Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us?

The article says the indie web won’t succeed because it lacks the engineered addictivity of the regular, ‘big tobacco’ web.<p>In reality, it doesn’t even come to that. The indie web is, as of now, inferior to the point that no honest product comparison could make it seem an alternative. It requires you to learn concepts (like Mastodon’s federation and servers) that does not benefit you in any real way in your day-to-day use, adds additional complexity, and makes things less practical on the user end in the real world, even if in abstract it does improve the ideas underlying.<p>P2P is still trying to win based on the goodness of people’s hearts. That does not work - I’m saying this as someone who built and is running a P2P platform myself (Aether, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getaether.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getaether.net</a>) so I struggle with the same thing. You have to be decentralised <i>and</i> a better product. The only way to make this is to play to the strengths of P2P networks.<p>If you try to copy a centralised service to make it P2P you will always be at a huge disadvantage, since centralised networks will be always better at running centralised systems. If you do something that’s only really possible on a P2P system though, then you can offer the centralised internet an actual alternative. I don’t think anyone does that yet. (Though for whatever it’s worth, I’m trying.)

I get the impression that nobody has really mentioned the elephant in the room, which is that Facebook and Twitter are so popular precisely because they are so big, and the IndieWeb is unattractive mainly because it isn&#x27;t.<p>Like probably most of you here, I don&#x27;t care for walled gardens. I host my own blog, avoid Google as best as possible, and am regularly one step away from deleting Facebook. But I don&#x27;t. Why? Because many old friends are there, and I have no other realistic way of keeping up with them. There&#x27;s no earthly chance I&#x27;ll ever get them all onto Mastodon, so for better or worse I&#x27;m going to stay where they are. In the end, friendship is more important than philosophy.<p>On the contrary, after years of avoiding it, I recently started using Twitter. Again, the reason is that that is where the people are. I&#x27;m still a bit iffy about it, but I have realised that in my field, almost everybody is on Twitter. It is simply the most efficient way to keep up with what is going on and what the important people are doing. In the end, practicality beats purity.<p>So yes, I&#x27;d love to use micro.blog, or host my own Mastodon instance. But until they can offer me what the elephants of Facebook and Twitter can - i.e., a global community - they don&#x27;t stand a fighting chance.

Mastodon may not “save” us but I find it to be enjoyable. Smaller communities can actually be moderated <i>properly</i>, and not everything is always about collecting data, pleasing advertisers, etc. It feels more like a real internet community again.

Is HN &quot;indie&quot; enough for this definition?<p>There are plenty of non-facebook social media platforms. From HN to minecraft forums. Eve-online and hundreds of associated websites is essentially one large social media network. And there are plenty of online communities catering to all the stuff you cannot talk about on facebook (piracy, hacking etc). Teens gather in these places specifically to avoid facebook.<p>Each of these network nodes is run by an independent person or very small group. I think they together get at least as much traffic as the larger networks do individually. We just don&#x27;t talk about them as much because they don&#x27;t collect the statistics that facebook does. They don&#x27;t market themselves to advertisers like facebook does. They don&#x27;t seek to spy on their users like facebook does.

Calling it the indieweb is spot on imo. I was running IRC servers and phpbb message boards throughout the 2000s and it seems to me that the only thing changed with the web is the massive influx of novice users on big social media.<p>The rest of us have always been, and likely always will be, a sub-culture of sorts. We used to have message boards, now we have federated social media instances.<p>If you look at a list of mastodon instances it reads like a list of privately hosted message boards in the 90s&#x2F;2000s. Or a list of privately hosted BBS&#x27; in the 80s.<p>The major difference being that these islands are now all federated.<p>In my youth I had a dozen IRC accounts setup in my .irssi&#x2F;config (or BitchX;), today this would have to be federated. (iWish IRC was fedarated too but that&#x27;s another story)<p>So not much has changed on the social aspect. And that&#x27;s where I believe we&#x27;re headed. A big shallow part of the internet will be used by people who have better things to do than engage in deep conversations on the computers about their special interests.<p>While a much smaller, sub-culture, will use specialized forums for their special interests.<p>So I guess the sad conclusion is that you shouldn&#x27;t expect the IndieWeb to go mainstream.

Imagine if the internet was owned by one company. Or email was owned by one company.<p>Instead we have a non profit set of standards which divide the internet into different layers. So you can have your ISPs, your web hosting providers, your websites etc. There is a healthy demarcation which prevents consolidating of power.<p>Maybe the way to breakup twitter&#x2F;facebook etc is to create a set of protocols and divide them into layers.<p>For instance I should be able to register a username for tweeting like how you register a website name for DNS. Once registered you have a choice to store your tweets in any data hosting service.<p>Then a number of aggregate readers handle the front end user interface.<p>Each reader can have its own content filter and discovery algorithms. So even if your content is found offensive in one reader, you can just switch to another. If one is really addictive in a negative way, switch to a less intrusive useful version.

I’ve only dabbled, but my impression is that mastodon and micro.blog are oriented towards building “online” communities like Twitter, ie communities of interest with people you likely do not know in real life.<p>Facebook and to some extent Instagram seem to be most often used to share within pre-existing offline networks; ie you might use it to follow life updates from someone that you also see in person on occasion. This works because everybody is on it — you don’t have to hope that your acquaintance from college (or whatever) has picked the same instance as you.<p>Is there an “indie” real-life-network alternative? Is that what Diaspora is intended to be?

Yes, but only social media that is actually &quot;social&quot;; that is, platforms which enhance our offline lives instead of keeping them online.

&gt; I was both pleased and chagrined by the irony of the fact that my anti-social-media talk had found such a large audience on social media.<p>This immediately reminds me of the &quot;Fifteen Million Merits&quot; episode of Black Mirror.

This data that the tech Giants hold close to their chest belongs to the people and should be released for competitors to use in their products.<p>I envision companies competing on UX&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;ect while all using the same data set. People should be able to use Myspace to talk to their grandparents on Facebook.<p>How it is now is like if Ma Bell was never broken up, and we were only able to use our AT&amp;T phone and data plan to talk to other AT&amp;T customers only. How could any other phone company start with such barriers in place.<p>But who am I? Just the last human.

Back in the early 2000&#x27;s, I became part of a large group of friends. Someone in the group hosted a private web site where friends could post pictures and messages. When MySpace became popular, people started migrating over there and then to Facebook. You could say this was the private or indy social network of the day.<p>I was disappointed to see the site fall by the wayside, It&#x27;s just easier, and that&#x27;s were people are.

There is still usenet groups, forums and email lists around. Those technologies have existed for decades and are optimised for user happiness&#x2F;utility, not user engagement (drastically different and all the fancy facebook measurement only gives you engagement).

Not unless it comes bundled with an indie society.

I am willing to bet that someday, we will return to our roots: classic communities forming organically around topics without algorithms guiding us along. But until then, let us remain hopeful and vigilant.

What&#x27;s there to stop any of the big sites from buying them out before they become a threat?

I doubt indie social media will save us from facebook, no more than indie journalism will save us from the new yorker.<p>I hope one day the likes of facebook and the new yorker doesn&#x27;t exist, but I&#x27;m not holding my breath.<p>The only thing we can do is stop consuming divisive toxic garbage that is facebook and the new yorker.