
Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media - imartin2k
http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/03/25/beyond-deletefacebook-more-thoughts-on-embracing-the-social-internet-over-social-media/
======
bogomipz
I thought this was a well-written piece. I would love to see a "return to the
internet" movement in 2018.

The author suggests everyone "acquire your own damn digital land." And I think
this is the way forward. In 2005 or the pre-FB era being a "techie" was a
personal distinction. I feel that now most people have become "techies" in
varying degrees, either out of necessity or general interest. I mention this
because I think I think there's so many more people now that are fully capable
of operating their own site or blog than there were in the pre-FB era or the
pre-smart phone era.

I think one of the greatest joys of "getting online" back in the day was the
sense of adventure that the internet provided - strange, funny, obscure,
intriguing, informative "websites" lurked everywhere. And stumbling on one of
them and bookmarking them is/was a strange thrill. Contrast this to scrolling
through a uniform looking "newsfeed" you have no control over. I think
something like a "back to the internet" movement just might make it's own
momentum.

~~~
stickfigure
The problem with the idea of going back to a distributed internet is that it
directly contradicts the primary thing people in the #DeleteFacebook rant
about: Privacy.

The _only_ way to ensure that your content doesn't get reshared without your
permission is to create a tightly locked-down walled garden. If you're really
worried, you need some sort of DRM too. And if you're really really worried,
you need global laws that ban software that breaks DRM.

You can't have private, distributed data. You have to pick.

~~~
bogomipz
>"The problem with the idea of going back to a distributed internet is that it
directly contradicts the primary thing people in the #DeleteFacebook rant
about: Privacy."

Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own
site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation?

Content control, copyright and DRM are orthogonal to the issue of privacy.

Also I don't really understand the use of the phrase "the distributed
internet" to distinguish from "silos" and "walled gardens." The internet is by
design distributed. FB while being a walled-garden is still very much "on" the
internet.

~~~
intopieces
>Can you elaborate on how exactly maintaining your own
site/blog/domain/presence etc is at odds with privacy advocation?

A website that any old person can access means it's a website that any number
of bots can crawl over and aggregate. Now you're basically back where we
started with Facebook.

~~~
walterbell
There's a big difference between content aggregation (done by all search
engines) and behavioral profiling (done by advertising companies, including
social media).

~~~
intopieces
Sure, but that fact that the latter is supposedly not done on personal web
pages doesn't mean it can't / won't be done on the data on, say, Mastodon
instances.

------
the_lnternet
I, personally, don’t see why it’s necessary to coddle those who are unable to
remember a time before garbage “social media” sites, by adopting the term “
_social_ internet.”

It’s just The Internet.

None of these sites or apps have done anything new, with the technology we
have. It’s the same shit that existed in 1999, but scaled up to more
bandwidth, faster client-side hardware, and warehouses full of servers.

Facebook really isn’t an improvement on AOL. Snapchat is just a means of
forcing people to delete the lewd emails you’d like to send. Twitter is SMS
text messaging, plus a mailing list web UI.

Since maybe 2004, people got sold on the idea of turning their address book
into a home page, exposing their contact list as content. But it wasn’t
anything new or incredible, it was just user behavior that changed.

Only now, when everyone is desperate for a political scapegoat, are we
claiming that it was used to rig elections. But the only difference between
the time before “social media” up until now, is that when we just had 900 page
paper phone books, the phone book never drew lines to graph connections
between phone numbers.

We have smart phones now, and smart phones have been the real game changer. In
1999, an ad campaign would have conflated these devices as supercomputers
banned by export treaties, pointing to Game Boys getting used as missile
guidance computers or military grade cryptographic hardware. But again, it’s
just scaled up network bandwidth and more computing power packed into smaller
packages. The real game changing aspect of smart phones is the cameras, hot
microphones and uniquely identifiable, trackable radio tags we’ve been
brainwashed into carrying.

Insisting on calling it a “ _social_ internet” simply treats people like
children.

Platform monopolies are not The Internet. The Internet does not require a
prefix or qualifier. It’s not the “social” internet.

It’s just The Internet.

~~~
loceng
"Better" mousetraps built - when what we need is more community for growing
and learning and more interconnectedness, through increasingly better
organization and governance.

------
fancyfacebook
Welcome to how the internet used to be. It's amazing that people's memories
are so short on this subject, if you have enough smart people pushing
corporate experience X or Y then everyone assumes that's the only option.

The first step is rejecting the aggressive attempts at corporations to ensure
you live in their "garden" as much as possible. It's bizarre that people are
doing gymnastics about how if you just restrict yourself to this certain 3% of
the food in that garden everything will be ok.

How about setting out on your own instead? How about starting from: "I don't
need youtube, I don't need amazon, I don't need google analytics" and figuring
it out?

That's what everyone used to do.

~~~
eitland
I recently created a web site.

Just black text on white background.

I write about stuff I find interesting. So far a few unfinished pages.

I don't even think it is indexed yet.

It is my rebellion against pixel perfect audience building technical blogging
and what not.

It feels good.

I might add links to other similar pages at some point.

Anyone else makes old fashioned web sites?

~~~
otachack
Have you looked at static page generators? Wonder if that provides the
simplicity you're looking for along with optional customization. One example:
[https://gohugo.io](https://gohugo.io)

~~~
eitland
Did.

Got distracted by choosing one.

Got distracted by choosing a template.

Got distracted by problems with Markdown (an8d Asciidoc).

Get distracted every time I want to write.

After I got my html "template" up and running I just copy that and write
whatever I want to write.

Conclusion: for me, when writing, finding the correct tools prevented me from
just writing.

(I have however spend some time on my developer tooling and feel I get a good
return on investment there. Currently (for 5+ years) Netbeans and Maven, and
later also VSCode + Yarn.)

~~~
kerrsclyde
Amen to this.

I've spent more time than I dare to admit trying to rebuild my person web site
which I ran successfully from 2000-2012. Which coding framework should I use,
CSS, database, hosting platform, the list goes on. I should have just spent
the time writing it all in plain vanilla html (which I've now started doing).

Ironically if I'd start posting my content on a social network where I had no
control over how it looked/functioned I would have spent my time actually
putting together something useful.

------
jancsika
> For those who don’t crave recognition, it induces a digital life that’s more
> localized to closer friends and family — a state that’s more congruent with
> our fundamental human instincts.

It's a noble goal.

To achieve it, the author suggests that people _buy_ a domain name, _spend_ $4
a month on web hosting, and manually _install_ Wordpress. The author leaves
out ssl, so I assume either the person is going to pay some more for a cert or
spend time learning about LetsEncrypt and installing CertBot.

Add to that Wordpress maintenance time and time installing plugins.

Subtract from that the ability to write polemics on any of these topics:

* geopolitics wrt Ukraine

* diversity in tech/gaming

* China's policy on Tibet

* probably others that I'm missing.

Because if rile up anyone with even slight hacking skills (or anyone who could
pay such a person) your $5 a month website is toast.

And we're apparently replacing the attention economy with "directly checking
your site," RSS, and email newsletters.

If we're going to entertain technical-user fantasies like this make-the-
internet-great-again piece does, can't we as technologist at least imagine a
less boring future?

* it should cost $0 to publish

* the more popular/polemical one's writing, the _faster_ it it should be to retrieve the document. You know, technology that has existed for close to two decades now

* it should be as easy to use the software of our fantasies as it is to use the awful social media networks we're decrying. Drudgery shouldn't be a badge of ethics.

* it should also probably be able to deliver publicly-funded scientific journal articles at $0 cost to the user.

Actually that last one is key. If someone thinks they've got a Facebook-
killer, don't describe the technical underpinnings to me. Just give me a
search bar to find publicly-funded scientific journal articles on your system.
If I can discover them and read them and they haven't disappeared after a
month, I'll then consider using your system to express myself.

~~~
eitland
> To achieve it, the author suggests that people buy a domain name, spend $4 a
> month on web hosting, and manually install Wordpress. The author leaves out
> ssl, so I assume either the person is going to pay some more for a cert or
> spend time learning about LetsEncrypt and installing CertBot.

> Add to that Wordpress maintenance time and time installing plugins.

For most of us it would be more efficient to just use html.

Then you don't have to maintain Wordpress at all.

Or, if updating links etc gets tedious: use static html generators.

~~~
gitgud
Hmm I suppose static site generators actually are more secure and stable too
right?

If it's just a static server, then it won't require the maintenance of core,
plugin updates that WordPress and other CMS's need, just the web server
updates.

------
packet_nerd
> "...the development of open social protocols that support the network effect
> usefulness of large social networks without a centralized company in
> charge."

Not sure what exact shape the author imagines this might take, but I've had
this idea (dream) in the back of my mind for a long time.. We need a
standardized protocol that is open (I.E. not controlled by or dependent on 1
or 2 companies), private and secure by default, and dead simple to setup. For
a while a few years ago I was really excited about the Bittorrent Bleep
concept. The fact that it's been discontinued demonstrates just how important
it is for these protocols to be open source and have multiple implementations!

Imagine a protocol that was P2P, supported chat/messages/voice/video, group
messaging, integrated microblogging, ability to follow your friends and rank
their posts with your own algorithm! Imagine if it was modular. You could
choose from a half dozen post ranking algorithm plugins, or write your own, or
sign up for extra-value services from companies that were competing for your
business (maybe providing curated post lists or cloud storage of your
posts/PMs).

I realize that absolutely none of this is innovative on it's own. We've been
able to send encrypted messages/host blogs/script our own algorithms forever.
But it's highly fragmented and requires a certain technical acumen that many
people just don't have. My grandparent's aren't going to host and configure
their own blog. Not going to happen. But, while it lasted, Bittorrent Bleep
was entirely doable for them.

~~~
Zhyl
I think we need to think of social protocols less as a technical solution and
more as what I'd describe in my day job as a 'business process'. Sure, part of
this will be tech-enabled and parts will be fully automated, but I feel that
what is really lacking is an internet etiquette that can be abstracted over
different channels or platforms.

Consider Facebook. With the friend request _it invented a new social
protocol_. It was based on an underlying technical need (this platform will
allow you to message, interact with and view the content of this target user)
but became a social contract (I assert that I know and am willing to interact
with this person on a level where they can see my daily updates and
information that I have chosen to share). This was incredibly rigid and
binary, but essentially shaped the social media landscape and affected the way
that users, especially early users considered their friendships and
acquaintances.

Also its a bit out of vogue now, but there was a massive 'thing' of the
facebook relationship status being some kind of social registry.

If anyone has read the 'Kingkiller' chronicle books by Patrick Rothfuss, I
would imagine a 'social protocol' to be something like the 'rings' system from
the city of Severin. Simple ruleset, but allows complex social emergent
behaviour and could be abstracted over different mediums or communications
channels.

~~~
andrewshadura
Only that the concept of a friend and a friend request existed before
Facebook.

~~~
Zhyl
Sure, but I'd argue the Facebook friend request is different to, say, the MSN
friend request. One felt like adding someone to an address book, the other
felt like officially adding someone to your circle of friends.

Probably subjective, but therein lies the insight into why Facebook is so
culturally significant.

~~~
andrewshadura
Well, I don't see how it's very much different from, say, LiveJournal friend
request (except that it doesn't have to be mutually accepted) or a similar
feature of MySpace (I think they had it too) or even last.fm.

------
FlyingSnake
I second the author that we need to host our own website and data, however
finding an audience is really hard in post-Facebook world. Just ask any
blogger who saw the golden years of blogging (2008-2012). The Internet might
be the same but the social media sites have changed the nature of the game. I
feel our attention spans have decreased and the fallout of the Facebook
privacy fiasco will definitely make it hard to consume new stuff.

I'm not sure if decentralised solutions like Mastodon/Scuttlebutt/Diaspora etc
will succeed, as I feel this is a human problem, not a technical one.

~~~
eitland
> I second the author that we need to host our own website and data, however
> finding an audience is really hard in post-Facebook world.

I think many of us wants even further back than the golden years of blogging:
we want back to before "blogger" was a profession, back to when we put things
on Internet to share and get feedback.

IMO "Finding an audience" is something you need if you are going to milk
advertisers.

------
jakecopp
I agree, except how do you control the audience of a website, like keeping
friends separate from professional contacts?

What's the best way to do this, a password you give to people? I don't like
the idea of forcing people to give up their identity.

~~~
tgragnato
I have been maintaining a nextcloud instance for some time (migrated from
owncloud). It initially was for my personal usage, but over time I created
accounts for relatives, friends, university and work colleagues (free Dropbox
!!).

I’d have never thought it’s so customizable: in the store there is an app for
xmpp chat with a fb-like ui (very popular amongst my younger friends) and the
social aspect can be managed by Circles
[[https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles](https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles)],
control over visibility and permissions is included.

Of course, it does not scale to millions of users, but that’s the point. The
approach is a middle ground between “delete social media” and “own your own
domain”.

------
hliyan
I long for the return of a platform-less Internet, where the only real
"platforms" are primarily HTTP and email...

------
acomjean
I think its a good take.

The problem its hard when not social media to get visibility.

Its easy to start a blog (wordpress/blogger/tumblr etc.. ), its harder to get
people to go to it and periodically check it out. RSS aggregators/ google
reader was a good way to do this, but they've fallen out of favor. There is a
ghost town of abandoned blogs on the internet presumably because they didn't
get the reads/ interaction.

Its almost like you need to announce your new blogpost on twitter/ fb..

But I think there are solutions.

I saw this open source groupware on hn a while back and am starting to get in
installed for an art non-profit. There are probably others, but I'm going
install and see how it goes:

[https://www.agorakit.org/en/](https://www.agorakit.org/en/)

~~~
cilefen
[https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/) lays out techniques for getting
the word out when you publish a blog.

~~~
eitland
Or one could just wrote because on wants to write, want to share knowledge and
not to "build and audience" or anything.

~~~
togetherasone
I agree with this sentiment. Yet, it seems instinctive to suggest that the
internet wasn't made to be exploited by those wishing to monetize it. I just
think we've let the presence of large tech companies pervert this concept.

Absent such groups, it would seem to be desirable to let individuals monetize
work which makes them happy. In such a web, it would be more akin to a street
marketplace, as opposed to, say, a curated set of goods.

------
whatyoucantsay
This is a penetrating analysis and I completely agree with its values.

In practise, however, it is a very quixotic pursuit to try to pull the social
world away from SV companies with network effect lock-in. The only way to
succeed just may lie revolve in anti-social marketing behaviour.

~~~
rpvnwnkl
I agree with you; the sentiment here is right, but it's unrealistic to try and
change the mindset of so many people.

In my experience, 'the masses' are bright enough that they will drop a service
when it's no longer useful to them, or when something better comes along.
After all, they adopted FB in the first place, right?

If you're opposed to the services, the best you can do is abstain from them
and share your reasons why with anyone who cares to ask, but don't bother
preaching. It might be as effective to be a loud exception: as an example, how
could a public agency organize a public forum via FB if all citizens aren't
using FB? By standing out from these services, inclusive groups will have to
accomodate their members who are outside of them. That's all we can ask for.

People are giving their attention, personal information, and money via these
social services, but maybe they can afford to spend it there. Otherwise they
would stop, no?

------
EGreg
If I may shamelessly mention the project we've been working on the last 7
years...

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

1\. We started with the idea that _actually_ social tools would let you get
in, get out and get on with life. They would help you coordinate your actual
social life in the real world instead of sucking up your time online. A minute
spent on the app would result in hours socializing in the real world, not the
other way around. Group activities would form like snowballs leading to an
actual goal, not random chatting. Thus came the first part of our mission:
_Empowering People_.

2\. We also realized very soon that communities wanted to install our software
themselves. The flipside of letting people _actually_ get together on their
own time, is that we can help unite their members and engage them.
Universities and Buildings, for example, release their own social app to their
Students and Tenants, and allow them to find one another and connect on their
own time. (See [https://qbix.com/communities](https://qbix.com/communities)).
Thus we cane upon the second part of our mission: _Uniting Communities_

3\. We realized there is actually no good open source alternative to Facebook,
that communities can install the same way they can install Wordpress for
blogs. We wanted to change the world and have developers and startups build
social apps as easily as Wordpress plugins. We wanted communities to run our
platform and apps even on a mesh network or router disconnected from the
Internet - REAL decentralization, to be used in countries with censorship, or
on a cruise or remote village to plan dinners, date, etc.

But the world has changed since blogs and we had to build and maintain
literally thousands of features, from user signup to data access to payments.
We recently got a security audit by an outside firm and are proud to say that
they found (and since patched) only three, very hard to exploit,
vulnerabilities in the entire platform. The code is at
([https://github.com/Qbix/Platform](https://github.com/Qbix/Platform)). We
don't have a slogan for this part of our mission yet :)

It's totally free and open source, and we will begin growing a community
around it in 2018. If you want to join or find out more, contact me -- the
email is greg and the domain is qbix.com

See a 7 minute video about it to understand fully the how and why:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

~~~
walterbell
Nice work. Which tool did you use to create the video?

One of the examples says that when overlaying a Google map widget on the
dentist's site, that the dentist does not have access to location data.
Elsewhere, the video mentions iframes. If the dentist's web site runs HTTPS,
how are you injecting iframes? Or is the primary "site" being served locally,
with the dentist's web site displayed in an iframe?

If all of the user's identity data is stored on their phone, how do they
backup that data or move it between devices?

~~~
EGreg
Great questions.

1\. I used Keynote and then ScreenFlow

2\. The dentist's site HTML/JS actually chooses to include the iframe pointing
to the user's identity server, our platform does the rest.

3\. The user's data is stored encrypted in other areas, as well. They
themselves can decrypt the data and grant keys to access it as they see fit.
Our platform handles the rest.

------
esturk
My personal take is that over all, `application specific` social platforms
(SP) are working just fine like Github (SP for coding) and Yelp (SP for local
listings). There's a general goal that people go to get the resources they
desire.

However, Facebook as come to be a `SP for media`, which is why its generally
known as social media. There's just no general purpose on FB other than to
share media articles nowadays.

------
lkrubner
A personal story:

I went a few years without Google Analytics, and I was proud of the fact that
my weblog had no tracking software. I kept thinking I would write a script to
track the audience myself. But I was busy and never got around to it. So in
the autumn I decided, okay, I'll use Google Analytics for a few months, till I
can write my own code.

I'd written my own system for tracking my weblog, back in the era of
2005-2009, before I used WordPress (back when I only used my own code for
websites).

Looking at the Google Analytics results nowadays is heartbreaking for someone
like me, who remembers the independent blogosphere of 12 years ago. Because it
is gone. Utterly gone.

Back then my traffic tended to come from dozens of independent bloggers who
noticed when I occasionally said something smart. The blogosphere was a world
of individual voices. There were big group blogs, such as Crooked Timber, but
even those consisted of individuals and it was easy to figure out who had
admired something I wrote. It was a world where you had some sense of who was
reading you, and what they thought about you, and they could see when you read
them in return.

That world died in the era 2006-2010 as Twitter and Facebook gained influence.

Nowadays, Google Analytics shows I get traffic from sites that aggregate
audiences. Overwhelmingly, that's Facebook and Twitter. The traffic is very
sporadic, full of big spikes of anonymous readers. A few times a year I'll
write something that gets on the front page of Hacker News, and then I'll get
from Hacker News anywhere from 4,000 to 40,000 visits over two or three days.
Which is great, but also sporadic.

What I miss is the ability to follow those who are reading me, and more so,
their awareness, in response, that I am reading them in return. The dynamic of
"You read me so I read you and you see that I read you" is alive and well on
specific sites, such as Twitter, but I miss it being part of the general
Internet experience. I do realize I can use something like
[https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge](https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-
bridge) to treat social media as a series of RSS feeds, and I am planning on
doing that, but that still misses the element of them seeing that I am reading
them.

I've been thinking about some way to try to balance people's preference for
walled-gardens with this kind of open back and forth conversation. I might
work on this more seriously later in the year.

If anyone is interested in a bit of history, way back in 2006 I wrote what was
widely considered the most definitive summary of the fighting that had taken
place among those interested in developing RSS. All of this was made
irrelevant by the rise of Twitter, but in 2006, this still seemed like a very
important topic for the Web industry:

"RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it"

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-
damaged-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-
in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it)

------
jcahill
One of the perks of social media is precisely the shift in cat herding burden
from the user to the platform. I present the following as supporting evidence:

>NOTE: THIS SITE IS A PARTICIPANT IN THE AMAZON SERVICES LLC ASSOCIATES
PROGRAM, AN AFFILIATE ADVERTISING PROGRAM DESIGNED TO PROVIDE A MEANS FOR
SITES TO EARN ADVERTISING FEES BY ADVERTISING AND LINKING TO AMAZON.COM.

I do not revel in the glorious autonomy of, say, permanent academics whose
self-help blogger reflexes have become so internalized that it's no longer
clear whether they recognize that a post is opportunist piggybacking on
trending slacktivist topics. If I can't tell from the general tenor of your
blog whether _you_ can tell that you're baldly shilling your books, your self-
perception in the matter has ceased to hold relevance.

My first thought upon seeing affiliate marketing links on a self-serious blog
is usually something more along the lines of: _why_ does this creature believe
they should be paid to have tastes in others' works?

For the most part, I'm not going to visit at all. But when I do, I am going —
100% of the time — to strip tracking parameters, affiliate codes, and all the
other bullshit off any link prior to visiting.

Knowing that a platform's design serves to background any given individual
user's capitalism of-the-soul in the service of a more homogeneous, impersonal
assault from the proprietors is an extremely valuable thing. De-emphasizing
personal schemes allows platform-centric economies of scale to double as
behavioral peacekeeping. If I _only_ have to circumnavigate a user's terrible
ideology, vainglorious twitter feuds, etc. to accrue value from the subset of
their posts I find worthwhile, I'm doing better, curatorially-speaking, than
if I had to concern myself with that user's schemes to monetize their mere
existence in my vicinity.

Constraints on affordances limit a small proportion of content-creating
elites. You know you're one of those when your whining about the platform
becomes action in leaving the platform, self-publishing in parallel, or
otherwise upregulating personal agency.

For everyone else, though, those same constraints make the world go round.

The average internet user has no business whatsoever running their own
services, per every single survey of digital skills ever conducted. And a CS
prof writing otherwise is either (a) grossly incompetent in his stated area of
expertise or (b) allowing himself to shoehorn flights of fancy into his
writing in the service of pushing schlock.

A profile you lose because you didn't pay $4 last month, or didn't get
security updates for, or […] is simply not a plausible centerpiece of
alternative social media under any demographically-literate view of the world.

Homestead the noosphere all you want. Tenements will still need building too.

