Slashdot Mirror
We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites (vice.com)
Jason Koebler from Motherboard argues "we should replace Facebook with personal websites." An anonymous reader shares the report: As a freshman in high school, in the year of our lord 2002, I made a website called "Jason's Site." While a website named after myself and devoted to updates about my own life was unspeakably vain for the time, it was also quite forward looking: The site has a news feed, an "about me" page, and an email mailing list for people to receive updates. I intended for it to be funded by reader donations. It had a section for Flash videos and photos, a guestbook, and a "friends" page that was literally a list of my friends. It had an ill-advised but nonetheless prescient "hot or not" section that featured photos of my friends and acquaintances and predated both Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's original idea for the social network, called "FaceMash." I updated the site regularly and obsessively for about three months, and then never returned to it. The site was embarrassing then and is embarrassing now, but abandoning it was a terrible mistake.
Facebook gets a lot of credit for "disrupting" social media and for turning MySpace into a worthless piece of garbage, but millions upon millions of teenagers and young adults were already sharing every aspect of their lives on other social networks, and on their own websites. Facebook had the good fortune of being new, slightly different, and exclusive. It was even luckier to come to power shortly before the rise of the smartphone. I guess what I'm saying is that Facebook isn't really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now. Facebook has of course become something much larger than a single website, and has, despite its flaws, "helped connect the world" for better or worse. But Facebook tapped into a trend that was already happening -- it didn't invent the idea of letting people put stuff about their lives online, it just monetized it better.
Facebook gets a lot of credit for "disrupting" social media and for turning MySpace into a worthless piece of garbage, but millions upon millions of teenagers and young adults were already sharing every aspect of their lives on other social networks, and on their own websites. Facebook had the good fortune of being new, slightly different, and exclusive. It was even luckier to come to power shortly before the rise of the smartphone. I guess what I'm saying is that Facebook isn't really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now. Facebook has of course become something much larger than a single website, and has, despite its flaws, "helped connect the world" for better or worse. But Facebook tapped into a trend that was already happening -- it didn't invent the idea of letting people put stuff about their lives online, it just monetized it better.
LOL.. Replace Facebook with personal websites eh? Isn't that how this whole internet thing got started back when I was in college?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Remember how great all those web sites built by High Schoolers were back in the day? I don't either.
google and bookface would totally honor things like robots.txt files on a personal website, especially if it's hosted on some garbage "cloud" social site.
They would never harvest your data and sell it to hundreds of companies. /s
Yes, lets bring them back.
Some of those sites were fun to browse
You also go to start somewhere.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
IIRC an individual could set up their own little custom website-let, their own little space within their control. "Their" space.
Cuz it dontz!
Go Jezuz verzuz Zatan!
That's 'year of our Lord 2002'
People have been building the protocols to support this at https://indieweb.org/ and http://activitypub.rocks/.
If you're not ready to host your own software, public installations of Mastodon are a decent alternative - https://instances.social/list
Facebook succeeded because it made self-publishing, and commenting, easier. (Easier even than the trivially simple 2 page original html spec.)
Google succeeded by making the search place on the Internet simple to use (one box, one, or was it two, buttons) and uncluttered by unsightly banner ads.
There's a lesson in that.
Giving too many degrees of freedom, or too much disorganized and useless information, reduces the size of the user base.
So maybe if someone comes up with a website-making template thing that makes personal websites (and their interaction) as constrained and uniform to use as facebook is, maybe that could happen. Otherwise, it won't.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Who's "we", and why do feel "we" can do this?
Can't agree more. Personal websites (e.g. IndieWeb) and interoperable online communities are the way to go to replace Facebook with a distributed approach. That's why we started Grou.ps (http://grou.ps/) an open source online community builder Grou.ps just a week ago. It's all open source, the code is on Github, it is written with IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org/) standards built-in. Everyone is welcome to create their own community and contribute to the source code. As for personal websites, we're good, Wordpress and Jekyll are both good open source solutions. As an example, my personal website https://emresokullu.com/ is just one, it follows h-card rules, and once I add "follow/friend" feature to it, it will turn into a functional node in the distributed open source utopia. More of us should do that, and make this a reality.
This is such a terrible idea that won't ever happen that it doesn't even warrant my reasons why its terrible..
Facebooks use of personal data can be regulated. The use of data from a public site such as "Jason's Site." is an order of magnitude harder to regulate due to it being accessible to anyone, I don't see how that's an improvement.
Facebook is boring but basically functional, and I don't really care who knows what brand of cereal I prefer or how often I buy coffee.
Tumblr, Blogger, etc are not much different than GeoCities and MySpace back in the day. Being totally devoid of social networking makes these better than Facebook according to the criteria in the article, but most people aren't following the author's arbitrary criteria. Running your own website still has some technical hurdles for most people, but there are plenty of alternatives that get you nearly there or you pay for a full blown CMS. Larger organizations and clubs can run WordPress through a hosting company, and retain a lot a lot more control than Facebook grants.
There is also MeWe and a few others that are basically like Facebook but more group oriented like G+ was. It's still the social networking model that people seem to want.
in short, unrealistic expectations on how society will adapt to social networking. regression to early technology is very unlikely.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
more people would have their own personal site. Those Raspberry Pis are perfect for it. But I believe most contracts prohibit you from operating a server. This is yet another reason we must demand that ISPs be given common carrier status.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Research the subject...
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/8bilw2/darpas_lifelog_canceled_the_same_day_facebook_was/
They wanted to record every breath you take. Q has said, "we can hear you breathing" -- seems like a link, there!
The original appeal of Facebook for me is how easy it was to stay connected. Search for a long-lost friend and BOOM you are connected forever. If you are old enough to remember manually keeping an address book up to date, then you are old enough to remember how freeing it felt to be relieved of this responsibility. For frequent contacts? Sure, enter the contact into your phone (if it isn't already synced with Facebook). But for everyone else, it's a great way to stay in touch. Or maybe not a great way, but it's a way and it requires no effort.
Now I like it because I can stay plugged in to local events - local papers are either closed or worthless now, so for good or bad social media == local news.
I don't really post much on there, but I do share a lot of photos - it has replaced Flickr for me in that regard... but that was as simple as changing the plugin that I use in Lightroom.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...but we should add the personal websites under a single domain so people can go there to find them and search them easily. We could call it mypage.com or something.
Running your own web-server has gotten easier and cheaper. A RaspberryPI 3 would easily handle the traffic for most people's personal sites. And high speed connections are much less costly than they used to be for the speed you get.
Replacing Facebook with yet another central repository like GeoCities used to be is not a step forward, or backward, it's just the same thing.
Facebook beat MySpace because of Glitter GIFs and other ungodly customizations that were so popular. Going to someone's page was unbearable. That's why Facebook banned GIFs for so long on their site and they highly control the layout to something simple and elegant instead of allowing garish monstrosities.
If you want to make a go of being a "somebody" on the internet, then yes, you should build your own brand, host your own content and stop running ads that point to a megacorp's platform.
Even streaming videos is trivial these days. I have the public domain "His Girl Friday" streaming on my own server as a proof of concept.
The closer you get to the ISP the closer you get to the first amendment being enforced. Freedom of the Press doesn't give you a right to another man's printing press. Roll your own. Then you can print what you want and no one can shut you down without a court order that shows your "speech" isn't protected by the first amendment.
Work Safe Porn
Amusingly, they're recording everything a person does -- even, those people who won't be entered into the Book of Life!
Which means, the Book of Life most likely does not include the log of lifelog/Facebook. So, there's that!
We could have protocols for doing facebook-like stuff, like sharing walls and groups and... whatever else is on facebook. We could have an open source reference implementation. It could all be decentralized, and made available by ISPs in the same way they make email available (that basically means teenagers won't have to compile a kernel so they can install Linux on a raspberry pi just to share cat pictures). Such a network wouldn't have a single, ruling company - it would all be decentralized.
How is this news worthy? How did this make it to slashdot? How does someone have such a terrible idea that becomes news on the internet and then posted to slashdot which then passes the mods?
You must be new here. This is Slashdot... We fight over ALL the best bad ideas on the internet for fun here.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
How about we all stop being such narcissists that we think the minutiae of our lives should be shared with all the world?
Or if you are such a narcissist that you can't stop, you accept that the cost of your personality disorder is the loss of your privacy...
What FB and other social media sites did was allow idiots with very little technical skill publicize their activities. Of course, the problem is those folks are actually pretty stupid and have zero to contribute aside from revenge porn, cat pictures, and photos of the food they are eating at the time. Oh and they can apparently share Russian propaganda with ease. If we go back to making people build their own websites (or at least have to install one with a few clicks on a host) then the level and speed of stupid propagating on the internet will plummet by a factor of 1000. Suddenly only those who know the magic incantations of a point and click UI will be able to spread nonsense everywhere. that minimal level of expertise is enough to block out most of the mouth breathers. The only annoying morons left will be us... and that's actually an ok thing since at least if we're dense, racist, or sexist we can engage in semi-intelligent arguments before calling each other cucks. I'll take that any day over what we have right now.
Seems weird to use the word "should" for something we did 10-20 years ago, or maybe more than that. I guess the people who don't care didn't, but if they don't care then they don't matter. Do we really need the world to be a cult where everyone has to do everything that everybody else does?
Of course, a bunch of personal websites aren't the same thing as Facebook, but I don't expect facts to derail a rant.
Because I'm going to spend all day going from one friend's site to another to another..... rather than a single site to find out what's going on with all my friends and family.
I hate to admit this, because Facebook is horrible and a drain on society, but Facebook at least understands what its appeal is. All the people who think that we just have to make websites easier to build and maintain are completely missing the point. Facebook is big because it is one place, not many. You're literally trying to replace Facebook with something that lacks its main appeal.
So, your website allowed people you preapproved to add content and prohibited others? In real-time? I doubt it. And your website notified you whenever any of your friends' websites had new content? I doubt it. And your website allowed you to search thru the websites of (several billion) others (with similar protections) to find more 'friends'? No, it didn't. I'm not sure why (I'm definitely not a fan) Facebook has been so successful, and it may be possible now to create an alternative. But who pays? Yeah, everybody providing their own support for their own site is not going to work. Obviously. Creating a self-sustaining alternative will require a business plan, a way to at least break even. I'm not seeing it, people are (generally) too lazy, too cheap, and too parasitical for the kind of distributed system you seem to be suggesting.
so fucked..
ya know as adults, why the fuck cant we police ourselves?
buncha bitches
Zuck is a fuck... No, Zuck is a butt fuck.
What people should go back to doing is actually connecting with people directly, and in person as much as possible, rather than the fake, sterile experience of using the Internet, which it seems to me more often than not is used to avoid actually being social. It's also screwing up the socialization of kids, especially teeangers, who are socially awkward more often than not to start with, and who need more practice socializing, not excuses to be socially avoidant.
Nah, we should go back to emailing everyone in our contacts photos and family updates several times a year. Maybe cram it all into a PDF.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
That was difficult!
Oh I know why: because only 0.0001% on the planet are able to figure out how to run their own website and maintain it and pay for it.
I disagree. It's because most people are lazy. I know plenty of people who knew better and still don't have their own web sites.
I don't respond to AC's.
Why isn't anyone selling off-the-shelf private "clouds"??
Plug it in, and you can tell all the data krakens to fuck off!
It should definitely replace Google's and Apple's "cloud" sync.
Opera had a really nice start with Opera Unite. All it needed is an always-on home server to keep it being usable when the PC is off.
turning MySpace into a worthless piece of garbage
Uh, MySpace users did that very effectively all by themselves. Facebook sucks a whole lot of hairy balls, but switching to suck hairy ass instead doesn't seem like an upgrade to me.
Think back to forums and web sites.
Email lists and IRC. Yahoo chat and search engines that really found content.
Sites that people interested in a topic had to put effort into.
No shadow bans, freedom of speech. Freedom after speech.
No Spanish government demanding removal of all content relating to anything about a Catalan declaration of independence.
No French government saying that people cant make fun of French politics using cartoons, music, art.
No German government removing comments on German history, the news about Germany and the results of German politics.
No Communist Party in China setting up a search engine with a US brand to never find results on Tiananmen square, a funny bear or words like term limits.
The ability to talk about DRM, crypto, math.
The right publish about repair work without a brand using terms like counterfeit to stop such topics.
The ability to find a movie funny and comment on acting ability. To talk about a bad movie script. Without getting banned by an actor or movie company.
To publish your own comments, thoughts and politics without politically active social media "staff" removing accounts and removing your content.
To not have a search engine de rank news many users want to read.
To not remove payment options to people and sites people want to support. Then not remove any comments about such a policy change.
The web gave back a lot of results on any topic.
The good news was your comments stayed published and your content was yours.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The true value of the Internet has yet to be realized.
Disintermediation is the cutting out of the middleman. The technology allows for direct communications without a snooper like Lamebook interfering and looking over your shoulder. But it's not done often enough.
Artist to fan sales and communications without the record company or movie studio in the way, that's how it should be. We rarely need middlemen. Heck, imagine how more unified the world might be if we all prayed directly to god and ignored the layer of priest/mullah/rabbi holy men and books and armies standing in the way. God IS great - but religion is the devil. To me, the middleman is always the devil.
In life, and in cyber-space, we would all be more happy with Diasporas, or this poster's desire for expanding the use of webpages, than having creepy middlemen Lamebooks interfering. Hopefully wiser and more connected people than I can try to bring about such a re-creation of the Internet.
Google and bookface would totally honor things like robots.txt files on a personal website, especially if it's hosted on some garbage "cloud" social site.
To be robots.txt was always more about "don't waste your own resources indexing this" than any kind of privacy mechanism. If they want to ignore that, hey, it's their CPU and storage.
I think personal websites still seems better. Anything public at least multiple sites would index so they could be searched generally. Anything I didn't want public I could have in a password protected area, where indexers could not reach...
It seems better than a world where something I might have written up on Facebook is just lost down a memory hole and not very findable by someone googling for something.
Now the real problem is - who is hosting these personal websites? Is it Tumblr, Wordpress? They are all kind of a mess, even compared to Facebook. And it's a lot harder to find out what friends have new content, even if they all have RSS feeds properly managed on these personal websites... pretty easy to open up and glance through a Facebook feed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Facebook is something you should avoid at all costs.
Corporatism != Free Market
The internet was pretty great back when people put stuff on their own websites. Remember webrings? Forums are still the best way to connect with like-minded people. Facebook is just horrible at this kind of thing.
Getting the drooling masses off of Facebook and others like it is a nearly impossible task. Old people today think young people are all computer-smart when in fact they are very computer-stupid. Mobile rules the world of these people and most of them only care about useless shit-shat stuff with their friends and family.
I've already done my part.
If the nerd in each family where to do this, then start cross-linking with the nerds in other families in their circles we would have the share your meme, dog, and rug-rat circuit family and low-tech users need!
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
There are tools like Diaspora* that essentially let you setup your own little facebook that can even hook up with other Diaspora* shards. At one point I thought about trying to get my wife and all her friends to migrate over to a private Diaspora* shard with paid hosting.
Was to hard a sell to the wife so I decided not to bother, but it definitely looked like a viable replacement. Not sure it supported all the games which was a deal breaker not to mention I don't want to run a social network site for fun.
But there are options.
Allow me to repost from another thread:
Byte (magazine) Information Exchange
That was "Social Media"
That was fun.
That was informative.
And it cost - money - to belong. Not a lot of money, but the members paid for the service.
We were the users, clients - Byte was the service provider, Bix was the service.
Clear as a bell.
Also there was Delphi and several others.
(even AOL?)
Then there were 'hidden cost' services like a college account and USNET.
Why put up with Farce Book?
I've never been on Facebook, but I am on Mastodon, have a tech podcast, co-host a major nationally syndicated radio show, and so on. The podcast / "TV" show is semi-decentralized in that it isn't hosted on a centralized platform like YouTube. Everything was done in-house and based around free software. From production to distribution to marketing. I like and use Mastodon and it's actually been quite useful and successful in attracting or maybe I should say gathering a base of people to follow the show. I also have the advantage of being a high paid executive at a mid-size international corporation upon which I've had the power and ability to promote the podcast / "TV" show to a large audience. It's also promoted on the nationally syndicated radio show that I co-host. I'll refrain from coming out- but it's probably the only major nationally syndicated radio show that routinely covers GN/Linux and free software related matters and so for those who listen to the show you probably already know who this is. :)
Mastadon can be one, theres another better one I forget the name of that you can buy a family web domain and people can upload their own pictures and updates and whatever. it's not a bad idea and it is workable and it does lead to more interpersonal connections because in no way will these new local networks be as pervasive as Facebook.
....and it just links to my social media accounts.
Ahh, the irony.
But the truth is, I'm just tired of having to constantly update and maintain my website's software. If you don't do it, eventually security holes get around and the machine hosting it gets hacked. It doesn't matter which one you use, every CMS like Drupal, WordPress and so on need active system administration. I already do it for a living, and don't have much energy for it when I get home.
So the solution is to have just static pages and content on my own webserver, and link to my social media accounts for the day to day blab.
I know, I can do better. But I'm lazy, like most sysadmins.
... Captain Obvious just awoke from 17 years of hibernation.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The only thing that makes social media even work is the dopamine feedback look. People hit like (or not like) and you get a dopamine release from seeing a thumbs up.
That is all any site has to do it properly present this flaw in human psychology and people will use it.
Doesn't seem to matter if the feedback is positive or negative either. Just clear indiciations that you've caused someone else to click a button seems to do the trick.
Because I'm going to spend all day going from one friend's site to another to another..... rather than a single site to find out what's going on with all my friends and family.
sounds like a job for a protocol. A way to label a friend's site once and be able to access it easily from there. The idea isn't that everyone should have their own personal website customized like a tumblr page. But that everyone should create their own facebook using whatever template becomes popular. Presumably like a mastadon ID you can give someone a URI or a customized handle that lets you incorporate into whatever dashboard you'll have and you can get the updates there.
Just another second banana
Everyone should have their own space, in fact that what we will call it. Their space. Sound like the sleeper hit of 2019.
some person site/server feature in the Opera browser?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
https://www.wired.com/2009/10/...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
And I don't even use or like Facebook, but I just have to say. Facebook is a lot more than just monetizing on people putting stuff out there about themselves online.
I remember the "magic" of the old Geocities days, and the first websites I created as a teen. I think myspace was closer to that than facebook.
What facebook did was something entirely different, they put tooling out there that required people to only register, which I first viewed as a way to get and keep in touch with old friends, and play games together. =)
It's called social media now, but what I likened it too back then was social networking, and that's something that having a personal website doesn't necessarily do.
Just my two cents.
shops, clubs, restaurants, cafes should start to at least provide their schedules on an own webpage without forcing abybody to "follow them" on facebook or log in to facebook.
(And that, for their own sake. Never got why anybody would put more there than a link ot the real web page, because, let's be realistic: If you have a well running shop/cafe, then that would be the most profitable place to advertise for sponsored ads....)
Posting positive comments about Bookface on Slash... brave soul.
[($)]
Socialism, FB needs to be run by the government. For many its a essential service...
[($)]
One of the few conservatives who has not been censored, shadow banned, demonitized, deplatformed, or whatever.
Also does not have Zuckerberg sending his private information to major corporations.
Drudge was way ahead of the curve on this. He recommend this "old school" methodology long before the slaughter of conservatives.
Conservatives who depended on google, twitter, or facebook have been ruined.
The good old days. My first webpage made with Notepad. Long gone but not forgotten. I wish I still had the file and probably do. Somewhere...
Facebook took myspace and added newsfeeds. Providing the ever attentionless a constant stream of "what's uuuup". The problem with myspace is that people loaded down their page with videos, music, flash that absolutely killed the browser - and still would -
We need all those animated GIFs back too. And .MID files that plays something that almost is recognizable, a page view counter with 12 digits so we know it got 000000000139 page refreshes from the author.
L'Idiot
GNU Social?
Mastodon?
The whole topic of finding people, affinity groups and other social networking site features will have to wait until I recover from thinking about how this would be better in any way from a security and privacy point of view...
Running your own web-server has gotten easier and cheaper. A RaspberryPI 3 would easily handle the traffic for most people's personal sites. And high speed connections are much less costly than they used to be for the speed you get.
Provided your ISP both legally and technically allows running a server at home. If the ISPs in your area put their home subscribers behind carrier-grade NAT, your ISP's router won't forward inbound connections on port 443 of your public IP to your NAT IP. If you're on a home plan, each of the high-volume ISPs serving your address could disconnect your service for running a server, which violates the typical home ISP acceptable use policy (AUP).
The closer you get to the ISP the closer you get to the first amendment being enforced.
With the death of net neutrality in the United States, the ISP or ISPs serving your address have a First Amendment right not to publish what you write.
There's already more than a 'reference implementation'. https://hubzilla.org/
"Single Signon" - jump from one web server to another with without needing 100 usernames/passwords.
Social Media - check
Personal Web sites - check
Personal Wiki - check
Personal DAV file server
Personal DAV calendar server
Personal DAV contact server
They even have a shopping cart so a user can set up their own ETSY/EBAY/whatever
No Communist Party in China setting up a search engine with a US brand to never find results on Tiananmen square, a funny bear or words like term limits.
In the era of "forums and web sites" (which I take to mean between when home ISPs began service in the early 1990s to when Facebook left closed beta in September 2006), what search engine not beholden to a large company existed? Governments and brands don't need to coerce away the actual speech; they just need to coerce away the ability for prospective viewers to find such speech. Getting your speech discovered in the first place is the one problem that IndieWeb hasn't solved yet: "None currently."
If the nerd in each family where to do this, then start cross-linking with the nerds in other families in their circles
How does the nerd in one family go about discovering nerds in other families in the first place without using big "silo" sites such as Facebook, Wikia, and Slashdot? If it involves face-to-face exchange of URLs, that's a bit more difficult on account of social interaction disorders that disproportionately afflict nerds, such as Asperger-type autism.
Giving too many degrees of freedom, or too much disorganized and useless information, reduces the size of the user base.
(Ducks. Walks out in a fire-resistant suit.)
I here what your saying, but its based on traffic. People run VPNs and with doorbell cams, people are streaming data up to the cloud at large rates now. A simple server to host a page that just serves some information and a few pictures wouldn't even peg the needle as worth their time.
Also, while the carriers are not bound by Net Neutrality they know that the decision was contentious and the next administration could implement the rules. Also, states have been enforcing net neutrality policy.
I doubt its an issue unless you cause destabilization of the network by running an unsecure smtp server for instance...
I guess what I'm saying is that Facebook isn't really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website
Nope... /thread
the problem is not the software. It is packaging and offering it attached to a personal domain name, in a way that it is truly portable and available **also** as a managed service.
My main proposal on how to do exactly this http://per-cloud.com/
My blog posts about it: http://stop.zona-m.net/tag/per...
Yep. Surprisingly their score is 2 even as I look at it now.
... or you could pay a few bucks a month to a responsible ISP and let them deal with the hassles of hosting. My personal web sites costs be about $3/year.
The critical first amendment issue really demands the foundation that doesn't _require_ an extra third party (your 'responsible ISP'). I see the crux of the issue as the network neutrality home server thing. It's not that if ISPs (were forced to) abolished their home server prohibition terms that it would make immediate sense for everybody to save a few bucks and therefore decide to go down that route. It's the fact that enough people (like, thousands) would become their own mini-ISPs allowing hosting for millions with plenty of redundancy protocols, _that_ would drive the price down from $3/year to $0.03/year along with the more critical fact that persecutions of wikileaks-2.0 and snowden-2.0 would have to cut straight to the unavoidable ISP and become true 1st amendment lines in the sand. As opposed to things that can be 'contained' using leverage against the otherwise unnecessary third parties that your 'just shell out a few bucks a year to some nice company that might stick up for free speech for awhile at least' advice entails. Likewise, removing all unnecessary 3rd parties is the only way you can avoid bringing some variant of the facebook mega-multi-billion-dollar-transnational-neo-free-speech-overlord into the picture. Advertisers and censorship of unpopular (but worthy of protection) speech.
As soon as you pay an extra ISP/hoster, that is the company that will shut down the most important free speech of the entire platform at the most important moment in history for that speech. And all of society ends up paying for that even more than the facebook profits from it.
Yes but not centrally owned and gathering your data to sell you ads
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I see that you can now specify JSON as the export format for your Facebook data dump. So we just need a website app that uses that data as its source, and allows federation between all such sites.
You can easily host your own webserver with FreedomBox. The only thing missing, I think is easy install and configuration of an email server.
From the website:
https://freedombox.org/
FreedomBox is designed to be your own inexpensive server at home. It runs free software and offers an increasing number of services ranging from a calendar or jabber server to a wiki or VPN. Our web interface allows you to easily install and configure your apps. Be your own host!
Not many would pay to host their own site, Facebook like those before it is popular because its free. What users of these sites failed to recognize is that their personal data was part of how the service is paid for. Zuckerberg from the start was clearly not interested in protecting anyone's personal information. It was a commodity for him to access and profit from.
Is this a rant about the phenomenon of 'luck' in tech? Tech is often a winner-takes-all scenario, and particularly with social media it seems... who wants to start using a social network that has none of your friends or acquaintances! Anyway, comparing your endeavours to Facebook is ignoring the countless other people who also had personal websites, even in the nineties! I mention Geocities and Tripod and that probably shows my age fairly accurately... Facebook was just in the right place at the right time, as is often the way with creative projects.
Jason Koebler from Motherboard in 2002 invented "Jason's Site". He then went back in time to the 1990s and gave that concept to the public under the name Geocities because by 2002 nobody else had thought about personal websites.
The success of Facebook came from the fact that it originally allowed everyone to advertise for free. Every company could have their "page" in there, and they could also make their own plugins for the website easily. After creating their page on Facebook they would proudly display a "Find us on Facebook" banner at their business location, tuus giving Facebook ubiquitous free publicity...
Isn't this what Mastodon is all about?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
It's distributed and owned by the users. The concept is great, but it all hinges on increasing the user mass - it's not as easy to use or feature rich as Facebook (yet).
My 75 year old mother can post on facebook, she can't build and maintain a website.
THAT is why facebook took off, it allowed the village idiots to be... idiots.
And I just realized I called my mother a village idiot, sad part is it's not far from the truth.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
People run VPNs
Subscribing to a VPN service just to be able to accept incoming connections is a cost that a lot of end users don't want to have to pay in perpetuity. Nor does it scale, as VPN providers will end up running out of IPv4 addresses and end up having to put their subscribers behind NAT as well. Buying a domain name and keeping it renewed is another cost, and non-technical users need to learn a lot more to make that work than to make, say, a Facebook account work.
Also, states have been enforcing net neutrality policy.
They won't be able to for long once judges start ruling that the FCC's regulation preempts state law.
He thinks creating a personal web site was "forward looking". Ever hear of GeoCities or AngelFire which were around since the 90's?
He thinks a hot-or-not section is "prescient" even though hotornot.com started in 2000.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
It's hard to take this article/opinion seriously, but realistically the reason personal websites went away was because nobody wanted to visit a separate website everytime they wanted to see someone else's content - particularly when the UI and format of that content could shift dramatically on each site.
Social networking put all that stuff in a centralized location so that you can "catch up" with the interesting tidbits with a quick scan, and you don't have to worry about a full page photo background or The Verve Pipe blaring in the background.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I had several personal sites. The last of them got defaced because I failed to upgrade WordPress often enough to plug security holes. And because it used free hosting, I also didn't manage to salvage it from backup. And it's not like many people looked at the site. It was probably just some drive by hack. So even obscurity didn't protect me.
The amount of work that needs to go towards supporting a personal website (finding a host, possible registering a domain, setting it up, ... and then maintenance) is something that only an enthusiast would do. Sure, you can do it more simply in Wix or WordPress.com (where I migrated my blog) or other such sites, but then you're under another big umbrella, so what's the huge difference from Facebook? And you still need to set things up.
My intent wasn't really to post positive comments - it was more to contradict the base assumption of this article. There are at least some of us who use Facebook for reasons other than digital vanity.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That is already a thing and is called Diaspora. Duckduckgo it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
While that IS what the WWW was meant to be like, you still need a centralized location for 'discussion' among several people, espcially those you dont yet even know about.
its why we have clubs in the real world.
( now that said FB IS evil... just this isn't the answer )
Nobody looks at their Facebook page, or their friends pages. Facebook is about the feed.
Facebook is just a freakin' multiblog. OK, fine, a freakin' multiblog with zillions of integrations and stuff. But at heart, just a multi-author blog site.
No reason (other than overcoming the network effect, which I know is gazonga huge) why there couldn't be numerous competing multi-author blogs ... they could always share content with, ya know, RSS ... it's not like we haven't invented a way to share content.
How the F* did this get onto the front page of Slashdot? The author has absolutely no idea of what they are talking about!
Oh you mean like Geocities????
Personal websites have their place in the world. But saying we should do away with Facebook (or similar sites,) is like saying we should do away with Slashdot because all it does is point to other sites.
Ridiculous. I suspect the OP just doesn't like Facebook (the company,) and is lashing out under the guise that it's not a useful tool.
Own your content and control how it is displayed. Is that too hard?
Come on already with the humble modesty. Ninety nine percent of people who did their first website in 1994 did it because "they could" and the choice of the subject: themselves, was dictated by the fact that for 99% of them "myself" is the only subject they have been proficient.
The remaining 1 percent did it because they (A) knew how to HTML and where to steal inline emoticons (B) knew something else very well and wanted to spread knowledge.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It needs to be a device that requires nothing except for plugging it in and installing the app on the device that wants to use it. That was my very point.
Not some server software that doesn't even play along with package management systems.
I already have something better. I just need to make a clean image of my own SBC home server, and put it on another SBC like mine. The problem is that I don't have an "app", and syncing is unreasonably hard due to how limited and shitty (aka "simple") mobile OSes are.