Towards a world without Facebook

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as &quot;the Internet&quot;: the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts.<p>For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users.<p>If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it <i>simpler yet</i>, and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it&#x27;s strong incumbent advantage.<p>So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with &quot;a world without Facebook&quot;.

The fundamental problem is economic. It&#x27;s not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can&#x27;t be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them.<p>The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can&#x27;t achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current cultural standard for ethics.<p>Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations, having come out of academia with their &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; slogan, but inevitably all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are relying on VC funding.<p>I&#x27;d love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.

I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video. Which don&#x27;t belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common protocol. Then multiple &quot;vendors&quot; can host the information (encrypted so they can&#x27;t read it), and multiple &quot;vendors&quot; can create clients.<p>I often feel like the block chain is derailing the decentralized Internet by adding unnecessary complexity.

I have no idea how blockchain helps social media. If my details, my posts or other &quot;my thing&quot; end up in one they&#x27;re indelible, no? So how does that help me exercise my right to be forgotten? Besides the perf question of syncing blockchains, or the design hit of federating them, or apportioning by some yet-to-be-defined traffic&#x2F;post&#x2F;data taxonomy...

For me the trinity is facebook, twitter, and slack, so I&#x27;ve started figuring out how to replace them all at once.<p>So far riot&#x2F;matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and discord, at least for my purposes.<p>I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook messenger. So riot&#x2F;matrix could reduce my reliance on facebook in some ways, too.<p>I haven&#x27;t tried it out yet, but it seems mastodon is the most likely twitter replacement. Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation.<p>As for the rest of facebook... I don&#x27;t know. I was reading this thing about addiction, and how the bitch of addiction is that not only is it the thing you&#x27;re addicted to, but it is also the thing that makes it harder to kick the addiction. (In the case of a substance, it hacks your brain to make it more difficult to resist impulse&#x2F;urge.) Seems like something of a parallel, in how using facebook makes it harder to leave. The only path out in those cases is to take slow incremental steps that make it easier to resist over time. So, carving out the pieces of facebook that are important to you. For me that might be a public blog to share my thoughts, an email list, actually gathering email addresses and phone numbers for people on facebook I might want to stay in touch with, etc. Although I still want to check out Disapora and Scuttlebutt... and I don&#x27;t know if ActivityPub is relevant here.

After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave.<p>Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.

Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price of all the things they buy.<p>That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze the shit out of their behavior. Users could be customers again. So the real question is how do you convince potential users that they are better off paying for services directly?<p>It is of course not that simple, it never is, think for example about people seeing ads for Gucci bags and actually buying them and how they subsidize people which may see those ads but never actually buy the products because they can not afford them and which may also not have the money to pay for services directly.<p>But I do not think any of the peripheral issues fundamentally changes the core challenges, getting people off of ad supported services.

Facebook capitalised by being in the right place at the right time, a time when the internet was opened to the non-tech savy, the &quot;regular&quot; world spilled into what was already a social experience. This is why Facebook now has the moniker of the &quot;mom&quot; platform. Technology like blockchain might free the business model from having to generate revenue and better align the experaince.<p>But I have an easier time believing people will just dump social media than some Utopian public social ledger is going to solve what is essentially a psychological shitfest.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steemit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steemit.com</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minds.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minds.com</a><p>Bizarre that jonevans&#x2F;techcrunch doesn&#x27;t site these modern social networking sites, only the mysterious demise of Diaspora etc.

This already exists. It&#x27;s called scuttlebutt and it&#x27;s awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don&#x27;t need to setup your own sever or trust someone else&#x27;s to host your content like every other decentralized social network I&#x27;ve seen.

How on earth is blockchain going help? Seriously! There is no conceptual situation, in theory or practice, that blockchain will improve upon Facebook situation.<p>Generally speaking, Facebook is bad for about 5 reasons: 1. Privacy: unexpected people see your data (legally). 2. Right-to-be-forgotten: your data sticks around longer than expected. 3. Data Security: your data is stolen from your data keeper. 4. Cyberbully: Unwanted data surfaces without your control 5. Fake news: wrong information is fed to you.<p>How do blockchains help with ANY of these? 2. is certainly getting WORSE, since blockchains never forget. 1. is probably getting WORSE, because most blockchains are public. 3. is getting SO MUCH WORSE, because so many other people will now store data, and compromises in <i>any</i> of them will expose everything (think African Prince scam). 4. will become impossible to solve, because the data is going to be public and cannot be deleted, and because all of those anonymous mechanism will ensure that the culprit is impossible to track. 5. won&#x27;t be impacted.<p>So, tell me, how the hell do blockchains help? Seriously.<p>Look, I know blockchain is a cool idea (yay! no need for central database!). However, central database <i>can</i> help in many situation, especially in anything involves history, limit of access, and regulation.

In my opinion: good premise, bad conclusion. Blockchain, as good as it can be, isn&#x27;t really required for social sharing.<p>I&#x27;m going to state pretty obvious things. We need to take a step backwards. What we need is a decentralized&#x2F;federated app platform. It must run in any OS, it must allow to any actor to provide its own implementation (and their own apps - providing network effect) and it must be easy to use for the final user.<p>We already have some parts of this done. Facebook just took advantage that community didn&#x27;t know what to do with them.

Scuttlebutt seems like an interesting implementation of a decentralised social network:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scuttlebutt.nz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scuttlebutt.nz</a>

How about starting by just having a good, open source social platform for the Web, like Wordpress is for blogs. Wordpress is used to host 20% of all new websites.<p>Meanwhile, to post a comment on TechCrunch, I had to register yet another account with yet another password, and after that the comment I was writing was lost (despite the site saying it will save it). And then I still couldn&#x27;t post it on a mobile phone!<p>This is 2018, and you can see how the state of decentralized social networking sucks. I made a video about it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI</a>

Do you really want to live your days feeling dependent on this sort of &quot;service&quot;? Do you really want to say, &quot;but I need Facebook!&quot;.<p>In today&#x27;s age, you need a phone number and e-mail. It&#x27;s ok - they are decentralized. Don&#x27;t let a centralized platform of Facebook&#x27;s evil nature become necessary for you to live your life.<p>Delete and forget it existed. Ignore and move on. Give up the benefits and pay the cost.

How about moving away from free services and demanding security, privacy, and customer support. Change our attitudes so we are not willing to be the product any more.

The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently.<p>Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes&#x2F;reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against deleting the whole account only because it&#x27;s an invaluable address book. Realistically, the inertia of people to leave it will keep me as a user for a long time.

I think the way forward is to embrace ActivityPub and similar endeavours. I&#x27;m not sure how much of Diaspora wound up on ActivityPub[0] &#x2F; ActivitySteams[1] but I feel as though the best path forward for projects like Diaspora is to reach out to W3C to see what could be standardized.<p>ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it was called) and similar open sourced twitter-like platforms, it doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean we should be restricted to &quot;micro&quot; blogging by those platforms (besides, sharing pictures, and such is somewhat still valid &quot;micro&quot; blogging just look at Tumblr). If the limits are too much you could still at the very least send over a summary between hubs and if the person wants more info they can visit the originating site for the whole post.<p>I think the path forward is to use open and standardized formats &#x2F; protocols. We have the technology... There&#x27;s a couple of implementations for ActivityPub&#x2F;ActivityStreams already[2], you could either join one and contribute or just start one yourself if none are in the language &#x2F; license you prefer.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;2018&#x2F;REC-activitypub-20180123&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;2018&#x2F;REC-activitypub-20180123&#x2F;</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;activitystreams-core&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;activitystreams-core&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;w3c&#x2F;activitystreams&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;implementation-reports" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;w3c&#x2F;activitystreams&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;implement...</a>

A fundamental distinction needs to be made between blockchain-based and non-blockchain-based decentralized services. Blockchains are insanely ambitious, century-scale, state-killing, finance-replacing behemoths. WE DON&#x27;T NEED ANY OF THAT STUFF TO REPLACE FACEBOOK! You&#x27;re exploding the problem way out of scope, and constant focus on blockchains seems almost like a false flag to demotivize people who just want to build <i>decentralized alternatives to Facebook</i>, which is already an astoundingly huge problem.<p>Stop trying to put blockchains in web decentralized systems. They&#x27;re not going to work for several more decades. All we need to do to kill Facebook is solve the self-hosting P2P UX problem, and create a W3C-like body that allows developers to participate in standards creation process for how we schematize common social data. That&#x27;s it. Once everyone is running a federated node in the cloud or in their basement, <i>then</i> you can go back to doing blockchain stuff.

Facebook badly needs a direct competitor. I wish there was social network with fewer features available, like what Facebook was in 2006-2007. Get rid of the newsfeed—it’s toxic and that’s the worst part of the experience. Make sharing related to specific groups— college friends, family, work friends, etc. I would prefer a social network with fewer features.

This is so annoying. &quot;A world without Facebook&quot; like it&#x27;s some kind of almost apocalyptic reality. I&#x27;m only 27 and I remember when Facebook came out when I was in highschool. Miraculously, I also remember life before highschool and it was just fine too.<p>I deleted my account in 2014. Wow big woop. I didn&#x27;t die, and I still stayed I. Touch with my family and friends I cared about. I spent less time passively stalking people I don&#x27;t care about. Wow. Amazing. Mind boggling.<p>I also deleted my account before it became a fad to write some emotional diary about what it&#x27;s like to get rid of your account like losing a child or approaching the topic like you just jumped to the other side of a heated world wide political debate and too a stand, about the same time as women started to post with no makeup (like wow, you are some kind of fantastical hero making a YouTube video or posting an fb or Instagram pic without spending an hour caking on foundation, more girls should &quot;be brave&quot; and step out like you) and I honestly can&#x27;t tell them apart.<p>Stop making getting rid of Facebook a big deal and it won&#x27;t be a big deal to not have one, the same way I&#x27;m a girl and never gave two cents about makeup, quite literally, and I don&#x27;t make it a big deal to not wear it. I don&#x27;t waltz around like some superior than thou feministic hero that girls should tremble to their knees.for guidance on how to give up their addiction to drug store eyeliner.<p>News flash. Your social life will not dissapear, in either case.<p>What is the deal. We have better things and more interesting things and more important things, all of us to focus our time and energy on than how other people perceive our obnoxiously curated profiles.<p>Stop giving Facebook so much power. They have power because you give it to them. Theyve been openly untrustworthy for years. So don&#x27;t give it to them .

We can never replace Facebook with another Facebook, decentralised or not. It needs to be disrupted orthogonally.<p>Think of the individual components of Facebook that are keeping people from leaving, and create better stand-alone versions of those. Can they be integrated with other things that Facebook doesn&#x27;t have? Sort of like the concept of disrupting an incumbent by integrating a different part of the value chain from – except there isn&#x27;t really a (known) value chain.<p>We have to find new points of integration, new ways of bundling valuable features that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. It would likely have social components, and probably be defined as a social network, but don&#x27;t start in that end. Start with the components.<p>I don&#x27;t see any other way Facebook is going away in the short term.<p>Personally I&#x27;m really only there because of work and for discovering events. Oh, and stalking.

I guess an art collective could really be a group of people who can actually use some kind of decentralized social network. Especially in countries where there is censorship. So a decentralized network and some kind of control over what you post (like high quality pictures of artworks, and the copyright is really unbreakable). On top of the needs of an artist from a capitalist standpoint (need to protect your product, the artwork) there is the ideological-political one. Most artists I know are very political and leaning towards solutions that are liberal and are implemented despite of governmental agencies as well as big corporations.

Is a world without Facebook one with a real alternative (everyone in the same place), or one where there are many alternatives?<p>Reddit is a single platform with many mostly-independent communities. Could a similar thing in the shape of a social network exist?

The tech that is proposed in the article sounds a lot like Nano&#x27;s block lattice, where everyone has their own blockchain.<p>You could even potentially use it to run this social network by just increasing transaction data size.

Every time I check HN I see increasingly dramatic headlines about Facebook, but I have a feeling that when I check Facebook’s stock a few weeks from now it’ll be back up like nothing ever happened.

I&#x27;m unconvinced that the US population cares enough about its data to get rid of Facebook anytime soon. The media goes berserk with every new breach, but even the Equifax debacle barely registered in the minds of most Americans. I don&#x27;t see Cambridge Analytica as a tipping point, because most people are oblivious to the fact that people are deleting their accounts in the first place. Their infinite newsfeeds will be just as full of crap as ever.

The blockchain is a potential solution. But deep down I have high expectations for IPFS — I think a workable, usable alternative for Facebook there could be the beginning of a real movement towards a decentralized Internet.<p>Also, for anyone in this space: the Facebook killer app is Events. I can share photos &amp; statuses in myriad ways, but I truly only have one way to access a complete events calendar for my city, organizations &amp; social groups.

Why should decentralization equal blockchain? I didn&#x27;t quite get the idea. Decentralization for social networks was proposed a long time ago. The problem is not in application of it, but in the fact that good social networks aren&#x27;t supposed to be commercial. And that means someone should invest volunteer time to advance them.<p>Diaspora grew over the years, and it&#x27;s still growing. But the growth is slow.

For those of you who read this article and believe there may be a thread of a good idea within, go read Neuromancer.<p>Gibson had a vision of an Internet with decentralized social media, including decentralized code execution, 35 years ago, and we have not yet realized it - or anything remotely close.

I tried to follow the article, but I don&#x27;t get what the blockchain technology has to do with a social network.<p>Also, given how innefficient Bitcoin became with just a few transactions, how could the thing handle the billion of pictures that get shared every day?

What happened to the Freedom Box? I think that is the only promising solution to online data tracking. Most problems could be solved if everyone had a small personal server so that developers could deploy online applications that store the data locally.

But blockchain means all the information is public. So, author thinks it&#x27;s better to just publish all your stuff by yourself on blockchain than it could be leaked from the evil Facebook&#x27;s private database?

Malicious ad took over my browser when I tried to visit the link...

I find it curios that the article is calling the &#x27;blockchain people&#x27; to save the world from Facebook when the blockchain is a <i>public</i> ledger.

What did I just read

Boy this is getting old. I hope FB dies for no other reason than for HN to get real content again instead of the same old tired anti FB crap that&#x27;s dominated the front page for the last 2 weeks.

&quot;wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve&quot;<p>I&#x27;m probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is exactly DRM for the individual. I don&#x27;t want anything with DRM and I don&#x27;t want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.