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.

Comments

You mean go back to how it was?

[bobbied]

LOL.. Replace Facebook with personal websites eh? Isn't that how this whole internet thing got started back when I was in college?

Re:You mean go back to how it was?

[lactose99]

We should bring the <blink> tag back too

Re:You mean go back to how it was?

[chispito]

LOL.. Replace Facebook with personal websites eh? Isn't that how this whole internet thing got started back when I was in college?

Other than that wasn't when the Internet started, yes, personal websites or the "Blogosphere" as it was briefly known, was better than Facebook in so many ways. Private, independent forums were also better than Reddit, but I think that day of reckoning is still a ways off.

I'd say (platform X) was better than Twitter, but the truth is No Twitter, or a Twitter Shaped Hole, is the best alternative to that platform.

the Indieweb/Fediverse is a thing.

[dgp]

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

Re:the Indieweb/Fediverse is a thing.

[Bradmont]

This is about as much a "service" as email itself is. It is a standard that lets anyone build a service and interact with others. Sure, there are services that do it for you, just as there are services that offer you an email account, but it is definitely not the same thing. In fact, it is a lot more like TFA's idea than it is like Facebook. The analog would be that HTTP/HTML is to activitypub what the personal web page is to mastodon.

The power of constraints

[presidenteloco]

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.

Re:Bring back Geocities!

[DogDude]

I do. It was pretty awesome.

Re:IndieWeb & Interoperable Online Communities

[DogDude]

Your web site doesn't work.

Re:IndieWeb & Interoperable Online Communities

[forkfail]

First website to be /.ed in a decade.

Re:Why?

[DogDude]

There's nothing to regulate about a personal web site. There's no data being collected and sold.

Good idea but..

[110010001000]

...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.

Yeah, sure....

[WankerWeasel]

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.

Re:Yeah, sure....

[Solandri]

That's what bookmarks and RSS feeds were supposed to be for. A way for you to get updates pushed to your browser without you having to visit every individual site you have bookmarked.

Facebook isn't the first iteration of this problem. It isn't even the second. Before Facebook was MySpace. Before MySpace was GeoCities. (Before GeoCities was AOL, but that more Internet access via a portal instead of TCP/IP on your computer). In each case the individual wanting to publish on the web was faced with two choices:

• Buy a domain name. Buy space on a hosting service. Install Apache. Install WordPress or whatever other software you need for the type of publishing. Learn how to configure it to do what you want. Do your publishing. Inform all your family and friends of your domain. Regularly update the software and Apache to keep ahead of security exploits as they're discovered. If you do get hacked, work to clean everything up and get your site up and running again.
• Or create a Facebook / MySpace / GeoCities account and let that company deal with all of the above. You only have to worry about the publishing.

That's the fundamental problem. Getting updates from multiple sites is easy. It's the site setup, maintenance, and cleanup work if you get haced (that most people wouldn't have a clue how to do anyway) that's hard. It's a lot easier just to have someone else deal with all that for you. And if that someone else requires you to sell your soul^H^H^H^Hdata and personal info for their services, people start to think that's a pretty good deal.

This is why I've constantly railed against Open Source project managers and contributors who are dismissive or condescending towards user requests. If you don't make it easy for users (people who don't know how to program) to use your software, they will just use some other software which makes it easy for them. And Facebook, Google, Apple are more than happy to give them that easy user experience easy in exchange for the user's soul.

If you want Open Source to succeed, you have to make it easy for users, not just for programmers.

Re:Yeah because

[Anonymous Coward]

Their spider would not gen information about who visits my page or what pages I visit.
The information they can sell is only what I make public.

Re:Yeah because

[chispito]

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 but they don't get the pleasure of recording IP, cookie, browser, or any other tracking information of you as the site owner. They don't get to access anything you put behind a login. They don't get whatever information you willingly post on a public website already categorized and piped into their database.