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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
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?
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.
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.