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?
Does anyone actually believe that?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
Jeez, I really don't understand comments like this. It's perfectly obvious what people use FB for. Literally billions of people use it to share and receive updates from friends and family without having to initiate a direct interchange with a specific subset of people from among their contacts. It's a simple and effective way to keep up to date with contacts around the world, and email just doesn't work in the same way, otherwise those billions of people would use email instead. You may not see the need for such a service yourself, but self-evidently that is not true for many other people.
No. Just no. Absolutely not. Because “being held acccountable for what you post” in some countries means jail time or torture. And even if it isn’t the government, in many countries including my own, the wrong opninion or party affiliation can result in bricks through your windows. In these times, when it’s not hardened activists but ordinary people feel they have a right and duty to silence undesirable opinions by any means at their disposal, I prefer to stay anonymous, thanks.
There’s some good lively political debate on a couple of blogs I frequent. As well as trolls, nut jobs and the occasional spammer. But we all understand that without anonymity, these sites would be dead. Most people would justly be afraid to posit anything remotely controversial under their real name.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Go OUTSIDE and give it a try.
Go where? Oooh there's an open air free concert in my city this afternoon. It was advertised on Facebook.
Wait you didn't think Facebook was used just to stare at posts from people you don't like did you?
Facebook's main staying power is that two apps handle everything. Groups, messaging, calendaring, blogs, file downloads, movies, pictures, and many other items.
I disagree. Facebook's main staying power is that it's where the people are. Most people that I know who use Facebook are using it for three purposes. They're posting and reading posts, like twitter except the audience is your friends and not a bunch of strangers. They're using messenger as an alternative for SMS, since they don't necessarily have the cell phone numbers for all of their Facebook friends. And then some people are using Facebook to promote their work, art, band, or whatever.
For all of these things, having the right people in your network is the whole value of it. Having yet another microblogging platform is easy, but it's hard to get your friends and family to use it. Having an messenger app is easy, but getting random acquaintances to sign onto it isn't going to be easy. If you're trying to promote something, then you have to go where your audience is, or else you have to promote an alternate platform first before you can promote yourself.
I know Facebook can be used for all kinds of other things, but I'm not aware of anyone I know really using it for anything else. For example, you mention calendaring. I don't really know anyone who tries to use Facebook to keep track of their calendar. To send and receive invites, sure, but that can be done through any messaging platform. But I don't know anyone who says, "I need to check what I'm doing next week. I'll look at Facebook to find out."
Anyway, back to my larger point, the main feature of Facebook isn't any of the features. The main feature is the audience. I don't think the solution is to get everyone to move to a particular new platform, but to devise a way where people on different platforms can connect to their whole audience. The real problem that nobody is trying to fix is, why can't I use my Twitter account to subscribe to Facebook feeds? Why can't I use my Hangouts account to message Facebook users? Why isn't there interoperability between platforms?
We don't require that you have a Gmail account to send emails to Gmail users. We don't require that your site be hosted on DreamHost to link to sites listed on DreamHost. We developed a set of standards that lets each service communicate with different hosts managed by different people, using a set of open protocols. That's how the Internet works. The whole Internet was built on the idea that people were going to do that, to use standard protocols allowing different hosts to communicate with each other.
The problem is, we don't demand that anymore. We don't even ask for it or expect it. Facebook makes its microblogging platform and its messaging platform, and lock it down to require a Facebook account, and Google makes their competing service, and they can't talk to each other, and nobody even thinks that's strange. The answer isn't a new proprietary platform, but a new set of protocols that can be used by all the platforms.
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.
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