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?
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
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.
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.
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.
ANYTHING, other than Facebook, is an excellent alternative to Facebook.
Usenet won't work unless the people posting to it can be held accountable for what they post - otherwise it's spam, flames, and shitposts. At the moment, most of the posts made to talk.bizarre are coming from some dating site that promises to help their users connect with "cougars". On top of that, it's ridiculously easy to crosspost to inappropriate newsgroups, and once that starts it's very hard to stop.
What the hell???? But, just for grins, let me tell you about a glory hole that used to be in one of the very oldest buildings at UT Austin. The divider between stalls was a huge slab of solid marble. Somehow, a glory hole was made in it. It was there for ages. Might have something to do with the fact that the building also houses the Architecture Library. I found it more amusing than practical.
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.
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.
Let me rephrase it to reduce the chance of sarcastic pedantry:
What is a good alternative to each point of functionality that Facebook provides without the use of Facebook?
"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 attitude seems to be endemic throughout the whole industry now. Just bought some HP workstations that I'm going to throw linux on (Slick small devices with dual screen support), but just turning on the computer for Windows 10: Microsoft wants to collect data on you and you have to agree to it, and then HP wants to collect data on you and you have to agree to it. This anonymous usage data isn't just limited to their computers, it's on their damn printers too, which annoys the crap out of me. When did I agree that my printer is going to be a trojan horse into my corporate network? I no longer trust any devices anymore.
I had to create new firewall rules to block all traffic to the internet from these devices. Luckily, this is getting easier to do with new switches being able to block stuff by port and easy to create VLANS.
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.
In fact, the first dozen or so twitter users all came from Slashdot.
The FB app can't slurp your data if it's not installed on your phone. Or so I've heard...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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
The solution to this is quite simple : remove anonymity.
Self-hosting is still a thing, right?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I visit all the time. Ir is a great channel.
Check out the YouTube channel and enjoy your visit in Silicon Valley Knowledge.
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.
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?
+1 for Usenet.
A good project would be to place a new GUI over a few of the more censorship resistant networks.
Bring Usenet, IRC, P2P, web cam, microphone support, crypto chat together as one GUI "app".
Each network supporting a wide range of different was of connecting with people. Person to person and for global communications.
No social media censorship and big brand politics.
Make the internet great again.
--
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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.
I agree, can someone mod this one up as "Informative" since I lack mod points.
Anyway - overall there's no thing as "too big to fail" on the internet. One major mistake and people leave a service like outrunning an avalanche.
Either you have a specialized service that has the edge or you have a general service that just works because "everyone" uses it until something sour happens.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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 ;-)
Vimeo, Bitchute.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Usenet died when all the major ISPs used the child pron excuse to drop support for it.
Facebook knows your phones advertiser id and that will still get passed around to facebook APIs from most apps. So they'll still know what you're up to.
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.
The solution to this is quite simple : remove anonymity.
And how would you do that? Require that all usenet servers must document their users' details and not permit anyone to post unless they can supply those details? Who checks the details to make sure that Mr I. P. Frehley actually DOES live at 1060 West Addison St.? Would there be an American Usenet Identity Service that liases with the Russian, Chinese, English, Icelandic, African, New Zealand, Australian and Duchy of Grand Fenwick Usenet Identity services?
Usenet was a good idea when it was made up of less than a thousand university students, but it doesn't have any mechanisms for dealing with gaslighters and professional spin doctors. It didn't have to.
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.
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 ?
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
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...
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.
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.
Yes, but it doesn't need to be pure P2P. Something that uses an OpenID like concept with an RSS feed would allow the same functionality. Allow links between servers but allow them to limit information sent to others without some sort of trust mechanism.
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!
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...
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?
A modest killfile will rid you of most USENET spam.
The user-interfaces built on top of USENET could also choose to plugin to some kind of SPAM filtering API.
It's not rocket science. The big issue is that choosing and employing these filters should be your choice, not the platform's.
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.
The usenet model, just like the email and web models, are both distributed and financed by the participants...
You don't pay directly for usenet or email, but your isp probably provides those services as part of the subscription cost, and there are a variety of third party services also available under various different models. There's nothing stopping you from creating your own server either.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
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.
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.
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
Or, never get hooked in the first place. That's what I did (or didn't) do.
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.
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.
The solution to this is quite simple : remove anonymity.
No goddammed fucking way.
Removing anonymity absolutely empowers any netk00k who wants your hide just because you ruffled his feather because his pathology cannot stand something that is perfectly normal for 99.44% of people.
Or if you have the misfortune of angering some corporate behemoth with an agenda, without anonymity, you are just toast.
On Facebook, newspapers have the power to ban you completely for the whole of Facebook for 30 days if you question or mock their editorial line: I know this from personal experience. This is what “accountability” really means; you do not face a rigid, democratically-selected set of guidelines where you know what is okay or not, but an ever changing whim of corporate drones who haven’t got laid last night.
By having the User Agent eliminate any post without a valid digital signature automatically. People can already get validated X.509 certificate, so everything is more or less already in place.
Personally, I think the X.509 certificate should at least include the name, age, country, and postal code of the person. The age is to let people filter out kids, and the postal code is to differentiate people with the same name.
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/
Look at my user name. Yes, it's my real name. And you know what? I'm certainly someone with some "very offensive" opinions. That never stopped me to express those opinions using my real name. More than that, I live in Canada. Since it's clear some people might feel "offended" for what I say, this means some of my opinions could easily be classified as "hate speech". I could end up in jail for them. But I prefer to go to jail rather than to shut up or to hide.
"Lively political debate" on the Internet between anonymous people are extremely low quality and they have very little influence in real life. They don't change anything. They are only intellectual masturbation.
In fact, it's even worse than that. By hiding, by refraining from expressing what you really think in real life, you give way to political correctness. One of the reasons political correctness took so much space in our society is because a lot of people who had an "offensive" opinion decided to hide.
The best way to stop living in fear is to stop hiding under your blanket and to open that damn closet door to confront the monster.
I know I could lose some clients for my opinions. It happened to me in the past. I know Google could one day decide to close my account (I don't have a Twitter account nor a Facebook account). I know that a bunch of SJW "netk00ks" could one day try to assault me (I always post under my real name, and as far as I know, I'm the only "William Baric" in Canada, so I'm easy to find).
So?
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
Social networks are not about websites or tools you use for access - they are about PEOPLE you connect to.
So, yeah... sure...
Every from teenagers through grandmas to everyone you know surely can't wait to jump onto that sweet ASCII thing like it's 1990s all over again.
NOT!
Slashdot OP is stupid, confusing people with software.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Instagram is owned by Facebook since 2012 (for one billion USD).
Prison for what exactly?
Please be very specific. Please provide evidence and cite your source.
You don't need to completely remove it. You want each post cryptographically signed by a randomly generated identity. Anyone who wants to post anonymously can do so by just generating a new identity, but set the default to ignore posts from users with 0 reputation (or, ideally, have something like a 99% . Once people have posted a few times and others have replied to them or endorsed them in some other way then increase the probability that they'll be seen. Let people configure their thresholds and weight individuals that they trust to moderate more or less highly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I agree, MeWe seems to be the best option, since it has iOS and android apps and a rather large user base already
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
JaredOfEuropa writes:
No. Just no. Absolutely not. Because “being held acccountable for what you post” in some countries means jail time or torture. [ ... ] I prefer to stay anonymous, thanks.
You didn't post with your real name, but you didn't post as AC either.
Depends on what you mean by "accountable". Reputation systems can work with pseudo anonymity.
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.
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
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.
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.
Personally, I think the X.509 certificate should at least include the name, age, country, and postal code of the person. The age is to let people filter out kids, and the postal code is to differentiate people with the same name.
Seriously? Have you bothered to work out any of this in your head or are you so insulated from reality that you think everyone lives in a first-world country where nobody is beheaded or tortured for making unpopular political views?
Off the top of my head, I could come up with a half dozen ways to make it easy for a legit person to sign up for a service and difficult for spammers to created hundreds or thousands of bogus accounts..
1 idea would be a cryptographic computational puzzle... Something that might take a random PC or phone a minute or two to solve. Maybe more than that.... whatever it takes to make it not too much of a pain-in-the-ass for someone legit, but non worthwhile for a spamfucker.
Or maybe a multi-faceted approach... Users can click a button "nobody is going to torture me" and opt to link acct to cell phone.. Or "send my validation code via snail mail" and then a second button could say "I'll opt for the 30 min crypto challenge because my government is barbaric and hates freedom"
But any system that demands you divulge too many details about yourself... Fuck that...
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
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."
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.
So one app can support a lot of different ways of moving data.
Person to person with crypto.
To upload and let the world see.
P2P within a set community.
That gives the user the freedom of social media without having to be censored by one brand.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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! --
Real relations with REAL PEOPLE?
NAH! It'll never work!
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.
And you're still in a developed democratic country, so you think insulting people by category takes courage. In many countries, attempting to foster free speech or oppose the government is punishable by prison, torture, and possibly death. That takes courage, even if the messages can be posted anonymously.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Any uncensored service is going to have all sorts of unsavory things on it. Usenet died when not enough people cared about it for it to be worth any hassle.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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...
Whatever happened to Ello?