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
Go OUTSIDE and give it a try. Did you know the sky is still blue?
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.
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.
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.
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
Timeline is your inbox.
Grouping people into groups is making client-side in your MUA or setting up mailing lists.
Photo albums is a home web server if you happen to live in an area whose ISP makes it practical.
Why not make a fake account and test it
I've read horror stories on the web of people being locked out of their Facebook account for refusal or inability to link an SMS number to an account.
The video can go on great sites like Vimeo, Bitchute.
Support sites that support freedom of speech.
A video clip that would have got supported on social media can find a lot of really great other sites.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
+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"
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.
The user always pays.
The users data sold in bulk via social media and ads.
Paying for their own services as they want.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You mean Google hasn't killed Google Plus yet? And it's free?
If something's free then you're the product.
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.
IRC?
J
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.
#IDeletedFB5YrsAgoWhereWereUAllThatTime?
No hashtag. I immediately recognized Facebook and (to a lesser extent) Twitter for what they are when they first came out. I never jumped on the bandwagon. I've never had an account on either site. Generally, the longer I live the more I find that when large masses of people all jump on a big bandwagon it's usually counter to my interests. Exceptions do exist but they're rare. Always it's a case-by-case basis, of course. As Edward Bernays (nephew to Sigmund Freud) recognized, it's all too easy to get people to vote against their own interests. All you have to do is avoid talking about rational pros-and-cons and go for emotional appeal. This is the guy who convinced women to smoke (because liberation! -- tobacco companies double their customers!) back when only men smoked, wrote books with names like Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda, termed his work Manufactured Consent, and founded what is now called Public Relations.
People need to re-learn how to say "no, I don't need that". Always the illusion is that you are being served, as a great modern teacher once said. It looks like they're helping you, but actually they're helping themselves to you. If it appeals to a sense of vanity, a desire for attention, or any other unmet need and emotional weakness of yours, then it's feeding everything wrong with you and profiting from it. The textbook example is the drug dealer and the drug addict, it's just that often there is no physical chemical involved.
I'm glad you came to your own understanding of this. Everyone does so at their own pace. I'm fortunate to have realized this before Myspace and then Facebook came along but I assure you, I made my own mistakes before I learned by doing. However you arrived at this place, it's called personal growth and it is to be celebrated and cherished.
I long ago learned not to pity myself because it's wasted energy that should be invested in change, therefore I don't pity others (empathy and compassion are completely different things that actually can help). If I did pity myself, I would also pity those who never learn, those who jump from one bandwagon to the next saying "this time it's going to work!" They remind me of people who stay in abusive relationships, rationalizing the actions of their tormentors while remaining afraid to be on their own. Facebook and their ilk are just the modern P.T. Barnum who recognize that there is profit because a sucker is born every minute. This mentality also believes that "it is immoral to let a sucker keep his money". Today, data is money.
It's that simple once you cut through all the hype and bullshit. It helps when you understand what you are dealing with. Then you can make an informed decision and the temptations no longer seem so tempting.
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
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?
USENET could function as a back-end to something more user-friendly that incorporates media-elements, etc.
The biggest problem I see is that USENET doesn't allow random people to create new groups. Even if your USENET admin does allow you to do so, there's no guarantee that your new group propagates.
This can be solved, of course, but I'm pretty sure that once people start tinkering at that level they'll end up with something that can no-longer be called USENET.
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.
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.
Put the filtering at user rather than group level. No need to moderate group content if you've hidden the users you think behave poorly. But I assume each user should do it themselves or else people are shut down.
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
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."
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.
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
That's exactly how you break a heroin addiction.