
We should replace Facebook with personal websites - jbegley
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbanny/we-should-replace-facebook-with-personal-websites
======
jasode
_> most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their
lives online._

Where does the author get that idea? The _majority_ of Facebook's 2 billion
users _do not post_ to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly
used as a way to _passively receive_ content. Some of the content is from
family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc).

Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that
most of the billion users don't have.

The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed rather than a 1999
Geocities personal website. (But that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace
Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory
lookup database.)

~~~
saucoide
When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always
ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and
requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use
different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on
your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would
be so simple

~~~
ip26
The magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery.
I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.

~~~
ticmasta
The nefarious problem with FB is the illusion of recommendation/discovery.
They're not trying to find new and interesting things for you the way say, the
cultural aspects of HN performs this feat; they're trying to define your
profile and then serve up more of the same to increase engagement or capture
your entire sphere of awareness so they can manipulate and shape your
perception.'

~~~
paulddraper
> they can manipulate and shape your perception.

That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve
you the content and ads you want.

~~~
stcredzero
_That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to
serve you the content and ads you want._

Basically, serving you the content and ads you want can turn out to be pretty
malicious. By doing so, a big company can manipulate and shape your
perception. Year by year, data processing is making big companies ever more
potent at doing just this. Is it any wonder that it eventually got to a point
where we started seeing problems?

------
pmlnr
Homepage. It's your home on the internet. It's good for you.

Things to get started with:

\- [https://www.netlifycms.org/](https://www.netlifycms.org/) \- completely
free static website on top of github pages

\- [http://mastodon.social/](http://mastodon.social/) \- federated
microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well

\- [https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-
apps/](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/) \- one click
wordpress for 5$/m

\-
[https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/](https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/)
\- another near one-click wordpress for near 5$

\- [https://yunohost.org/](https://yunohost.org/) \- easy self-hosting, even
on top of a raspberry

\- [https://indieweb.org/WordPress](https://indieweb.org/WordPress) \- make
your site communicate with other sites

\- [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/) \-
decentralized, sneakernet friendly, private social system

~~~
kowdermeister
These are great, but what's the solution for those who don't even know what
HTML is? They are the vast majority of FB users.

I don't think anyone who taken web development a bit seriously have any
problem to publish something online independently.

~~~
josephcohen
Going to throw our hat in the ring here. We built Universe
([http://apple.co/Universe](http://apple.co/Universe)) for precisely this
reason: to enable everyone to build their place on the internet, without
touching code, all from a phone.

You can see some of the sites created with it here:
[http://showcase.onuniverse.com](http://showcase.onuniverse.com)

Here's more about us: [http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-
design-doe...](http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-design-
doesnt-involve-computers-at-all)

~~~
kowdermeister
Wow, this is great, I'll give it a try. I love the artistic touch too.

You basically made a CMS and web designer app for the web on mobile, which is
90% with the users, this is a wonderful concept.

Is this the new Tumblr? :)

------
bwb
This is so crazy, I love the idea but the world isn't going back to how it was
in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I've been in web hosting for a long time and
I love the idea of everyone creating their own little website. The truth is
people don't have the skills or care enough to do something like that, FB,
Quora, Twitter, all these services that are walled gardens work because they
make it EASY to share/create and CONNECT people easily with others and easy to
use apps that do x. WordPress is about the closest you get and it is a
nightmare to manage and $$$ on the hosting side compared to closed gardens.

We need to just accept the new world and keep innovating inside it, there
isn't going back to how it was.

And stop this nonsense about privacy, either pass a big federal law or accept
that your info is how free sites are funded :).

~~~
mxuribe
I agree with your comments except for (respectfully) the part about: "We need
to just accept the new world..." I firmly think this all represents
opportunity. Opportunity for technologists to develop open platforms that are
__NOT __cumbersome to setup nor to host by the layperson, and that - at least
over some time - are extremely inexpensive. Maybe i 'm an optimist, but i
firmly believe there will be an open platform - or multiple complimentary open
platforms working in concert - which will fill all of these needs
(independence of/control of online presence, privacy, networking
opportunities, etc.). I don't think we should merely accept this fate. For the
technologists who read hacker news, I think all of this should be a call to
arms - or better said a call to service. What is that phrase I've heard,
something about being the change you want to see in the world?

~~~
bwb
Totally agree, I just don't want people to think it is going back to what it
was in the late 90s and getting trapped thinking that was some type of golden
age. Going forward there is tremendous opportunity to do new things that give
people the ability to express themselves online.

~~~
acomjean
The thing about social media which is slightly different from everyone having
their own site (tripod, geocities ..) is that its more interactive.

There is some messaging built into the "new social" that wasn't as available
back then (we didn't all have smart phones, and internet was charged by the
hour.). There wasn't as much content either which did make it slightly more
manageable to surf through the pages you wanted.

polite and interesting exchange though.

~~~
CodeCube
Yeah it's funny; I remember back when blogs first became popular, but _before_
comments-on-posts was a common thing. Most community and discussion happened
on message boards or newsgroups (whenever a link to said link was posted).
That's what led to the backlink (quickly taken advantage of by spammers),
which led to the on-premise comment thread.

------
Puer
The author's thesis is fundamentally flawed. They say it isn't clear why
everyone was so excited to have a Facebook, but that's exactly the answer -
_because everyone had a Facebook_. One of the biggest appeals of Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter (which is arguable even more useless than FB), etc. is that
every nobody has direct access to an audience of millions. They can scream
their offensive, unoriginal, spontaneous, nuanced thoughts into the void and
instantaneously get sympathy, disgust, praise, and simple acknowledgement with
little to no effort.

Contrast this with maintaining a personal website. Even in a world where FB
doesn't exist, it's still a chore to get people to memorize yet another URL
and regularly visit it, especially if it isn't updated on a consistent
schedule (which most personal websites aren't.) Furthermore, given that the
author seems to be advocating for self-sufficiency as much as possible and
avoiding centralized platforms, assuming you're hosting your own website and
not using a cookie cutter template, you're now fighting Google for search
engine visibility and that's a battle that is absolutely not based on merit of
content.

This is not to mention the unpleasantness of using most personal websites
because they're poorly designed (light text on a white background), or they
try and guilt-trip me into supporting them with Patreon/Paypal popups, or the
only consistent content produced is content promising to produce more content
in the future, etc.

I'm probably reading too much into the author's article, to be honest. It's a
nice sentiment and I agree, but at the same time the thing I don't understand
about the recent trend of publishing articles on mainstream news sites
preaching the life benefits of going cold turkey on social media is that _it
isn 't a binary choice._ I know it's a novel idea, but you don't have to quit
FB to pick up that hobby you once loved again! You don't have to quit FB to
maintain your personal website! In fact, you can probably use FB and your
audience on it to grow your readership on your personal website! Even if you
accept the author's argument that personal websites fulfill the purpose that
FB does (strongly disagree), they give no reason why you have to pick one over
the other.

¿Porque no los dos

~~~
IshKebab
Yeah the idea of everyone setting up a personal website with their real name
and a recognisable photo of themselves is pretty laughable. Are people going
to upload photos and implement an account system to restrict access too?

That was Facebook's original raison d'etre (and the source of its name).

~~~
klez
You don't need to implement anything. There are self-hosted CMSs and blog
platforms that have been doing this for a long time.

I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a
developer"-hard either.

~~~
dvtrn
_I 'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a
developer"-hard either._

Tangent:

I've now talked four friends who wanted to start blogging out of spending
money on AWS instances and VPS providers because they were convinced this was
the path they absolutely _had_ to take just to start writing things using
WordPress. These are not technical people.

Which makes me wonder where that impression is coming from. Surely it couldn't
have been Wordpress.com because the site goes out of their way to show how
easy it is to sign up and start blogging on their platform, but I've long
wondered why they were _all_ so eager to avoid taking the simplest path to
their goals since none of them were above spending money to realize their
goals of having a blog.

~~~
androidgirl
Hey, I know where that's coming from!

Awhile ago I was digging through Pinterest on topics related to blogging,
finance, online business, etc.

A lot of these pins target millennials and moms (wow, especially moms).

The point of most of these sites is affiliate marketing; they've got deals
with hostgator, bluehost, godaddy, whatever, and get kickbacks when users sign
up.

So all these pinboardss about blogs about blogging advocate for the VPS route
because it's how they make cash.

------
kristianc
So, what the author is saying is that we should make something just like
Facebook, only:

\- Harder to find

\- Harder to update

\- More expensive to run

\- Prone to falling over / being hacked

\- Non-standardized

\- Doesn't provide instant feedback

The reason why we post on Facebook is because it is much (as in an order of
magnitude) better and much more convenient than having your own website. Most
people do not have their own "platform".

The reason why most people gave up blogging is because they discovered that
shouting into the void (and then having to repost that material onto social
networks so five people would read it) wasn't that fun or rewarding.

These decentralized fantasies based on personal grievances with Facebook fail
when they run into the real world and how most people actually behave.

~~~
zymhan
Well, this sounds like the goals of Diaspora, which never gained tons of
traction, but has been around for years.

[https://diasporafoundation.org/](https://diasporafoundation.org/)

~~~
kristianc
Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than
Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy".

Indeed, for many, the centralization of Facebook is a selling point, 'Freedom'
might appeal to political activists / journalists but isn't of much interest
to people who just want to find their friends rather than talk to
'happybunny123' and 'Privacy' has consistently shown itself to be something
people are 'meh' about in deeds.

I've got nothing against Diaspora per se, but it's for geeks and privacy nuts.
[https://diasporafoundation.org/](https://diasporafoundation.org/) suggests
that one of the things I might want to "Join the Conversation" about is
"Linux".

For the broader population, when you offer very few of the same benefits and
introduce additional costs, it's not a surprise it doesn't gain traction.

~~~
jancsika
> Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things
> than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy".

Since when is "privacy" a feature of Diaspora? Their first big bug was, "any
data from any users can be gotten by anybody willing to try." At least for a
long time user's posts were stored in plaintext. (Not sure if that's still
true.) And it's federated, not distributed.

I think your angry rocket of a rant overshot the moon there. Signal users
might have privacy. Diaspora users certainly do not.

~~~
kristianc
Decentralization, Freedom and Privacy are taken from the Diaspora homepage.

Also you’re conflating Privacy with Security.

------
ChuckMcM
The alternative, now that network bandwidth isn't in the 56Kbps range and
sometimes on and sometimes off, is doable.

If you look at the "end" game, imagine that everyone has a machine at their
house that they can access locally in their web browser. It has easy tools for
posting updates and pictures. When you create a "profile" on it, you can
choose to upload that profile to a well known repository of profiles. There is
a widget to search the repository for people you might know, and if you
"friend" them then your local machine gets a link to their RSS equivalent
feed. Friend graphs become distributed, content is always local, and the only
cost is to maintain the machine holding the profile repository.

IPV6 addressing and more than 500Kbps of upload bandwidth makes this possible.
The current long pole in the tent are ISPs who specifically disallow (and
interfere with!) long live server processes in their consumer internet
accounts. I've written the FCC and my representatives suggesting that this is
a place where some good rulemaking would enable Facebook alternatives that
protected civil liberties.

~~~
martythemaniak
I had a very similar idea, except the machine you're referring to here is your
phone. Once you restrict yourself to text and low-res pictures, your phone can
be your server.

A single app would let you edit your profile and post items to a feed. This
includes a web server. You can also use it to view friends' profiles and
chronological updates from their feeds. All data lives on your phone, fetching
updates happens by one phone connecting to another phone.

Downsides are that it probably needs some kind of centralized
discoverability/listing. Bandwidth would be a problem for folks on crappy data
plans, but maybe not so much - you're only serving text and low-res pictures
to several dozen people. You can also do stuff like waiting to respond to
requests when the phone goes on wifi.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I would love to see phone homed Apps like this make an appearance on the
market. One downside is that your data is in your pocket which means it is
lost when you lose your phone. That might be avoided with a thread to back up
the data to a home server of some sort.

------
___alt
Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages.

* It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues).

* It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow everyone's updates.

* It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to connect to.

* It has group conversation.

* It has event planning.

Personal pages have none of that, except with syndication where RSS is a
partial solution. And on top of that, Facebook is providing it free-of-charge
(with the "hidden" cost of scattering your personal data all across the
universe) with very minimal setup, including for laypersons.

~~~
newscracker
_> Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages._

I'm going to argue on the following points based on observations.

 _> \- It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your
stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues)._

Almost nobody knows well about how to control who see what, and even when they
do, hardly anyone changes it often. Almost everyone leaves it at something
that may not be appropriate for all the content they're sharing. Facebook,
after its many privacy blunders, reminds people about the audience setting
sometimes, but I don't see people changing it. Also, "lists" as a concept to
control who sees what was stillborn. Less than a fraction of a percentage in
my circles would even be aware of it (this despite me trying to educate people
about privacy).

 _> \- It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow
everyone's updates._

Here again, it's _easy to follow updates that Facebook deems the best to keep
the person coming back_ to show more ads and make more money. Almost nobody
knows how to choose to see someone's posts always and how to avoid someone's
posts short of unfriending them. The default is users not knowing that they
can control it, which means practically they don't control what they see and
what they don't see.

 _> \- It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to
connect to._

The same argument in the previous point applies here too. Facebook focuses on
making people come back often. So the discovery feature may be useful in some
cases, but usually it tends to create an overload of people, groups and pages
to connect with. Search on Facebook is dismal, and the main "discovery"
mechanism is Facebook's suggestions (which is incentivized for ads).

To summarize, Facebook's features work to maximize holding people's attention
on its platform and showing ads. How well this matches with one's individual
choices varies a lot. Facebook isn't really doing anything phenomenal in
surfacing relevant content to people.

~~~
LocalPCGuy
As a counterpoint to your counterpoint, at least Facebook's default setting is
friends and friends of friends (I believe, it's been a while since I've had
mine on the default setting). By default a personal website is public, and
it'd be pretty difficult to setup authentication and user accounts for the
people you want to be able to see your content, keeping it secure and
preventing it from leaking. That is a pretty huge difference. Not arguing
Facebook has been perfect, obviously they've had huge blunders, but it is
vastly simpler and more secure (most of the time) for the average person
compared to them trying to do it themselves.

------
josephcohen
Facebook is now many things, but when it started it was about identity: this
is who I am, this is who I know, this is what I care about.

As Facebook has expanded, it's become a mostly passive experience. This is a
byproduct of Facebook's business model, which is to sell _other people 's
time_. Like any business, it's incentivized to maximized its inventory, which
in this case is time spent on Facebook properties.

People are waking up to the fact that Facebook doesn't add value to your life,
it extracts value by consuming your time.

There is another way. You don't need to be the product.

This is why I created Universe (YC W'18), a new kind of tool that allows
everyone to build their place on the internet—their own website, with their
own domain, and their own design.

The internet should look more like a bustling, erratic metropolis and less
like a centrally-planned suburb. To do that, it needs to be built by everyone.

Check out Universe and let me know what you think:
[http://apple.co/Universe](http://apple.co/Universe)

\----

Some sites made on Universe:
[http://showcase.onuniverse.com](http://showcase.onuniverse.com)

More about our story: [http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-
design-doe...](http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-design-
doesnt-involve-computers-at-all)

~~~
whereistom
Wow this is sick! Excited to give it a try. Why don't more people know about
y'all?

~~~
josephcohen
Only a matter of time, we think

~~~
agnos_tic
Do you have an Android app?

------
aacook
I find one of the most useful and basic aspects of Facebook is sharing photos.
I launched NanaGram ([https://nanagram.co](https://nanagram.co)) a little over
a year ago to try and bring my 94-year-old grandparents into the fold. It's a
service that makes it super easy to mail printed photos in the mail by text
message. Something I didn't expect is my family and I started using it like a
private social network. Knowing everything is private, we're much more willing
to share intimate details and photos. All of us youngins get notifications of
the photos we're posting. I also created a "Saturday morning digest" email
which is a nice way to delay gratification. At the end of the month, our
grandmother gets physical copies in the mail. I subscribe myself to a copy of
the photos for QA which is pretty neat. Sometimes I also mail select prints to
my siblings.

------
josefresco
This conversation always devolves, or evolves into a discussion about RSS.

I actually think there's an opportunity for the "website builders" namely
WordPress, to create "consumer" app(s) that pull in feeds from WordPress
powered blogs (with RSS) This consumer / consumption app would compete with
Facebook/Twitter directly.

WordPress powers a significant % of the web and combined with the market share
of some of the other large providers like Wix & Squarespace I think they could
mount a legitimate challenge to FB/TW

~~~
egypturnash
Wordpress _has_ this. There’s a “Reader” tab in the official Wordpress app and
a web page on Wordpress.com that does the same thing.

They don’t promote it. But it’s there.

~~~
josefresco
I figured, thanks for the information. I've used the app to "play" with my own
sites but never explored the Reader tab.

I think obviously, they'd need a standalone or new app that puts the focus on
this feature. Split the site management app out or re-engineer to compliment
the user consumption app.

------
commandlinefan
Yes, everybody should have their own "space". I, for example, would have "my
space".

~~~
decentralised
I'd call my "space" AOL because I'm never around.

------
neovive
I might be looking at this too simply, but I think FB's "current" success is
related to the fact that it's simple to use and "everyone" is already there.
It's just not worth the effort for a non-technical person to set up a personal
website that involved selecting a platform, configuration, hosting, space
restrictions, fees, access restrictions, etc. FB is like an "all-inclusive"
resort for those wanting to easily connect/share with friends, family and
acquaintances quickly. It's free (at least in direct financial costs) and
there's very little friction and decision-making involved.

As a web developer, I see the value in owning your web space, but it's a very
hard sell for others due to the extra work involved.

------
vfc1
There is this project which has the goal of building a decentralized Facebook
- [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz)

I think it will eventually happen, but I don't see how mass adoption will
occur. Facebook grew a lot by getting our complete address book on signup and
sending invitations to the whole list.

------
j-c-hewitt
My time on Facebook has actually taught me that I want to know a lot LESS
about people like casual friends, family, and business associates. I want to
know as little as possible about their political opinions, their religious
beliefs, their favorite sports teams, and other affinities that they have.

I stopped using FB as a user entirely once I realized that it was diminishing
my opinions of other people much more than ignorance would. Knowing more about
other people greatly impeded my ability to get along with them. "Open" is a
big impediment to "connected" in a lot of cases. On, say, a sales call, I
would way rather not know someone's opinion about immigration policy and not
know about their favorite hockey team. I would rather stay totally ignorant of
all the irrelevant personal garbage about that person and just focus on what
is relevant to the actual connection I want to create there. There are just
too many things that people feel free to say on FB that needlessly alienate
others and I found that it's so much better to just be ignorant of that than
it is to know and have my opinion of that person diminished.

I much prefer interest groups that are less focused on personalities for
discussion and to read authors who know what they are writing about for
commentary on important topics.

~~~
gurumeditations
Related to this, I think as a whole, too much connectivity destroys societies.
You talk about how you don’t want to know people’s personal beliefs, you just
want to be able to get along with them to do business. This used to be the
default for society, but this issue of knowing uncomfortable details about
others (all sorts of things from political differences to crime and
misconduct) shatters people’s trust in each other and society.

Social networks also act as a hyperfunnel for everyday people to become
radicalized in their beliefs (usually political instead of to violence), but
that’s a different issue.

~~~
CM30
Yeah, this is basically the reason I feel social media sites are a bad idea.
People by definition present different 'faces' to different audiences, and
society stays stable because (for the most part) these different sides of
people's personality aren't public for everyone to see. Social media
shattering all this has definitely led to an increasingly polarised society
with increasingly radical beliefs.

------
jeletonskelly
Alright folks, it's time to bring back Geocities and Angelfire. Pull out your
antique rotating skull and "under construction" gifs.

~~~
iosonofuturista
[http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/](http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/)

For all your gif needs.

~~~
lapnitnelav
Epilepsy warning required here.

------
bscphil
Spitballing a bit here. Why do they have to be websites? That is to say, why
do they have to be on the "web", HTML over HTTP, at all? This seems like the
default way to do things to us now, but if you think about it, what most of us
fundamentally want with a social media site like Facebook ( _not_ Twitter,
that's different) is just to communicate and keep up with our friends and
family. That's why people flock to any app that gets mindshare: Facebook,
Whatsapp, Instagram, that allows them to do these things.

What does an alternative look like? Something like a shared Discord for
friends and family to use, divided into groups or "servers". (That was the key
insight of Google+, that people don't have one online presence for their
family, close friends, coworkers, acquaintances, etc. It failed for other
reasons.) The extra feature you need is just a shared searchable history to
find media, albums of photos, etc.

I think the points the article makes are valid, but better understood as a
criticism of Twitter. It effectively asks, if what we want is to post stuff
online for other people to read, why not use the open web for that rather than
[centralized service]. Thing is, people are already working on alternatives to
this and not everyone needs to use the same thing for it to be successful.
ActivityPub, websites using RSS for synchronization, Neocities, etc etc. So my
response is that there are two sorts of things we use social media for, and
there's no reason to try to do them both with one site.

I think I'm going to look into open Discord alternatives, and try to get some
family and friends interested. Worst case, it will be an interesting
experiment I'll learn something from.

------
chx
Everytime people say "you should quit Facebook", I have two primary use cases:

1\. Our high school class. Yes we used to use a mailing list but it's so much
better with Facebook, with people freely sharing what interesting shit
happens. We are a very closely knit class, at the 25th graduation anniversary
like 25 of the 34 was there.

2\. I have a group of friends doing all sorts of awesome shit (some of the
more memorable include taking a medieval sword duel intro class, another
shooting foam arrows at each other, there was laser tag, trampolines,
Halloween mazes and much more) and the event functionality is just damn
perfect: you create an event, everyone can post on it (I am coming, I am not
coming, I need transport) all of the posts can be commented out. And people
can just write posts into the group suggesting more events.

For both you'd need more than thirty people install a new app (remember how
few apps are actually used) and actively use them _at the same time_ or you
will be missing events. This won't happen.

~~~
quickthrower2
That's the funny thing. Email is perfectly good enough, but there is a
psychology of not wanting to send too many messages or disturb people. But
posting lots of pictures on Facebook doesn't feel like that. Otherwise email
is a great social network for people you already know.

~~~
chx
We would need much much better email organizing tools before this can work.

------
AJ007
If you can't solve the cost (free) and the on boarding (technical aptitude)
then it isn't going to replace Facebook. Additionally, a great deal of
Facebook use is shifting from photos and writing to video, which makes the
cost problem even greater.

------
rchaud
Most people bloviating online don't have anything interesting to say. This is
as applicable to FB as it is to any contributor-posted crap on Forbes.com.

You'll have a hard time convincing these "content creators" to move off FB as
they know they won't be able to attract the same audience anywhere nearly as
easily.

Finally, a personal website doesn't solve the fundamental issue: people crave
attention. That's why FB doesn't report likes in real time, it spaces them out
so you can log back in re-check like some kind of lab rat. People crave drama
too, which is why news sites use clickbait titles on their FB posts. What
better way to boost "engagement" than post a headline you know will start a
fight in the comments?

The flip side of that coin is that people seem to actually _want_ a steady
stream of low-quality content, and FB has more than enough behavioural
psychologists and UX people on their team to ensure that keeps happening.

------
rootusrootus
What I would rather see is something that works pretty much exactly like
Facebook, but paid for, no advertisements, and total privacy. Aside from
convincing people it's worth paying $25/year for the same functionality they
currently get for "free" I think that's the closest to a viable option.

If Facebook hadn't lost so much trust already, they could try to jump ahead in
that game by offering this service themselves. Pay us what we typically would
earn off you from ads, and we'll turn off the ads and disable the tracking.

~~~
mxuribe
I think there was a platform several years ago - maybe App.Net - that tried
this but had to eventually close. Perhaps the climate nowadays might be more
suited to support a pay model? Small though it might be, I'm sure there would
be a portion of the population that would pay for this. The trick is in the
marketing and in triggering the network effect.

------
magduf
I'm surprised I'm not seeing a lot of comments simply recommending
decentralized social networks as an obvious replacement for Facebook.

We've had these for a while. One of the most famous is probably Diaspora.
Instead of having all your stuff on one centralized site so they can profit
off it, everyone has their own Diaspora site/account, which can be hosted
anywhere. You can have your own hosted site, or you can just have an account
on an existing site, and you can easily move your account around if you don't
like your provider or want to roll your own. That way, no one organization
controls everything.

The problem, of course, is that this is too much work for most people, and
most people are perfectly happy to give Mark Zuckerberg control of all their
personal information because it's easier that way. So Diaspora has languished
with almost no users, because the only way a social network survives is by
having a "critical mass" of users. If all your friends aren't on there, you're
not going to bother with it either. Facebook has that critical mass now, so
it'll be virtually impossible to unseat them; the only way is if people simply
stop being interested in social networks, or some other centralized service
brings something to the table that everyone craves and FB misses the boat
before it's too late (which is basically how FB unseated MySpace).

------
Freezerburnt
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Dispora* yet:
[https://diasporafoundation.org/](https://diasporafoundation.org/) I looked
into it a while ago and it was a little cumbersome to set up, but I really
like the idea.

~~~
ams6110
"it was a little cumbersome to set up"

Hence it will never be popular. Sorry, that's just how it works. If you want
non-technical people on the platform (i.e. the general public) it needs to
just work right away.

~~~
Freezerburnt
Well, it's not easy to set up your own "pod", but it's easy to join someone
else's pod. You could set one up for your family or company or at whatever
level you want.

------
mhale
This is a good time to point out Micro.blog, an independent publishing
platform designed to empower publishers and protect privacy. (Not my work, but
I'm a fan)

Check it out: [https://micro.blog/](https://micro.blog/)

------
miguelmota
My old mother uses Facebook because it's extremely easy for her to upload
photos, find people, and comment on other people's feed.

She's barely capable of managing logins. Granted there are millions of people
just like her who don't really care about privacy (also due to ignorance) and
will use a service simply because it's convenient and is good enough.

This is like saying people should do maintenance on their own cars because
mechanics at the shop will be able to see your personal identifying
information that you have in the car.

Posting content online and having sensitive private chats on a third party
website is like leaving personal identifying information inside a locked car
and expecting that it'll never get broken in to, either by hackers or by the
manufacturer leaking the car keys.

Also many people with personal websites are starting to use Medium because it
provides greater reach.

I'm all for decentralization and self-sovereignty and would love to see a
world where everyone hosts their personal website but this idea is far-fetched
because the masses are going to prefer free, fast, and convenient services
that require little management and thinking.

------
moosey
It is my hope that facebook is crushed and is never effectively replaced by
anything. In fact, with a few changes to privacy law, it almost becomes
impossible to run a facebook anyways, because it will eliminate many forms of
revenue generation for any company collecting user information.

I feel as though I live in the age of marketing, where it is more important to
market yourself well than it is to, I don't know, produce. So much valuable
creative and productive energy towards chasing dollars/likes/whatever. It
reminds me of concepts that we regard as dark patterns in tech: Money might
have at some point been a measure of productive work, but now it is a goal in
and of itself, and I think that the outcome has been suboptimal.

I understand that the cat is out of the bag, and, in particular, the ability
to upload and share video with the world could be one of the most important
advancements in human rights ever, but it seems that many people are too
distracted to be concerned. The very technology that could aid people is used
to disarm them from action.

A large part of my concern is that I'm half European and half Native American.
I appear Middle Eastern. I live in the United States. The cultural state here
is definitely not sublime for someone with my appearance. My best friend is
LGBT, and it is uncomfortable for her as well. I know that racism is a bigger
problem, but the way that these systems have been "taken advantage" of by
various governments to divide the US culture horrifies me.

About the "taken advantage" statement: An American company took money from a
foreign government that it used to spread propaganda in the US. What facebook
did is by design, and if it is allowed to stand, then what does it even mean
to be a US company at that point?

------
Antonio123123
That's a good idea. We need a decentralized facebook, where everybody hosts
and shares their data.

It would need a registry or identity provider for the initial contact, but
then it should replicate facebook functionality in a decentralized way. If you
want to see posts in a group (like facebook group) - you query online members
part of the group for their data, and download/share the latest version.

~~~
cpach
That’s an interesting idea but creating decentralised social networks seems
quite hard. IMHO it’s easier to just use regular web sites running e.g.
Wordpress, Discourse or SMF[0].

[0] [http://simplemachines.org/](http://simplemachines.org/)

~~~
Antonio123123
The issue is that you can't interact between profiles, or if you interact it's
centralized. Looks like there is existing a decentralized social networking
protocol: ActivityPub, having the features of social media (as mentioned in
related comments).

------
evo_9
I get what others are saying on this thread regarding the feed/content aspect
of FB, and agree a personal website isn't a substitute for those FB features.

BUT - if you just happened to have gotten married like I did, and are on the
path toward kids in the semi-near future, a personal website isn't a bad idea.

I was just starting to reconsider my no-FB account ever policy because of the
need to easily share family pictures/news, etc. Then I read this and thought -
NO! - I will not get sucked into finally having a FB account; a personal
website is a viable option.

------
frogpelt
Obviously, this was already tried.

The precursor to Facebook, at least among my peers, were personal blogs on
Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc and the precursor to that was personal web
sites on GeoCities and Tripod. Many of my friends linked to each other's sites
and it formed a pseudo-social network.

Facebook was better because you could control who saw your website by limiting
your friend list. They had the social framework in place, you just had to sign
up. Facebook is also a great place to share local news.

Something like it will probably, eventually replace the local newspaper and TV
stations.

------
wmnwmn
So, the driving force behind facebook is the newsfeed, which enables people to
see everyone's updates without going one by one to each page. It's going to be
hard to replicate this with personal sites, but maybe we don't want to
anymore, now that we see the downsides of the addictive feed. Perhaps a person
whose page you would not specifically visit once in a while, is a person who
you aren't really friends with. But I'm not sure, because the feed really is
fun at times. Politics degrades it as much as anything.

~~~
bluGill
Things are more complex though. There are people I'm friends with on facebook
that I wouldn't visit their web site. However facebook figures out when they
have a kid, die, or otherwise some important event happens that I care about
and makes sure I know about them. I care much more about random life events in
my brother's life and so I see more of them (but I'd visit his web site) That
is a valuable service that facebook has figured out.

------
dkrich
I still remember changing from MySpace to Facebook and the reasons had nothing
to do with exclusivity. What happened was that my friends and I were using
MySpace and one of us tried Facebook and convinced us all to try it. We stayed
because there were several aspects that now sound simple but made the user
experience night and day.

First, MySpace was incredibly clunky. When you posted an update the entire
page refreshed. Facebook had a much sleeker interface that used Ajax so
posting updates was much more seamless.

Second, I think the mid 2000s were a unique time where consumers were very
willing, almost wanting to try different sites and technologies. I remember
these being the days Tumblr took off as well. Now people seem to like
simplicity and speed, and are content focused. At that time it was all new so
people like customizing pages and having custom songs play when the pages
loaded.

Finally, Facebook had integration with third party apps that made using the
site more fun and gave people a built in feature to share. I remember living
social not as a deal site but a Facebook app where you ranked your five top
things from a bunch of categories, such as top five movies, books, etc. Users
loved it.

These factors are easy to forget now where they don’t seem that big a deal but
at that time these were huge differentiating factors that made Facebook more
popular and I think Facebook’s early product teams probably don’t get enough
credit for some of these decisions.

------
chiefalchemist
Not to get off-topic but this was one of my knocks against WordPress' new
Gutenberg. Sure, it's a cool idea and ideally in time great technology, etc.
But "big and fancy" layouts are mainly a __not__ mobile first ideal. Gutenberg
10 years ago? Genius. Today? In a mostly small screen world? A sledgehammer
when a hammer would do in most cases. (I'm generalizing. The minutia isn't
important really.)

When WP started, (self) publishing was the key. We've since evolved to where
content is important but network / connections matter more. I know #duh :)
With all it's market share and community WordPress was in a unique position to
leverage that girth and add the magic of "network" to the content.

Imagine something like (e.g.) Disqus but as the default - as Gutenberg is - on
every WP website. The general idea might not be new (i.e., Disqus has social-
esque features) but the mass network would be. Perhaps adding in a RSS
consumption feature for the sources I follow (and might want to share)?

That is where we are now, with a lot of small screens. God bless Gutenberg but
sometimes it feels like the promise of a new & improved fax machine - too
little too late.

------
cpach
I like this idea. Actually, earlier today I set up a private Wordpress site
that I will use to share photos of my kids to my family and relatives. One
reason I wanted to this is that my dad doesn’t use Facebook. I could have
chosen iCloud, but I prefer to use something that I control myself and is not
tied to certain hardware. The site is hosted on a VPS on Digitalocean which is
very convenient and the price is reasonable.

~~~
jdhawk
I've been looking for a solution to this for a while. How can I let my friends
and family stay connected with photos videos & related metadata, but retain
security and ownership?

I thought NextCloud might be a good solution, but I'm still searching.

~~~
amerkhalid
Same here. I am continuously searching for such solution.

Previously, I used self-hosted WordPress blog for sharing photos, password
protection was great but got tired of administering stuff. Also I wanted to
backup my photos on VPS, so I was uploading full-resolution photos which of
course, was not very price efficient for backup.

Then I switched to SmugMug with unlimited space. This was great because I can
upload photos directly from Lightroom Classic 6.0. Photos stay synced. And
easy automatic backup but photos are slightly compressed when you upload via
LR plugin.

Now I have "upgraded" to Lightroom CC, it comes with 1TB of storage. Your
photos/videos are available on laptop, phone, and web. It comes with Adobe
Portfolio which you can use to share. You can share privately too but I
haven't tested that.

However, it is not a true backup service, if you accidentally delete a photo
on phone, it is gone everywhere. And there is no recycle bin. So I keep local
copies and run a cron job to copy them to NAS.

So this is not a self-hosted decentralized solution but it seems to be best
option so far.

~~~
jdhawk
The critical piece is running a stand-alone environment that has low friction
for the users - my family.

I want my Significant other to be able to post as easily as Facebook. My
parents to browse easily on their devices, and uploading pictures from my
phone to be Facebook Simple.

Mastodon is pretty close to having all of this if you turn off Federation,
other than not being able to run a fully private node. You can still access
public pages for users.

On my list to check out are: HumHub & Hubzilla.

------
UncleEntity
Why go back to the aughts when you can have a federated, distributed,
blockchain based social platform?

Think I missed some buzzwords but you get the idea.

The main thing you need IMHO is discoverability -- finding the people you used
to hang out with in college 20+ years ago is something fb is pretty good at.
Probably even better these days, dunno, haven't logged in since '13 my friend
told me a few years ago.

~~~
mxuribe
Now that google has killed off their G+ social network, maybe they can focus
on adding value by being the "discovery engine" for the fediverse. I mean,
their original product was their search engine, so connecting disparate data
silos is something that they're good at. It worked for website discovery all
these years, why not for federated/distributed points of online presence? Mind
you, it need not only be google, but can also be bing, or duckduckGo, etc.

------
njn
A good idea. idk if that will ever happen. Still I like my weird website -
there aren't enough crooked angles, messiness, imperfections or just internet
spam in general on Facebook. Parts of the internet are obsessed with
authenticity and identity, and also reliability and uptime. Those things are
important for airplanes, trains, things like that. Not something like this: a
phonebook used to keep in touch with people and have random conversations
about nothing. I like to imagine a place like facebook that gets permanently
blurry if it gets rained on, like a phonebook would. And also there's no
passwords, like a real phone book.

Our everyday internet should be taken less seriously - used for what you want,
to simplify a few things, not make them more complicated or hidden.

Lev Manovich has some interesting thoughts on the database-centric nature of
how the internet's come to be. [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/language-new-
media](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/language-new-media)

------
denimalpaca
The author makes a decent point about what drove membership to Facebook in the
first place - the "cool" aspect via exclusivity and cool kids leading the
charge to make the switch. But he completely misses why having a personal
webpage is completely different from Facebook or Myspace or even Tumblr and
Reddit - the aspect of community. It's not just about sharing, it's about the
"strong connections" vs "weak connections" of finding content _within_ a
community; this is simply not something that would exist if everyone had their
own page. Almost by definition it wouldn't be a community - in a weird way
it's as if the internet alone is _too_ big to allow all these individuals to
have a balance of strong and weak connections. What's needed are these pages
that establish community rules, and not just "in group" and "out group"
dynamics. Myspace had the bulletin board and a Top 8 which gave it some sort
of culture; Facebook has the standardized news feed and Apple-esque one-size-
fits-all profile structure. A rag-tag libertarian group of individual
websites, no matter how many there are (and there are already plenty), are not
going to establish the same sense of community because they won't foster a
community culture.

Yes, I agree we should move away from Facebook, but the answer has to be a
better culture. So far from my prowling of alternatives, my only conclusion is
that there _cannot_ be a one-size-fits-all solution because that's exactly
what Facebook is trying to do by catering to lowest-common-denominator of
culture in the most powerful (psychologically) way: allowing content that gets
the most clicks. It's tautological. What we need isn't to break up Facebook or
wait for a disruptive alternative, what we need is a better sense of the
internet as groups of communities, of which you should be a member of several.

------
simplecomplex
I already did. I post to my own site and use rss/Microformats reader to
consume content.

Funny thing is I love it but everyone who uses Facebook (especially geeks)
likes to tell me this is all wrong because 2 billion people aren’t using my
website and I’m not a publicly traded company.

I think Facebook has messed with their heads. They just keep prattling about
“network effect” and “owning the market”.

------
freediver
Perhaps also consider that thousands of people working at Facebook are not on
the mission to the evil things. Mistakes have happened, and this could be the
wake up call for FB to turn around and employ that massive brain power for
truly life changing things.

------
toight
The problem with Fakebook is that it perpetuates unnatural outsized social
networks because Zuckerburg worked out at its formation that this is 1 very
addictive and 2 highly profitable.

Clone Facebook. Limit it to Family + 50 friends max which actually seems to
many. The numbers arbitrary. I think 150 social relationships is the max a
human can handle.

The digital social network would resemble the real social network and some
form of human decency and dignity would re-emerge.

Constrict the size of individuals digital social networks to what they evolved
to be able to handle and watch online behaviour and content improve.

~~~
anticensor
Humans can handle 150 friends and around 1000 acquintances maximum.

------
Bud
I'm all for bashing Facebook for being evil, but this article is abjectly
idiotic. "Personal websites" would replace essentially NONE of the things
people use Facebook for. Let's be honest.

------
taude
I want facebook lite: Facebook for Families. Small, tight, private social
network. Public social networks to be handled by Twitter (if you so desire),
or your own blog, internet page, rss feed, etc.

------
known
You may want to check [https://prism-break.org/en/all/#social-
networks](https://prism-break.org/en/all/#social-networks)

------
madrox
I'm reminded of DiSo from a different internet age: [https://diso-
project.org/](https://diso-project.org/)

It was an attempt to extend the blogging model with open standards so that
others could consume it the way they consume the news feed today.

Unless you were around for it back then, you probably never heard of DiSo,
which tells you all you need to know about how good of an idea it is in
practice. Or maybe it was ahead of its time. I don't know.

------
nvr219
Bring back LiveJournal!

~~~
mcfunk
My friends and I keep talking about this. The quality of the interactions on
LiveJournal were so much more substantial.

------
mikehollinger
One of the pros of Facebook is the ability to share content with a restricted
set of people, and find content easily (the feed). For example - I’m ok with
my friends and family seeing my vacation photos, but don’t generally want all
of you (no offense, but we need boundaries!) paging through them.

There’s got to be something more in between. I got excited by the various
distributed social networks but have yet to see any of them in any non-techie
context.

------
coliveira
The reason personal websites are not used anymore is that there is no traffic.
The big advantage of posting on FB is that everyone is going to the same site
and you know the people who are subscribed to your posts. Individual websites
have the problem of discoverability. Google solved part of that problem with
its search engine, but FB gave the ultimate solution by giving everyone a way
to publish directly on their own web site.

------
dccoolgai
No one here has mentioned Solid yet, which I find odd given the topic and the
volume of replies. It has some technical problems still (like 500 friends of
friends requiring 500 separate http requests) but it really promises to solve
what the author is complaining about. I was skeptical of TBL after the DRM
debacle but he really does seem to be trying to do right with this proposal
and I wish more people would pay attention.

------
daveheq
That's not a social network. That's not even Google+, which is just a bunch of
personal microblogs. If you somehow came up with some way to have personal
websites be an app that let people post on each other's walls and message and
like and reply to posts... then you've just got a different Facebook that
would need some sort of conformance authority.

------
OptionX
And then there would be indexing services where you can put all your friends
websites for easy access and a feed of their new content. After that the most
popular indexing services would offer hosting for those sites on their
servers, then the format would converge in a template-based pattern for ease
of use. Finally we would end up right where we started in my opinion.

------
coldtea
> _Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about
> Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online._

Only Facebook also provides a number of "friends" you "like" your posts
(quotes intended). Those likes and "engagement" is superficial of course, but
for most people posting on their own website would be a desert.

------
a3n
> There was no indication that something we’d been conditioned to do would be
> quickly weaponized against us.

In the early 90s, early web and internet, I knew people who protected their
IRL identities from the net. "Flying under the radar."

I thought they were somewhere between paranoid and "excitable."

We should probably not ignore crazy people as hard as we do.

------
superkuh
It's not that I disagree but he posted on vice.com instead of his personal
website. You don't make change by influencing others. You make it be being the
change yourself.

I've hosted my personal website from my home computers for 20 years now and
it's only become easier and more feasible as home connections became better.

------
z3t4
I think the biggest problem is authorization, you don't want random people on
the Internet to be able to see your family photos. That's what Facebook
solves. We need a decentralized ID system, something like a private/public
key, that is easy to implement and even easier to use/login to a site with.

------
jf-
We should replace facebook with a version of facebook where you get control
over all your data in exchange for a subscription. Meaning that nobody, app
developers or advertisers alike, gets access unless explicitly allowed,
there's no tracking, and you can actually permanently delete things.

The free tier would be as it is now.

~~~
veddox
Unfortunately, I suspect that FB makes a whole lot more money offering a free
service than they ever would with a subscription model. And though I very much
like the idea: if you look at email, you see how few people are actually
prepared to pay for an online service...

(Email has the added advantage of being a public standard that anyone can
implement - free or charged. Social media has no such universally accepted
standard.)

------
jamesb93
Okay, I pay almost nothing for my domain.

Provide me with the tools to create a cheap, mobile friendly, HTTPS website
and I'm in.

~~~
superkuh
Run the webserver on your home computer (apt-get install nginx, etc). Make a
static site out of html files. Tt's as easy as <html><head><title>my
site</title></head><body><h1>first post</h1><p>some content</p></body></html>.
For HTTPS you can use the LetsEncrypt easy setup packages.

------
debacle
A rough timeline of the early 2000s:

1\. Google creates the first noteworthy current gen search engine.

2\. The web slowly starts moving towards a semantic platform with separate
presentation.

3\. Google creates the world's largest ad platform.

4\. The semantic web inexplicably dies (see 3).

5\. The web painfully and lossily becomes a series of dense monolithic
networks.

6\. People realize this might be a bad thing.

~~~
drivingmenuts
> 6\. People realize this might be a bad thing.

6\. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users
are fine with it.

Good or bad, monolithic networks save a lot of ordinary users the pain of
having to learn. The reason they might not want to learn varies greatly, but
I'll go out on a limb and say it's related to a lack of time and basic
backgrounding, in equal measure.

It's not always only about the technically qualified.

~~~
Juliate
> 6\. Technical experts realize this might be a bad thing, non-technical users
> are fine with it.

Right. Tell that to the people that slowly come to the realization that their
politic decisions and destiny have been heavily influenced through tools that
built on and benefited from this very centralization.

They are (and will be) very fine with it.

~~~
blancheneige
we're not talking about mainstream media here. ;)

~~~
Juliate
Facebook _is_ mainstream today, it's even more mainstream than newspapers and
tv/radio news networks.

------
brisky
Shameless plug: you should check out [https://dpage.io](https://dpage.io) \- a
quick way to create a personal website and own your data too. The website will
be hosted on decentralized blockstack server nodes while your identity will be
secured on blockchain.

------
yoav
I think we’re looking at the problem wrong.

Facebook solves for some social aspects of the web really well, and then
layers on some toxic nonsense for profit.

We don’t need to replace Facebook. We need to regulate it, and replace its
leadership and business model.

Just like private firefighters were transformed into a public service

------
kgwxd
We should host our own content then publish it as a copy and/or link to any
number of places we want from there. A new platform pops up, point your stuff
at it. A platform goes away, there's plenty of others. A platform misbehaves,
easy to boycott.

------
LastZactionHero
I've made this suggestion on a few other threads, and I'll keep making it
until it works ;)

Anyone want to start a modern webring?

\- Self host your site

\- Put in a JS snippet to link out to other sites

The idea being to drive some traffic to your site without being beholden to
Medium/Facebook/whatever.

~~~
fuball63
I'm not familiar with this concept but am intrigued. Does the snippet just
pick a random assortment of links from other members of the webring?

~~~
fuball63
Update: found this article on Wikipedia.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring)

------
byteface
Around 8 years ago I tried to pitch to Nokia/Microsoft to use .git somehow so
users were paid to allow access to their data. They didn't listen but I still
like the idea that people own their own data and can monetize it themselves
somehow.

------
rbanffy
A free-to-host solution that included subscription to other websites via a p2p
push protocol would be cool. I thought about building it on top of the
standard runtime for Google App Engine (which has a free tier), but never got
to it.

------
Domark
Nice blog post at vice.com! That’s all this is.

Facebook posts my content using a template. Wordpress could do the same thing,
but it’s missing Friends.

So we need a personal site with Friends. Looks like Facebook works for that.

Discord is the only other app I have with Friends list.

------
porpoisely
Should we? Heck, I'm feeling real nostalgic. Lets go back to land lines and
56K dial up modems while we are at it.

The real question is who is this guy and why should we even consider what he
says seriously? And why is this so heavily upvoted?

~~~
a3n
My guess is that people wish for a people networking protocol/facility that
isn't corporately controlled, similar to how email is not.

------
LaserToy
I have being thinking about the same idea for a long time. Search can be
externalized, and hosting is very cheap these days. Actually, with right
approach, hosting might be virtually free, if we use cloud drive providers

------
MisterBastahrd
Facebook is a tool to receive updates from friends and family. As such, what
it really is at its core, and what would replace it, would be a giant opt-in
personal spying network.

------
h0p3
Come and join me folks! I am an open wiki, and I'm happy to connect with you.

[https://philosopher.life/](https://philosopher.life/)

~~~
indigodaddy
I feel like I just read a thousand Dr. Bronner's bottles..

~~~
h0p3
That's a fascinating thing to be compared to, lol.

------
FlyMoreRockets
Duplicate post, originally posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18721857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18721857)

------
greekgordo
Mastodon is a great option, me thinks:

[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon)

------
cynoclast
lol, no we shouldn't

It would leave 99.99% of people high and dry.

Facebook fills a niche that personal websites don't. Love it or hate it, your
computer illiterate grandparents aren't going to create a personal website,
and if they did, their grandchildren aren't going to visit it unless their
parents make them.

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kv85s
You could call it "GeoCities"

~~~
LinuxBender
Which is now replaced by NeoCities [1] It is open source, so you can run it
yourself if you wish, or make use of their infrastructure.

[1] - [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/)

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eriktrautman
The award for most obnoxious impossible to close invasive mobile ad experience
goes to vice.

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racl101
Is the author saying, in so many words, that we should go back to the
Geocities era?

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laythea
Before social media, that's what a lot of people did do.

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thinelvis
Blogger (blogspot) could have been the thing all along.

~~~
cpach
There are still some really good blogs out there! Usually focused on niche
topics.

~~~
Zigurd
Blogger together with comment threads on Google+ (which could be embedded in
more places than just Blogger) were supposed to be the magic elixer between
personal sites and a feed that promotes discoverability.

Sometimes I think Google has killed G+ just as there was a reason to give it a
second look, but I suppose they know how unlikely is a revival of G+. They
have got a successful social network in the form of YouTube, even though
YouTube comment threads often make Facebook look like the Promised Land.

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EpicOne4223
#MakeNewsgroupsAndIRCGreatAgain

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mbrumlow
First time I have ever agreed with vice.

Must be a cold day in hell.

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reubeniv
Essentially how MySpace used to work?

