
We Need More Alternatives to Facebook - submeta
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alternatives-to-facebook/?set=607909
======
kem
This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start
(private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus
centralized services...)

I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed
paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services.

The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where
people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the
same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own
services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers
without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents).

The success of things like Facebook and Twitter has never seemed like that
much of a mystery to me: they basically allow people to have a web page
without needing to make one. There was MySpace that did that, and then people
wanted to add on privacy and discussions, etc. to their webpage, so Facebook
supplied that; Twitter was basically providing a way for people to post
rss/Atom feeds, etc. But then you cede control to these large providers.

I don't think that model completely applies anymore, with messaging, photo
sharing, and what not becoming so integrated, but I think the fundamental
issues are the same, in that that the internet was developed with a greater
ratio of providers:users in mind than is the case now. I think there was a
much more federated model in mind when the internet was developed than is the
case today.

~~~
Sir_Substance
>The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where
people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the
same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own
services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers
without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents).

We already have a model for this: email.

You and I can use whoever we want as email providers, including hosting our
own, and if you don't think I'm a trustworthy provider, you can drop my
messages.

The system isn't without it's corner cases, but it's certainly proven to be a
robust model over the last ~30 years.

The only thing it requires is standards. We already have one for facebook
messenger: XMPP. Facebook and Google used to support it, but they both shut it
down because they wanted to lock their users in harder. We have CalDav for
events, but again, none of the big players want to know about it.

We could have a "social status" standard, allowing you to send a robustly
versioned life update to other servers from whatever social service manager
you'd prefer, but you and I know that no amount of user outcry could persuade
any of the major players to adopt it. Network effects, peer pressure and
social expectation (e.g. please submit a snapchat along with your job
interview) power their meteoric growth.

What we need is a "Regulating the Gauge of Railways Act 1846" for the digital
age. We need international bodies to review software that has become mandatory
to the modern world, distill it down to a set of living specifications, and
then ram it down the throats of software vendors.

~~~
skybrian
Email is insecure and was overwhelmed by spam, driving people to use systems
(such as Gmail) that are good at filtering spam.

Any distributed system will need to figure out how to deal with spam and
abuse. That's hard to do without there being a dedicated team to deal with
flagged messages.

~~~
wmeredith
Eh, if you set up your social email client like Twitter, you only get messages
from those people you follow. Done.

~~~
anigbrowl
Then you miss out on the social discovery aspect which is a key part of social
networking. You're just avoiding the problem of where to go by cutting off
your own legs.

~~~
marmaduke
Seems contextual whether that's good or bad: one theory of sleep is that we
lose consciousness so that we don't go out and get ourselves killed in low
visibility conditions.

~~~
anigbrowl
Social discovery is obviously something people want or they wouldn't use
social media services in the first place. Pointing to the existence of other
contexts where that doesn't matter is neither relevant nor insightful.

It's like saying 'why worry about these problems, just don't don't use the the
internet at all.' I still like paper books and other things and usually spend
a day a week off the internet but that doesn't help anyone who's trying to
solve an internet problem, does it?

------
ohthehugemanate
Every time I see a sentence that starts with "we need..." I automatically
think "shut up and build it, or you're just complaining."

If it's a real need, then building it is a good idea, and will probably make
you money. But 99.9% of the time, it's just a turn of phrase way to bitch
about the way the world and human kind actually works. Yeah, if we had another
Facebook the world would be better. And if I had wheels I'd be a cart. What's
your point?

We don't have another Facebook, and we aren't likely to get one, because we
don't actually "need" that enough to pay tens or hundreds of people to build
it. You just want to wish it into existence.

TL;DR: shut up and build it, or stop complaining.

~~~
ben_jones
I've actually spent quite a bit of time working on a design document for an
open source version of the Facebook platform. I got a fair bit of the
architecture and requirements down for what I believed would make the project
successful. Then I came to the slow realization that the world had
categorically no use for a Facebook alternative.

The features of Facebook are largely meaningless. What matters is the absolute
stranglehold Facebook has and will maintain via acquisitions of users. It's
not a question of simply getting the user to register for another site. Many
Facebook users will have as many as five or more Facebook products on their
mobile. They'll also be logged into a half dozen other properties on the
internet with Facebook's OAuth scheme.

Icing on the cake? Tinder. Every college aged person I've spoken to has little
interest in Facebook. But they've all reinstalled it in order to use Tinder.

You cannot get a mass migration to occur unless their is an absolute PR
Apocalypse at Facebook or if you can offer absolute parity to the slow
dopamine drip provided by constant notifications and social validations coming
from all their products. At once.

~~~
Bahamut
I think there is space for an alternative - keep in mind that that doesn't
mean that they have to be hugely popular.

For example, some online communities I am a part of subsist mainly in chat
rooms, or forums. Those communities are so tightly knit in many ways. While a
lot of us are also friends on FB, our ties in these communities are still very
strong.

~~~
anigbrowl
I'm in some such communities too, but efforts to get anything going on other
sites outside fb come to nothing because you just end up with more social
media to keep track of for no real benefit - you can't _do_ anything
sufficiently interesting that you can't already do on FB, and you've lost all
the network effects for content discovery, rapid dissemination of news or
sufficiently entertaining content etc.

OK you gain privacy but that's really a negative freedom. I assume everything
I do online is visible to spies and corporations anyway unless I go to the
bother of running Tor (and probably even then), so moving some of my social
activity off FB isn't much more effective than virtually waving a fist in Mark
Zuckerberg's direction.

Let's be realistic here, small specialist forums are simply not going to
overcome large-scale network effects absent massive functional advantages.

~~~
type0
> I assume everything I do online is visible to spies and corporations anyway
> unless I go to the bother of running Tor

Not quite sure what's your point here but most subject specific forums on the
web have a huge bunch of users with nicknames and not their real names. With
the same reasoning you could also say: no need to close the door to WC when
you go there to do your needs since people outside know what you're doing
there anyway! If you use VPN and a lot less of your personal information will
be sold to advertisers.

------
65827
The alternative increasingly is to simple delete facebook and live a more
offline life. Starting to see it become more and more trendy nowadays,
especially among teenagers. It's considered retro and hip to just schedule
social time and disconnect completely

~~~
blatherard
Here's one bit of anecdata in response. I've tried to disconnect from social
media and get out in the real world. I took an improv class in NYC with about
15 other people, a range of ages & backgrounds. On the last day of the class,
a number of the students were asking around for Facebook profiles to keep in
touch. When asked, I replied that I didn't have a Facebook account anymore and
it was...awkward, to say the least. Like, giving someone an email or a phone
number seems much more formal and/or like more of a commitment, I think.
Anyway, I came out of it feeling a little disillusioned about the viability of
an offline social life. Though this was a group of mid-20 to 40-something
people, without the teens you mention.

~~~
codingdave
I have had similar experiences, more than once, but it wasn't awkward. Most of
the time, people just say OK, and go on with their life. A couple times, we
talked about it, and they commented that they wouldn't be able to get in touch
with me again. We talked about whether being connected on Facebook vs. never
talking again really would amount to much of a difference in the long run, and
agreed that it really would not.

At the end of the day, a Facebook connection from someone that you otherwise
don't communicate with, or run into in the real world isn't important. So
those conversations are only awkward if you make them so.

~~~
nogbit
Well said, similar experiences myself. If someone is worth being a friend then
I get their email or phone number. If it's at a professional level then
LinkedIn is more than enough.

I think Facebook is sad, very sad, and the majority of people waste their
lives away on it.

------
evdev
From my perspective, problems with facebook:

1) Anti-privacy, megalomaniacal nature of network.

2) Social cost of having removed the normal ways we moderate each other's
behavior. E.g. when someone is a narcissistic bore, you talk to them less and
less at the barbecues and eventually events start happening they're not
invited to. Facebook takes the people most willing to ignore social boundaries
and customs and puts them center stage.

3) Opportunity costs of not having mechanisms to form more naturally-moderated
social groups, but with a wider pool of potential people than are in your
physical social graph. This has always been the dream of the social internet.

4) "Fake news", specifically the moral hazard of providing an environment that
plays to the "worst" tendencies of media consumption. This is obviously
dependent on our values, and how patronizing we're willing to be. But the
hazard is a real issue especially when your network attracts people under one
pretense--hang out with your friends/kids/grandkids--and then has this non-
advertised effect of sticking you in a media echo chamber. This unlike when
people choose to go out and fight their echo chamber in a way that's fairly
important.

5) Like 3) but now for "good" media consumption, or a Healthy Democratic Civil
Discourse, or whatever. I'm glib because this is on the razor's edge of
smuggling in whatever values we daydream about imposing on the world.

A lot of us can come up with the David-and-Goliath dream of a distributed
network, but I think it's interesting that this is probably neutral-at-best
for 4), which is the issue du jour. One could easily see things getting worse
and articles being published with the thesis that people need to be de-
balkanized for the sake of civic discourse.

Also, the REAL contrarian take here is that things are close to optimal.
People are succeeding at 3) and by extension 2), just in niche special
interest groups that aren't salient to us in the steady state. The "problem"
is that many of us lack the conviction or self-direction to quit media
behaviors we don't like. Meanwhile 4) and 5) are really about the bankruptcy
of modern ideologies, etc. etc.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't get your 2) because I have no problem ignoring people I don't like.
But I agree that bad behavior is rewarded and that this is a problem on social
networking in general (jackassery on YT, Twitter trolls, things like Infowars)

I'd add to your list the imposition of censorship with no feedback mechanism -
Facebook's 'community standards' are wholly arbitrary, and I find it extremely
disturbing that you can share almost any kind of violent content there with no
problem, but anything too sexual risks a date with the banhammer. It's
perpetuating standards of social control and sexism that actively hurt people.

------
donpdonp
[http://scuttlebot.io/](http://scuttlebot.io/) is a distributed log file meant
to be an application platform. It has some nice design choices and is worth
looking at in the context of making a new social network.

~~~
tomcam
Didn't know about that. Thank you – it looks like a well-put together project

------
godelski
It seems to me that a social network is one of those natural monopolies. It
works so well because so many people use it. Remember the big reason many
social network alternatives failed, no one else was on them.

There are some things (very few in fact) that just work better as monopolies.
But that just means you need to regulate it differently. And there's an
interesting discussion, how best to regulate natural monopolies.

~~~
adventured
The big reason many other networks failed, is because no one else was on them?
Prove that as the cause, as opposed to them sucking as the reason. MySpace &
Friendster were already very substantial when Facebook came along and
destroyed them, because they were horrible services.

The better question is, why would you need or want to regulate it as a natural
monopoly? Specifically: to accomplish what?

Let me give you some examples.

1) To force FB to open up, allowing other social networks to openly ride on
its network / social data (the broadband one pipe lots of delivery companies
premise). Ok, now you're begging for a radical increase in abuse of personal
data. And you're going to need some new (or expanded existing) bureaucracy
agency to manage it all, which will open up new government abuses without a
doubt (happens every time; and said agency will radically slow down
innovation, which also happens every single time). Some obnoxious SNEA -
Social Network Enforcement Agency - will get created, and that'll be the end
of any innovation in social media; if you give the Feds an inch of new power,
they'll take a thousand miles.

Besides, you can already replicate your social network onto other platforms by
allowing FB apps to access your list of friends. Most people don't care
because there simply are not that many highly compelling social concepts to
explore that are worth the effort to maintain/use. There will never be large
numbers of compelling social offerings; there inherently can't be as people
have finite time, the hurdle to acquire it is very high. It's work/effort to
maintain these networks for the end user, they do not want to have to upkeep
it all.

2) To enforce higher standards on privacy. Well, we can already pass
legislation to do that comprehensively across all media platforms, if it makes
sense. It'd be ridiculous to regulate one platform for that purpose.

3) To limit various corporate abuses by FB (Instagram/Snapchat, ala Internet
Explorer/Netscape). Well, we already have anti-trust laws for that and
thousands of other laws & regulations and numerous giant three letter
enforcement agencies.

Meanwhile, while the argument is being made for regulating Facebook as a
natural monopoly, the next technology paradigm is being born somewhere to make
them far less relevant. That process has been repeating itself for 60 years or
so now, requiring very little actual regulation by the government.

~~~
crdoconnor
>Meanwhile, while the argument is being made for regulating Facebook as a
natural monopoly, the next technology paradigm is being born somewhere to make
them far less relevant. That process has been repeating itself for 60 years or
so now, requiring very little actual regulation by the government.

^^ Just world fallacy

In reality, the DoJ deal with Microsoft is probably partly what led to the
second internet startup renaissance. MS were still bullies and they still
inhibited innovation by squashing smaller competitors but it would have been a
_whole_ lot worse if Microsoft were not defanged by that deal.

Unfortunately anti-trust enforcement seems to have gone out of vogue these
days (starting with Bush, but Obama was worse than useless in that respect as
well).

------
dgudkov
Many people miss the fact that Facebook as a product is not about the website
and related services. It's _your social connections_ that are the product for
you (and for Facebook itself). The technology is just a wrapper and is
secondary in this case. In order to create a viable alternative to Facebook
one should find a way to create a new kind of social good attractive to many
(which is much harder when Facebook already exists). So it's more about social
good engineering rather than coding.

------
Eerie
No, we don't need More Alternatives to Facebook. We need Less Alternatives to
Facebook. That is, Zero Alternatives to Facebook AND Zero Facebook.

Stop wasting your time!

~~~
danellis
Why is keeping in touch with friends in one place online wasting time?

~~~
type0
More like waisting your freedom, integrity, privacy etc...

~~~
danellis
Can you give me an example of how my freedom, integrity or privacy have been
wasted? They're not taking anything I haven't willingly given them.

~~~
type0
How do you know, if the latest reports is to go by they are buying personal
information from third parties in order to construct better dossiers.

------
thr0waway1239
I wonder what traits will define the Facebook transcender like the Windows
transcender [1] mentioned in PG's essay.

You can argue that since that essay (2005) the iPhone/iPad and Android and
then eventually "all meaningful apps becoming web enabled" has mostly made
Windows the last choice amongst the candidates rather than the first when it
comes to selecting personal computing devices. Right now, people who use
Windows see it in the same way people see crusty old government bureaucracies
- it is just one of those things you deal with because you have to, and move
away from ASAP.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html)

------
erikb
We actually have alternatives. G+, Twitter, Gnu Social, Slack, Wechat. The
question is what's your flavour and how do you convince your friends to switch
with you.

------
WCityMike
My perfect Facebook would be crosspollinating Facebook and the structure of a
RSS reader. I want to be able to skim through EVERY update on EVERY page and
person I follow, star/flag the ones I'm interested in, and then read the ones
I'm interested in. Because of its popularity, Facebook has all the content I'm
interested in within its walled garden -- but its browsing experience sucks.
IMO.

------
davnicwil
Shameless plug, but very relevant since it is literally built to be an
alternative to the current mainstream social networks: I'm hacking on
[https://postbelt.com](https://postbelt.com) \- a privacy-first, ad-free,
text-only, discussion-focused social network.

Check it out if it sounds interesting :-)

------
tracker1
What we need are (as much as possible) unbiased sources of news, or news
feeds. Right now, there's so much bias in the media, and in news outlets to
the point where it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction, or see news that
might otherwise make things "difficult" for those organizations.

The profit above all else direction the large media news outlets have taken
may serve their profit motives, but do little to actually further human
knowledge of current or pressing events.

~~~
cJ0th
There obviously are bad news that no one should consume (i.e. "fake news") but
I'd argue there is no such thing as good news in the sense that every one
should read them to become informed.

To enable the public to make informed decisions every individual should come
to face with a random selection of sources on a daily basis so that echo
chambers get reduced and a problem-solving mentality can come into being.

The problem - as you've stated - is indeed that all news websites want to
maximize views/profits. This, for one thing, leads to market segmentation
(echo chambers). For another thing, Hotelling's law is at work within each
segment so that the news from your preferred sources are very similar. If CNN
writes about Trump's tweet instead of mass starvation then chances are very
high that it's the same with CBS.

~~~
djsumdog
I liked the old term for "fake news." Before 2016 we just called it "news."

What seems like a free press in the US and the world is heavily controlled by
less than a dozen conglomerates. They often game the system, mixing propaganda
with news to create a narrative. Just look at all the pro-Monsanto comments on
Hackernews and the recent court revelations that Monsanto had a big marketing
program to post pro-company commends on tons of major/minor social networks.

~~~
tracker1
There's a big difference between not being anti-gmo, and being pro-
monstanto... I'm pretty biased against larger corporations and want a serious
reversion of IP legislation and practice (though feel some of it has a place,
we've just gone too far).

It really depends on the specifics. There's plenty of things in nature than
can kill you. Most people are allergic to something. That said, it really
depends, and most of what's done to GMO products aren't _that_ different than
the selective breeding that has gone on for millennia, and the stuff that
actually occurs in nature.

Just because there's always been some manipulation of news/media, doesn't mean
we should or have to accept that moving forward. I wish I had the time and
could cover the expense of coming up with something better, at least a place
to start.

------
mattbgates
Google tried and failed. There are alternatives in other countries.. V
Kontakte and odnoklassniki for Russia, WeChat and Qzone for China, though
other countries other than those two are using what Americans use. There are a
few other things like Snapchat and Kik that teenagers are using.

Basically, if you think about the time you were a teenager: your parents are
old. If they are using Facebook, than Facebook must not be cool. If your
parents aren't using it, than it must be cool. In Facebook's defense: adults
are more valuable as users than teenagers are, as they are clicking on ads and
buying things. So there wouldn't be any reason for Facebook to even try to be
that "cool" place where teenagers go.

So for someone to capture that niche the way Facebook had done would be very
hard to do. I'm around Zuckerberg's age and at first, Facebook never appealed
to me, until they removed the .edu cap. So that was an important step of
getting Facebook to the entire world. It made everything so easy to connect
with people and "keep in touch" via messages, wall posts, and photos. The
"Like" button seemed to be something the world had never really seen as well
and made it even easier to "show" you acknowledged it, rather than having to
respond.

I'm sure if Google Plus attempted to be a compliment, rather than be a
replacement, it would've had more success. And the next big social media
network that is an alternative to Facebook will need to focus on that. People
don't really like "change". However, they are willing to learn and switch to
things that are more useful and helpful. For the older generation, which on
Facebook -- 25+ is probably the most prominent users -- they really don't care
to switch because their friends and families aren't using anything else. This
is where Facebook has great strength.

Where Facebook and Google tend to fail is: they want to be everyone's
everything. They seem to want to dominate all aspects of our lives. And while
it sounds great and it has worked in China (with WeChat), it is not appealing
to everyone that uses their products. However, when you have so many products
within your already-huge enterprise: those products get lost or belittled. How
many features does Google and Facebook have that many people don't even know
exists? Facebook is social media and Google is search. Both have a little bit
of extra pull with the open source and developer community, BUT.. they need to
stay focused on what they are best at doing.

As a web app developer, I keep an eye on those failed or lesser known products
from Facebook and Google, and make my own and charge for them. It is likely
that they are free on Facebook and Google, but people might not know they
actually exist because again: Google is for search, Facebook is for social
communication. Anything more than that... is lost.

~~~
hdhzy
> As a web app developer, I keep an eye on those failed or lesser known
> products from Facebook and Google

Could you provide an example or two? I wonder if you mean something like Buzz
and Reader or something completely different.

~~~
mattbgates
Another thing that I think is becoming more apparent is the fact that despite
the "privacy policies" of Facebook and Google, they will hand over information
because they record it. With security and privacy a concern, more companies
that advocate their stance and clearly state that they either do not keep the
information or they do not share it is important and a big selling point, and
will be in the future.

Look at ProtonMail. Secure email service. It is booming in business because
people are seeking alternative to Gmail, Yahoo (notorious for data breaches),
and Live mail.

So there is likely a huge market for this as more and more people become aware
of just how much data about them is being sold to third-parties.

------
andreasgonewild
Agreed; distributed, free and secure group communications is a much needed,
missing piece of the puzzle. If only I could figure out how to make it pay the
rent. A couple of extra brains/hands wouldn't hurt either...

[https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis](https://github.com/andreas-
gone-wild/snackis)

------
ams6110
To me, the alternative to Facebook has been around for a long time: email.

The people I keep in touch with online all have email accounts. Sending email
to one, a few, or all of them is easy.

~~~
gvurrdon
Email mostly works for me, particularly for friends and family. The problem is
that many people prioritise Facebook over email and frequently forget to
reply, or don't send email in the first place as they assume that everyone has
seen their Facebook post. So, outside friends and family, not having a
Facebook account tends to mean not getting information.

------
ouid
There's lots of alternatives to Facebook. Facebook is for people who don't
care about alternatives.

~~~
anigbrowl
No it isn't. I've had accounts on numerous alternative social networks and
none of them are much good as general platforms because there aren't enough
other people using them, or using them often enough.

Stop pretending network effects don't exist or that your social media usage
habits must be true for everyone else.

~~~
ouid
replacement != alternative. Not using Facebook is a proper alternative to
Facebook. What Facebook provides isn't necessary, and what's bad about
Facebook is probably intrinsic to the entire social media model.

------
nemoniac
How on earth has Facebook become the arbiter of our collective morality?

------
dyeje
There are plenty of alternatives already, you just need to use them.

------
5_minutes
We just need a modern version of Geocities.

------
skrowl
... and Reddit!

------
fergazen
I've developed a sort of 'core technology' that can be used to build out what
can hopefully become another option in the social media arena. It's open
source. It's supports a fully threaded 'tree' of content, rather than just a
linear stream like Facebook and Twitter. You create SubNodes, rather than
'tweets' for example. Technology stack is Java, TypeScript, Google Polymer,
Jackrabbit JCR, MongoDb, SpringBoot.

Demonstration site is: [http://sbnode.com](http://sbnode.com)

------
wcummings
Email and something like Google Groups does 80% of what Facebook does.

