DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

For the life of me I can&#x27;t remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: &quot;Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex.&quot; Many apps fill 1 and&#x2F;or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative.<p>For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I&#x27;ve met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Uruguay, people who had barely ever heard of Europe, but they had Facebook. All of them. The only place on earth where this wasn&#x27;t true was China, in my experience.<p>So, no, I won&#x27;t #deletefacebook. I&#x27;ve stopped using it meaningfully a long time ago, but until something becomes a reliable, multi-decade spanning auto-updating rolodex, I&#x27;ll have to stay here.<p>Mastodon will never, ever, not in a billion years fill that gap. And I don&#x27;t need more alternatives for #1 and #2, so there dies that dream for me.

Mastodon is cool technology. The problem is Facebook fills a hole that Mastodon does not. Facebook connects people in real life. Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family. There&#x27;s a built-in desire to monitor their conversations. They&#x27;re rewarded with &quot;reactions&quot;. Facebook provides value for a very large group of people.<p>A relatively small group of people saw a problem with Facebook. Of course they have to have some underlying goal to make money. So they set out to create a federated system anyone can host that doesn&#x27;t depend on some central company that&#x27;s just out to make a buck. It&#x27;s a noble goal, but it solves a problem that most users of Facebook simply don&#x27;t care about. It doesn&#x27;t do the thing that Facebook does, so it&#x27;s a non-starter.<p>I&#x27;d also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of &quot;friends&quot;. Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.)<p>If you want to replace Facebook, first figure out what people value about Facebook and expand on that. You&#x27;ll need to be better than they are (at least until people determine they&#x27;re <i>that</i> awful.) <i>Then</i> look at how you can federate it or achieving whatever other goal you have.

I&#x27;m reposting this comment because I would like to open the discussion up beyond facebook and social media and into the reality that technology has provided marketing with some pretty ridiculous tools. :<p>I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market.<p>Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to acknowledge it&#x27;s influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly.<p>I don&#x27;t think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this means about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?<p>This isn&#x27;t meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don&#x27;t live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.

I&#x27;m using an unfederated node of Madtodon running on a Raspberry pi with Let&#x27;s Encrypt certs as a private family social network. Works well and family response has been massively positive.<p>You can disconnect while staying connected on your own terms.

I really hope more people join mastodon or one of the other federated social networks. But it is hard to make the point that it could replace the utility of facebook (especially messenger, events, search)

I think the idea that Facebook is putting democracy in peril is a bit farfetched.

Something I can&#x27;t figure out from Mastodon&#x27;s website is where and how it uses cryptography.<p>I fear it might all be plaintext, despite the insanity of doing that in the present post-Snowden world, rather than the appropriate end-to-end combined with point-per-point encryption.

I don&#x27;t care about events, but I&#x27;d like my friends and weak ties to easily be able to keep up with what&#x27;s going on with me. The only alternatives I can think of is signing them up all for a mailing list, or starting a website&#x2F;blog. But if I don&#x27;t want my blog to be public, I&#x27;m faced with doing something like setting up a wordpress blog with membership, and asking them all to register and sign in to see my semi-private blog.<p>Unless there&#x27;s a free &#x2F; open-source blog system with a decentralized federated SSO system, where everyone can choose to friend up (probably one-way, not two-way) to follow each other&#x27;s feeds? I suppose like mastodon, but for long-form or free-form writing?

If you&#x27;re thinking about using Mastodon, the CounterSocial[1] instance is worth considering. It&#x27;s run by &quot;The Jester&quot;[2][3], who has experience running secure&#x2F;hardened systems, and who takes more of an active role in countering bad actors.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;counter.social&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;counter.social&#x2F;about</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Jester_(hacktivist)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Jester_(hacktivist)</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keybase.io&#x2F;th3j35t3r" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keybase.io&#x2F;th3j35t3r</a>

Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg. If a fully featured app or service is free, then you are the product. Collecting and selling user information is pervasive.

Sounds good in principle but how would mastodon scale to billions of accounts and maintain data centers around the world?

So I question the sustainability of these platforms? How are they supported when they have sufficient mass? If they aren&#x27;t gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue?

LOL at the popup I get.<p>&quot;You&#x27;ve read over 3 articles this month. Let&#x27;s make it official. Log in with Facebook or Google.&quot;

As far as I&#x27;ve seen, this doesn&#x27;t provide new information, so it just reads to me like &quot;Developer of startup social media platform agrees with bandwagon: please consumers, stop using the product of our biggest competitor&quot;

Mastodon can&#x27;t be considered a real alternative unless you have a solution for all the child porn on some of the most popular instances.

How do people feel about using Facebook&#x27;s technology like React in light of all this controversy? Is there any concern that there is cross over between the data harvesting and the engineering behind React etc.?

&gt; Mastodon [...] No real name policies<p>Lacking a very rarefied community capable of self-moderation, like this site has or some specialized reddits and forums, the no-real-name becomes a major drawback. A minority of douche-bags will generate a majority of noise and will come to shape that world in their image.<p>This is quite visible when browsing Mastodon instances, many of which look like a crossbreed of 4chan with Myspace. Most accounts don&#x27;t have a real picture. The fact people assumed their real identities, cared about what they said and did, and that you could find real people knowing only their name was one of the key ingredients to the success of early Facebook.<p>Furthermore, the whole &quot;no data collected&quot; has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names. Otherwise, I really couldn&#x27;t care less about data attached to an anonymous account.