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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
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
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?
I do. It was pretty awesome.
I don't respond to AC's.
Your web site doesn't work.
I don't respond to AC's.
First website to be /.ed in a decade.
Check your premises.
There's nothing to regulate about a personal web site. There's no data being collected and sold.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
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'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!
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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?
Socialism, FB needs to be run by the government. For many its a essential service...
[($)]