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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
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?
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.
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.
Who's "we", and why do feel "we" can do this?
Hey, if the "Zuck" can create Facebook, surely WE can replace it.... Right? Right?
Take Slashdot for instance......
(sarc: off)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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!”
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
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
Take Slashdot
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
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.
Nextcloud.
your welcome
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?
ownCloud
Thank you.
....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
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*
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
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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
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!
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.