is doomed from the start. Most families don't have anyone capable of doing that, and hardly any families have anyone capable of doing it well -- keeping the machine running, updated, and properly secured.
There's a remote chance that it could work if there were a competitive network of service providers who ran the servers. For example, if ISPs did it, the way they all used to run email servers. It might also be somewhat possible if cloud providers operated and maintained the servers. In both cases, though, I think it would just lead the cloud providers to exploit economies of scale by putting up one big infrastructure for all of their users, and to compete by offering features that others don't have... then network effects would kick in and one of them would become dominant and you'd just have a new Facebook.
I think the bottom line is that widely-used services that are subject to intense network effects are natural monopolies. And natural monopolies require regulation.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I totally agree.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Better analogy: You probably use residential-grade locks on your house's doors because anyone who breaks your locks would in doing so show intent to commit a serious crime. This would give you, your home insurer, and your local police a strong case against a burglar. Likewise, Facebook could use its TOS as the definition of allowed access for both civil and criminal action against Cambridge Analytica pursuant to the CFAA.
Bullshit.
I'm a Libertarian, I'm part of Libertarian groups, I look at freedom things. For the past what? Three presidential elections since Google + came into being my feed has become a Democrat promotion fest. "Trending" things get posted on my feed, interestingly enough, it's nearly all pro Democrat with a 1 in 30 Republican thing showing up. Sometimes these "trending" posts have been reshared three times and have a whole +5! Being reshared by three people I don't know and being plused by five people I don't know shouldn't be enough to break through the I'm not following it and don't care about it wall, +1,000 sure, otherwise Google is taking sides in political things and pushing them on me. I've seen plenty of evidence of that one Google +. GOOGLE + IS NOT NEUTRAL.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
The US will extradite the next hacker who hits UK from the US.
I got a kick out of comments like this:
"NethServer is a pretty decent CentOS based option."
and the first line on the website for nethserver is:
"NethServer is an operating system for Linux enthusiasts, designed for small offices and medium enterprises"
Linux enthusiasts is code for "I don't mind doing kernel recompiles for amusement, and I don't know why there's all this stuff about word processors, when vi or emacs are perfectly good"
Yeah, right, part of facebook's appeal is that it "just works" - the barrier to entry is essentially zero. I don't see people
Teksavvy, one of Canada's largest independent ISPs
Is Teksavvy service worth the process of finding a Canadian employer who will sponsor an immigrant's work visa?
a significant reason being to ensure user privacy because the data is in my house
What happens to your users' data should natural disaster or violence strike your home? Is there a good way to protect it other than making an encrypted backup to a server leased from a third party and somehow backing up the backup's key elsewhere?
email is TLS opportunistically encrypted by Postfix MTA.
That will work once some counterpart to HSTS preload comes to SMTP. Until then, a man in the middle can and does strip the STARTTLS out of the SMTP traffic (source; source).
Try forums on topics on interest.
Who pays in both money and time to host, maintain, and secure these?
The user always pays.
By "user", do you mean those who read a forum, those who post to a forum, or some third option that you intend to explain in your reply? If you meant the reader, then would you enjoy having to buy a $5 subscription to every site you visit? At least for me, hitting a paywall on the majority of results from a web search engine would take the enjoyment out of recreational research.
You can share files from your own NAS if you want to. And you can even build your own NAS from off the shelf hardware and FOSS software.
I can't see how to make that work for subscribers to home Internet service providers that put home subscribers behind network address translation (NAT).
Anonymous Coward and students recommended that users switch from Facebook to email. This would imply switching from Facebook groups to mailing lists, attaching any photos that they would post to the email, but leaving video unserved. You recommended Vimeo or BitChute. I glanced at both and found the following:
Vimeo appears to charge $84 per year to upload unlisted videos, or $240 per year to avoid having to spend time making your case that "you're an independent production company, artist, or non-profit [...] showcas[ing] your creative work" every time a user flags your video as prohibited "Product demos and tutorials." How many converts from Facebook to mailing lists are willing to spend that much just for the ability to post video to a mailing list?
BitChute made it difficult to find the site's guidelines. First I tried scrolling to the bottom for a footer, but this produced an unbounded scrolling list of poster images and titles instead of a footer. I eventually found the guidelines by clicking a tiny, faded greater-than sign camouflaged next to the site logo, which exposed a list of video categories, then scrolling to the end of the list. This difficult user experience didn't give me a good first impression about the rest of the site's design.
Is there an alternative to poking yourself in the eye with a pencil?
Some have suggested that not poking yourself in the eye with a pencil is quite good.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://boards.4chan.org/b/
You will never get someone on Kickstarter to walk away from money. The money cult there encourages people to make absurd claims to try to get as big a pile as possible. Even if those claims are impossible.
I've never understood the stretch goals thing. Even a big Kickstarter is such a small yield that unit costs are not going down much for physical products.
They are literally promising more features for free, and none of those features are in the prototype/demo. And then people wonder why they can't deliver.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
It may be true that middle schoolers / high schoolers aren't joining at that age, but pretty much every college student ends up joining it due to it basically being a "social" version of outlook, in terms of maintaining a social calendar for clubs.
The trick is Facebook found a boring utility to go with their bad band pages and cat pictures. They may be more resilient than people just thinking about the cat pictures realize.
Retroshare. Everything is social. Everything is encrypted. Only 1 system needs to be online (with an open port) always for everyone in the network to get the information. Sorta like Usenet using dialup telephones. .... all included. All encrypted using PKI. Actually, the PKI is the hardest part.
Files,mail, forums, messages, chats, audio/video in beta
http://retroshare.net/
Prison for what exactly?
Please be very specific. Please provide evidence and cite your source.
When Facebook creates an account for someone that account is FOREVER and I can find people there. Compare this with email addresses which tend to change every few years as people get new internet service. Plus there's no place you can go to find someone's email address. When the internet first went public I asked why the post office doesn't offer an email address to every person the way it assigns a postal address. If they did this it would be FOREVER and we could find people using that method.
I love this. I voted for Trump because he drives soyboys like you crazy... You don't disappoint, on a daily basis.
(We pretend that the FBI didn't itself recommend he be fired, for leaking classified information to the press)
Money can very much lead to happiness, if you use it well.
Money can enable charity; comfort; security; health; knowledge; and amplify all manner of social goods, including love and kindness. It can also uplift your lifestyle from victim to empowered. Some of this is due to flaws in society, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Myself, I have spent most of my earnings on charity, and yes, it made me happy. Still does. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
IRC has some merit, particularly when it's on specific servers serving specific needs. But it's a bit too open for general social use, and its ability to share and to keep history leaves something to be desired. That varies from client to client somewhat, but that in itself is a shortcoming.
I run a rocket.chat server for the family, and am also a member of one for a special interest group (radio enthusiasts.) It's easy to share stuff — you can drag in images, audio, video, etc. — you have control over who you let in and what they can access, it's secure (well, as secure as https allows for) and there's no advertising, data mining, or other creepiness going on. I have the source code and can modify it (and have) to do some cool things.
If anyone wants to get ahold of me, email still works just fine and I expect it will continue to well into the indefinite future. We can go from there if that's indicated.
I have not been on usenet since I was perusing a cat group and ran into some serious filth. I'll never go back. Having moved to locally (meaning, me) controlled social environments, I'm convinced this is the optimum way to go for family and friends. I've met some interesting people who became actual friends in more open environments, most notably Flickr (probably because there tends to be common interests there as to the types of photography people pursue), but as it turns out, carrying on the friendship at any level above the most vague and casual level is far better done in a closed, locally-controlled system.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
More like 30,000 years, and...
Because we have yet to get it right. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Moderation by someone else is censorship
Yes but since people are increasingly incapable of self-censoring someone has to do the job...
it may start well meaning by filtering out blatant trolls but eventually it will degenerate into filtering to serve the agenda of whoever is doing the filtering.
I don't think that is always the case. I agree totally it can happen, I have seen it myself in some communities - but in others I have seen basically neutral moderation. It all depends on how willing the moderators are to allow debate, as long as it doesn't boil over. It is possible to have good moderation that does not serve any agendas other than making sure debate is civilized.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everybody just has to do their own, make their own 'Ignore' button.
As a moderator I don't think that is fine-tuned enough of a control.
Sure its always a good idea to be able to just outright ignore posts from some idiot. But in a lot of cases, someone might have generally good and informative posts but at times just gets really angry and mean. In those cases it's great to be able to delete a post or two, and keep an otherwise productive conversation on track that otherwise devolves into people yelling at each other that will not block either one...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The "Eternal September" issue is why a USENET system to replace Facebook Groups would really need moderation. It was awesome you could pretty much have a decent system without moderation back in the day, but that just doesn't scale to arbitrarily large groups.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The alternative to Facebook is getting a life. Seems like a foreign concept to the readers here though, judging by the comment spam.
I would imagine what you're describing is a result of most Google + users being Democrats, or at least relatively liberal.
I don't respond to AC's.
Sorry. That's just the way it is.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, WHATEVER.
Eventually you have to trust an organization whos job it is to make you "product".
EVERYONE is hoovering your data. EVERYONE micromanages. Seriously, look at YOUTUBE for micro(mis)managemt. And before you say "But Google's a separate company!", there's an article up on /. right now where Google is actively scanning, refusing/locking content uploaded.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
reality check...stick to the topic...email and text messaging have already replaced facebook years ago. facebook is for the younger and older folks who dont know the difference and for that matter...dont care.
I agree, and that is because Kickstarter's own business model is so badly broken. Because they are paid based on the money donated, of course they want more donations. Because they make no guarantee about the success of the projects, of course they don't care whether or not the projects succeed.
I'm advocating a substantially different form of crowd funding where accountability for success is baked into the cake. I actually call it a "charity share brokerage", and may even have gotten to that label before I ever heard of Kickstarter.
Unfortunately, I'm a pure solutions researcher in the same sense as pure mathematician. I have no executive skills or real interest in whether the solutions (no matter how obvious) actually get implemented in the messy real world. Sufficient to me that the solution has been discovered. Not to say that this charity share brokerage is "the solution" to anything, but I do feel like it is the best approach to a solution I've come up with. Defining the problem is actually more difficult, but it has to do with the misalignment of economic models with more important objectives, such as the maximization of good time.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
This is a bit like bragging about illiteracy.
My dick in your mouth? I'd like to regulate it straight down your windpipe. Congress can pass this law!
If you want privacy, then DIY is the only way really.
Money, power, fame? These do not equate to happiness.
I'll just quote Randy Newman form It's Money That I Love
They say that money
Can't buy love in this world
But it'll get you a half-pound of cocaine
And a sixteen year-old girl
In a big long limosine
On a hot September night
And that may not be love, but
It's all right
Cant say it better than the voice of Disney music.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
https://akasha.world
A project that is based off the Ethereum Blockchain, using Juan Benet's "Inter Planetary File System" (IPFS), that he developed at M.I.T.
Blockchain projects are the future of all applications. Possibly even Operating Systems. Though, some are more 'Decentralized' than others. So, you have to really examine their features.
Some other projects to consider to use and get away from the Big Spying Tech's:
Facebook - Akasha
Google Search - Presearch
Youtube - d.tube
Google Drive - Sai, MAIDsafe, StoreJ, and eventually Filecoin
Android - Ubuntu Touch
Some of these projects are in earlier stages of development, but most are at least in full beta. Our support will help them develop, and allow us to retain our privacy and freedoms. There are way more than this week list I just made, but I'm sure others could add to it.
Get a friend and try them out.
What did you do before Facebook?
Do that.
Signed,
Someone who never made a fb account and somehow still manages to make it through life anyway
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
if you gonna do it do it right now baby
V out V `MFG . NEWLY in NEWLY . HAGGISH `SOLELY .
EX in V . V . V out V `V out V `V we bes V out V `
V V . V . V . V we bes V we bes V we bes V out V `
V `V `V . V . V `YEAH `V `YEAH `NEWLY in SOLELY .
V . V V . V . V out V `V out V `V we bes V . V in
V in EX . V . V out V `V out V `V we bes V in V .
V out V `MFG . NEWLY in NEWLY . HAGGISH `V out V `
I agree but not very many people do that.
He certainly chose his parents very well.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
quite the contrary.
Google is just as much a threat to privacy.
Have you tried Not-Facebook? Not-Facebook is a lot like Facebook, but only you donâ(TM)t use Facebook. For example, when you find yourself wanting to take a selfie, and share it with people but only those YOU choose, and NOT those Facebook decides to sell your personal, private data to, use Not-Facebook, and instead of posting it, do Not-Post it. Want to get status updates from your friends? Instead of using Facebook, instead try using Not-Facebook, and instead CALL your friend and ask how he (or she,) IS. Itâ(TM)s so much more personal and rewarding taking the time and effort to pick up the smartphone you were probably already holding in your hand anyway, and selecting the dialer app, going into your contacts, and finding your friend, selecting his or her entry, and pressing the CALL button, then using noises you produce with your mouth and nose, instead of using Facebook.
Donâ(TM)t have your friendâ(TM)s phone number, or does your friend not have time to talk to you on the phone in real life? Well, then he or she wasnâ(TM)t really your friend in the first place, and what youâ(TM)ve been doing on Facebook all this while, besides helping make Mark Zuckerberg several billion dollars richer than he has any right to be, and letting a bunch of people know stuff about you that youâ(TM)d be far better served keeping to yourself, is deluding yourself about how many friends you really have, and ironically, probably losing whatever friends you have in real life, because youâ(TM)re spending all your time staring at that stupid little glowing rectangle, wasting electricity, becoming more isolated and depressed, and contributing to the downfall of our civilization. Also, looking at cats in absurdly small boxes.
So try Not-Facebook today, and stop giving random nefariously-intentioned strangers your personal information, and reconnect with real-life, and real-friends, not fake Facebook âfriendsâ
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Cool.. how does my grandma use these new facebook alternatives? Oh... she needs to join a crypto exchange, provide photographic ID with her webcam and await approval, buy some ethereum then move it to a chrome plugin before she also needs to install before she can use it? Are people in tech really this distant with reality? Fuck blockchain solutions.
Ubuntu touch was discontinued. You must submit to the borg.
When initially created Facebook was like a digital version of a thing from the past that some of us used to carry around, which was a book of some sort that had contact information in it.
That might have been a name and a number, maybe an address, a business name, or if it was a certain book you might have drawn a picture or described the gorgeous creature.
Briefly you may have written an email address or ICQ number, Pager #?
Facebook became popular during a time when there were not many other lets call it 'serious' social networks out other than MySpace (findapix, friendster? there were a lot of small ones).
MySpace was dieing because of the same reasons Facebook is about to die: People value their privacy.
On MySpace there was no privacy. Then suddenly this thing Facebook came out that you couldn't even join unless you had certain University emails.
It was cooler than getting a gmail account for a hot minute, which also required an invite.
So the irony is rich. This social network that initially was nothing new other than it offered privacy that MySpace didn't and nobody else offered either, built its entire wealth selling that very same private information.
And people are outraged?
No the dum dums are still using it. Because this story isn't on Facebook. Its on /.
My closest friends and family use Path. It's better than Facebook at everything we care about and I for one am very happy to pay the annual subscription.
An ethical alternative to Facebook that’s dedicated to doing good
Good Connection (GC) is an ethical new British-based social media platform that gives users a say in how the value from their data is used. In pre-launch tests users have been signing up at conversion rates three times greater than the norm because:
Half the profits are going to the charities & good causes the users choose
GC is committed to being straightforward and transparent about the way it uses data
GC does not sell data to third parties or allow them to access it
The launch of www.GoodConnection.com is being brought forward to meet consumer needs.
Contact the Founder & CEO, Jo Edwardes jo@goodconnection.com
I would imagine you are giving google a free pass because they are google, if this were facebook you would be screaming blue murder and not looking for ways to excuse it.
https://diasporafoundation.org... diaspora* is based on three key philosophies: Decentralization Freedom Privacy
Yeah, you nailed it right there. I get repeated emails from Kickstarter pimping random campaigns that have nothing to do with things I have bought before, and many of which appear to be thinly veiled scams. I'd block emails from Kickstarter, but then I would miss updates from products I have backed.
In this respect Kickstarter reminds me of those scam "bidding" sites like QBids or DealDaash. "Bids are not an auction, they are for entertainment purposes only. We do not promise that you will get any products in exchange for your money."
I might simply stop using kickstarter altogether. Anything that I buy usually ends up as a normal product that I can buy post-campaign for not much more.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Minds.com, a social network created with top priorities being user privacy and freedom.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Wow, did you pick the wrong place to pose this (completely legitimate) question. The only crowd that hates Facebook more than /. is reddit. It may be a tie.
I have been slowly integrating into steemit( http:\\www.steemit.com ) as it is blockchain based, pays me and my friends for our content, and because it is distributed. We chat using Discord. Recently several friends have come up with a local aggregator account so that those of us in southern California can keep in touch easier.
Is there a good alternative to dopamine?
Casteism
I did like this. I disabled FB, but kept messenger.(google it).
I am still reachable for my "FB friends" and groupchats discussing things. Like quitting smoking step by step.
Also look into Signal, the sound&video quality is actually the real selling point, encryption is bonus.
It's even worse.
Try it!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
no facebook.
Tim Berners-Lee suggests MeWe
What actually is the value being provided by Facebook or similar services and is that value actually worth the price you have to pay using such a service at all??
My evaluation and decision on this is: there isn't much value and the value is far out-weighed by the costs. So I have no Facebook account and never will.
When it comes to value, it's about what you spend your finite, 24-hour-day time on and if there an opportunity cost you are inflicting on yourself by using Facebook or ANY similar service at all? I believe that cost is so high that there is no reason to use any such service structured like Facebook. You are quite literally better off "social networking" in meatspace instead.
Iâ(TM)m not sure thatâ(TM)s any better from the privacy PoV.
Real relations with REAL PEOPLE?
NAH! It'll never work!
Back around 1960 kids found out you could talk to many others at the same time when calling into the Top Radio Station here in Chicago. Between the busy signal you could hear and speak with many other teens. Was this a social network? I don't remember if, later, Phone Phreaks were able to do the same thing?
Good idea. I'll just stroll over to my friend in North Carolina, or maybe my wife's Florida cousin, this evening and talk to them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Hmm... The primary linkage to the original story is the need for better financial models?
Anyway, as it applies in the crowd funding case, I think it would make much more sense to fund prototypes. If it's a valuable product (or service (including software)) that can be marketed on a rational basis, then the focus should be on proving the concept. The donors can be compensated by (1) Knowing they are helping the product get to market faster, (2) Helping assess the real demand for the product, and (3) Special incentives, just as a raffle for the prototypes, discounts when it goes into production, or maybe just being the first to be allowed to buy the product. (The prototypes may well become historical artifacts with special value, but I personally wouldn't want to buy the first production models since there are still going to be some bugs, even if the project plan included proper testing.)
I think the charity share brokerage should be earning its tithe by project evaluation in addition to the support for planning and funding.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You seem quite confused, or maybe you can't understand what I'm saying. I am certainly NOT suggesting that our personal data is not valuable. What I am saying is that our personal interests are not (under the current economic models) congruent with the profit-driven interests of the corporate cancers that are harvesting our personal data and USING OUR OWN DATA AGAINST US.
I don't really have much time this morning, but let me try an elevator pitch for an example: Imagine an email intermediary that holds your personal information and auctions blocks of attention (to protect the individual data) to legitimate companies with goods and services to sell. Such an email company would have a strongly vested interest in protecting your personal information to protect their own position in the exchanges. You would have a vested interest in providing more data, but it would be your decision if the extra money from increasing the value of the auctions you're involved in would be worth revealing more data. At the same time, the email intermediary would have a strongly vested interest to kill the spam to protect the value of the legitimate email they are benefiting from...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
So, you want specific charges and solid evidence completely sourced before an investigation begins? There's a lot of things that could land Trump in prison for life, given that he's fairly old and doesn't look to be in great health. There's possibilities for financial crimes. We know he's got extensive ties with Russians, and there may be something there.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There are many, like My Space or https://ello.co/beta-public-pr...
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Is them being free universally such a problem though?
Apple can be big privacy advocates because the majority of their profits does not lie within advertising but hardware sales, so they do not rely on selling user information at all. Thus, they can boost their public image by guarding their users' privacy. A win/win scenario where the business model aligns with user interests.
Similarily, Google profits would not come from controversially harvesting and selling Google+ user information, but from much less controversial AdWords around the web at large. Are you sure Google would really need Google+ to be a paid service to not have to infringe on user privacy?
Today the Ritalin-raised generation needs face book, grief counselors, in order to survive in their fragile and special life. I personally don't use social media because even with 17,000 likes, I am still an obnoxious asshole. I think it's exciting to live in these times with instant news and entertainment and every day I give thanks for living in a gated comunity
Proudly Butchering code for 20 years
Whatever happened to Ello?
Pls start telling us the alternatives to FB. Now pls.