
Towards a world without Facebook - middle1
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/25/towards-a-world-without-facebook/
======
cornholio
The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated
by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives
refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips,
talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts.

For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump
into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and
chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized
version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because
there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users.

If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it _simpler
yet_ , and even more compelling for average users. The margin for
simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a
perfect Facebook clone will not break it's strong incumbent advantage.

So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social
networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things.
Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing
to do with "a world without Facebook".

~~~
tlb
When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work
with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What
coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more
trustworthy than whoever would run the database?

There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what
they are here.

~~~
gurrone
I would like to add: Do they understand that it's impossible to delete
anything that got commited to the block chain once a block is accepted? I mean
at least if they think about a blockchain in the sense of the Bitcoin
blockchain. Implementing a deletion of prior blocks is an interesting problem.

~~~
Moru
I expect that is exactly the point, no more "censoring overlords" :-)

~~~
pmlnr
"People are stashing irrevocable child porn links, dox, copyright
infringement, and leaked state secrets in the blockchain" \-
[https://boingboing.net/2018/03/19/cant-block-the-
signal.html](https://boingboing.net/2018/03/19/cant-block-the-signal.html)

Sometimes it's not about Big Bad Censoring Governments.

------
dasil003
The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or
that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is
facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south
very quickly for them.

The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of
resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a
lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will
always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current
cultural standard for ethics.

Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will
inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just
look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations,
having come out of academia with their "don't be evil" slogan, but inevitably
all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or
later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are
relying on VC funding.

I'd love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media
efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical
challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will
require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly
difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.

~~~
bognition
> You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of
> engineering manpower.

I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13
employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared
to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd
wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.

~~~
tsunamifury
Both raised millions before being acquired, and likely would need to raise
100s of millions to start today. Facebooks has reached both network effect and
economy of scale which is very hard to unseat.

~~~
phoneboy
Not really a problem though is it. Compare with DASHs DAO that spend around
30M$ a year on improving and building the system.

------
swalsh
I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I
realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video.
Which don't belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the
implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common
protocol. Then multiple "vendors" can host the information (encrypted so they
can't read it), and multiple "vendors" can create clients.

I often feel like the block chain is derailing the decentralized Internet by
adding unnecessary complexity.

~~~
allannienhuis
That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface
they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing
up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social
media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of
Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of
that.

~~~
ColinWright
Then sign up on a Mastodon instance, make some new friends, and set up a
cross-poster.

 _Edit: I 'm getting down-voted - let me expand ... I've set up a Mastodon
account, started to integrate, and made new connections. I've also set up a
cross-poster, so I can work on either, and I'm finding that my more valuable
connections are_ also _migrating to Mastodon. So although it 's playing the
long game, that's a strategy._

 _If you don 't start, it will never happen._

~~~
allannienhuis
on the first point - I'm not looking for new friends or to promote any of my
own views. I'm looking to get birthday party pictures and the occasional meme
from my existing friends and family. Like most people I think - I post pretty
rarely, but like to comment from time to time on other people's posts/content.

I agree it's a chicken-egg problem. But there has to be enough value in it for
people like me to be worth the pain of transition.

For me there's very little incremental value in another solution. The privacy
benefits of using a different service are nebulous - I treat anything I post
on facebook as 'public', regardless of my privacy settings, and I really have
no reason to believe some other service run by volunteers will be capable of
protecting my data, or respecting it at all.

I'm paying for facebook by looking at ads and having 'someone' know something
(maybe a lot) about my public facing self. I think for most people that's been
a reasonable trade.

I actually _wish_ there were more competition in this space, and a way for
these social graphs to be more transferable in some way, but I haven't seen
any options yet that are attractive enough to be worth the cost of switching.

[edit] for what it's worth, I didn't downvote you :) the idea of crossposting
is a valuable addition to the conversation.

~~~
ColinWright
> _... I 'm looking to get birthday party pictures and the occasional meme
> from my existing friends and family._

Noted. Mastodon really is a twitter substitute, not a FB replacement. For
these things you're right - there is currently no FB substitute (at least not
that I know of, I'd be happy to be proven wrong).

We wonder if Mastodon can become that.

> _I treat anything I post on facebook as 'public', regardless of my privacy
> settings, and I really have no reason to believe some other service run by
> volunteers will be capable of protecting my data, or respecting it at all._

People are reporting that their FB data contains all their cell-phone call
details - are you also happy with that?

> _I 'm paying for facebook by looking at ads and having 'someone' know
> something (maybe a lot) about my public facing self. I think for most people
> that's been a reasonable trade._

But it's not just the things you are explicitly saying are "your public face."

> _... I haven 't seen any options yet that are attractive enough to be worth
> the cost of switching._

... or indeed, at all.

> _[edit] for what it 's worth, I didn't downvote you :)_

You can't downvote a reply to your own comment or submission, so I know you
didn't downvote me.

> _... the idea of crossposting is a valuable addition to the conversation._

Cheers.

~~~
allannienhuis
> "Mastodon really is a twitter substitute, not a FB replacement."

That's interesting, because I'm one of those that never really 'got' twitter.
I _think_ the main difference is the distinction between the relationships -
'follower' is different than 'friend'. Following seems to be more impersonal,
and so Twitter seems to be more about public information feed from people that
think they have something interesting to say (like an rss feed on a blog).
Facebook seems to be more about sharing things/stories/events with your
friends/acquaintances, although it does have the extra layer there of
corporate and celebrity accounts that are followed as well. For me the second
category of stuff has been in the 'nice to have' category; it's not why I log
on a check my FB feed. I just never found any content worth consuming on
twitter - I go to other communities (like HN) or use rss (Feedly) for that
sort of stuff.

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

~~~
Zee2
Couldn't the indelible blockchain-embedded data be pointers to data hosted
elsewhere? If the externally hosted data is "forgotten", the blockchain-
verified pointers would be useless.

~~~
bitL
Blockchain doesn't store data themselves. We would end up with petabytes of
new blockchain data every day otherwise.

------
tunesmith
For me the trinity is facebook, twitter, and slack, so I've started figuring
out how to replace them all at once.

So far riot/matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and
discord, at least for my purposes.

I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in
touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook
messenger. So riot/matrix could reduce my reliance on facebook in some ways,
too.

I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems mastodon is the most likely twitter
replacement. Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when
things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation.

As for the rest of facebook... I don't know. I was reading this thing about
addiction, and how the bitch of addiction is that not only is it the thing
you're addicted to, but it is also the thing that makes it harder to kick the
addiction. (In the case of a substance, it hacks your brain to make it more
difficult to resist impulse/urge.) Seems like something of a parallel, in how
using facebook makes it harder to leave. The only path out in those cases is
to take slow incremental steps that make it easier to resist over time. So,
carving out the pieces of facebook that are important to you. For me that
might be a public blog to share my thoughts, an email list, actually gathering
email addresses and phone numbers for people on facebook I might want to stay
in touch with, etc. Although I still want to check out Disapora and
Scuttlebutt... and I don't know if ActivityPub is relevant here.

~~~
zanny
I don't get what the difference between Facebook and Twitter even is supposed
to be. One for people you know and one for people you don't? You can solve
that in something like Mastodon by just having two independent content feeds
(and you can already set that up).

It probably used to be character limit, but again Twitter has already doubled
theirs and Mastodon's is already 500 characters.

That and the main developer of Mastodon is working on media features to make
it work better as an Instagram replacement as well.

The real secret sauce is that the Fediverse and AcitivtyPub means if you want
a Facebook like experience you can use Diaspora and still friend / share /
communicate with people on a Mastodon instance. Different programs can emerge
as fews into this data graph but its still the same fundamental primitives
(soon to be a web standard) data types.

Speaking of Riot, I'm hopeful the developers will look into integrating it
better into said fediverse. It should probably at least support some means for
Mastodon hosts to easily spin up a Matrix server at their Mastodon domain with
no friction and the same account database. It will probably take Matrix
protocol revisions to make that work, though.

Probably one of the important killer but missing features of Matrix will be
the ability to integrate into websites the way Facebook messenger does, so you
can have the social media site with the popup chat frames.

The only missing feature in my mind after all that is something akin to
Facebook / reddit comment threads / disquis / discourse. So that non-social
media sites can integrate social media comment sections into their media that
either autogenerate threads, repost to a Mastodon instance / on Diaspora and
let Fediverse commentors just comment right there on the page.

------
eyeareque
After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such
a connection with it and find it hard to leave.

Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact
with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated
with old high school peers though.

~~~
ams6110
I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up
with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties
before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't
have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without
Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not
sure what all the fuss is about.

~~~
davidcbc
Those kids these days with their new fangled gadgets and social media. In my
day we walked two miles uphill each way to share pictures of cats with our
friends.

~~~
vanilla_nut
No need to be dismissive. I'm in my early 20s, and most of my life has seen
the use of social media as the core mode of communication. Can you imagine
moving back to a world where you could only talk to friends in person after
you'd experienced talking to friends over the phone? Or shifting back to phone
calls only after you'd gotten used to text messages? Like it or not, a
paradigm shift has occurred. Personally I think Facebook has gone too far:
they've manipulated people too much, and their platform has become mostly
useless for its core feature (social interaction) because they've put too much
work into monetization, ads, algorithms, and suggested content.

I think there's a lot to be said for what is effectively a collection of
personal websites where people can share their life events along with a
standardized communication protocol. There are a lot of advantages, like being
able to keep up with (slightly) more people and being able to stay in contact
with people who live farther away, and who you don't have the money or time to
visit in person regularly. But it has to be on a platform that values those
things, or it'll go the way of Facebook -- exploitative, and eventually
useless.

~~~
davidcbc
The GP was talking about not understanding what all the fuss is about with
kids these days and their phones and social media and I'm the one being
dismissive? Your comment makes more sense under the GP, not me.

------
danbruc
Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized
services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong
is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for
them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price
of all the things they buy.

That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use
there would be no point to track and analyze the shit out of their behavior.
Users could be customers again. So the real question is how do you convince
potential users that they are better off paying for services directly?

It is of course not that simple, it never is, think for example about people
seeing ads for Gucci bags and actually buying them and how they subsidize
people which may see those ads but never actually buy the products because
they can not afford them and which may also not have the money to pay for
services directly.

But I do not think any of the peripheral issues fundamentally changes the core
challenges, getting people off of ad supported services.

~~~
AHMagic
Here's why I don't think decentralization is a red herring: in a centralized
service, if you disagree, you don't have another option. If you didn't like
AOL and quit, there was no way for you to maintain contact with AOL users
unless both parties used a different platform.

Decentralized systems like phone, e-mail, and mail allow you to maintain
contact with people while having control over your provider. I understand that
we've lost some of that control, but the basic idea stands.

If you don't have Facebook, you can't reach out to other Facebook users. If
you don't have Verizon phone service, you can still call Verizon users with
AT&T or <insert your another phone service>. If you don't have Gmail, you can
still send e-mails to Gmail users from Yahoo or <insert e-mail service>. If
you don't like USPS, you can send mail through UPS or <insert another
service>.

~~~
danbruc
That is a somewhat valid point but I think you and me are using decentralized
in different senses here. When I said decentralized I meant a decentralized
application, something without central servers. You are more talking about
standardized protocols that can be implemented by different vendors and which
together form a federated network. There is certainly also some overlap there.

But your examples of phone, mail, and email are essentially all centralized
systems with a certain number of vendors for each but together forming a
larger federated network due to standardized protocols. Email is probably the
closest of your examples to what I call distributed because at least in theory
everyone could run his own mail server although in practice it is probably not
so easy because spam made everyone pretty paranoid when it comes to forwarding
emails from random mail servers.

~~~
AHMagic
You're right. I think I'm referring more to "federated" than "decentralized".

------
wyck
Facebook capitalised by being in the right place at the right time, a time
when the internet was opened to the non-tech savy, the "regular" world spilled
into what was already a social experience. This is why Facebook now has the
moniker of the "mom" platform. Technology like blockchain might free the
business model from having to generate revenue and better align the
experaince.

But I have an easier time believing people will just dump social media than
some Utopian public social ledger is going to solve what is essentially a
psychological shitfest.

------
olivermarks
[https://steemit.com](https://steemit.com)
[http://minds.com](http://minds.com)

Bizarre that jonevans/techcrunch doesn't site these modern social networking
sites, only the mysterious demise of Diaspora etc.

------
TimJRobinson
This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO
involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best
bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever
or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized
social network I've seen.

~~~
baggachipz
From what I see, last commit was a year ago and that was just to bump the
version number. Is more work being done on this? It looks interesting.

 __edit __never mind, I was looking
at[https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt](https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt)

~~~
fabianhjr
Still very active: [https://github.com/ssbc/](https://github.com/ssbc/)

------
magice
How on earth is blockchain going help? Seriously! There is no conceptual
situation, in theory or practice, that blockchain will improve upon Facebook
situation.

Generally speaking, Facebook is bad for about 5 reasons: 1\. Privacy:
unexpected people see your data (legally). 2\. Right-to-be-forgotten: your
data sticks around longer than expected. 3\. Data Security: your data is
stolen from your data keeper. 4\. Cyberbully: Unwanted data surfaces without
your control 5\. Fake news: wrong information is fed to you.

How do blockchains help with ANY of these? 2. is certainly getting WORSE,
since blockchains never forget. 1. is probably getting WORSE, because most
blockchains are public. 3. is getting SO MUCH WORSE, because so many other
people will now store data, and compromises in _any_ of them will expose
everything (think African Prince scam). 4. will become impossible to solve,
because the data is going to be public and cannot be deleted, and because all
of those anonymous mechanism will ensure that the culprit is impossible to
track. 5. won't be impacted.

So, tell me, how the hell do blockchains help? Seriously.

Look, I know blockchain is a cool idea (yay! no need for central database!).
However, central database _can_ help in many situation, especially in anything
involves history, limit of access, and regulation.

------
im_dario
In my opinion: good premise, bad conclusion. Blockchain, as good as it can be,
isn't really required for social sharing.

I'm going to state pretty obvious things. We need to take a step backwards.
What we need is a decentralized/federated app platform. It must run in any OS,
it must allow to any actor to provide its own implementation (and their own
apps - providing network effect) and it must be easy to use for the final
user.

We already have some parts of this done. Facebook just took advantage that
community didn't know what to do with them.

------
pmuk
Scuttlebutt seems like an interesting implementation of a decentralised social
network:

[https://www.scuttlebutt.nz](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz)

------
EGreg
How about starting by just having a good, open source social platform for the
Web, like Wordpress is for blogs. Wordpress is used to host 20% of all new
websites.

Meanwhile, to post a comment on TechCrunch, I had to register yet another
account with yet another password, and after that the comment I was writing
was lost (despite the site saying it will save it). And then I still couldn't
post it on a mobile phone!

This is 2018, and you can see how the state of decentralized social networking
sucks. I made a video about it:

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

------
AHMagic
Do you really want to live your days feeling dependent on this sort of
"service"? Do you really want to say, "but I need Facebook!".

In today's age, you need a phone number and e-mail. It's ok - they are
decentralized. Don't let a centralized platform of Facebook's evil nature
become necessary for you to live your life.

Delete and forget it existed. Ignore and move on. Give up the benefits and pay
the cost.

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

~~~
alkonaut
So basically we pay $1 a year instead of giving facebook all our our
information?

That might _sound_ reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay
the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since
2008.

~~~
egypturnash
I run a Mastodon instance and I’ve had a few users ask me when I’m setting up
a Patreon to help cover my costs because they want to start paying for it.
YMMV.

~~~
alkonaut
Those users are mastodon users? Then they aren’t in the category I mean. I
mean the 90% of Facebook users who will not have heard about #deletefacebook
when it’s over for this time. And all those people are the reason I use
Facebook.

That’s the key to this problem:

\- making the product isn’t the problem. Technically it’s been done (e.g
diaspora)

\- attracting integrity-conscious users isn’t the problem. But they won’t drag
the rest along easily.

How to attract a billion Facebook users that won’t even hear about the
alternative?

------
2aa07e2
The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is
remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very
aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently.

Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my
likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was
scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against
deleting the whole account only because it's an invaluable address book.
Realistically, the inertia of people to leave it will keep me as a user for a
long time.

~~~
somethingsimple
What extension is that?

~~~
2aa07e2
Social Book Post Manager [1]

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-
post-m...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-
manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae)

------
giancarlostoro
I think the way forward is to embrace ActivityPub and similar endeavours. I'm
not sure how much of Diaspora wound up on ActivityPub[0] / ActivitySteams[1]
but I feel as though the best path forward for projects like Diaspora is to
reach out to W3C to see what could be standardized.

ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social
site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it was called) and
similar open sourced twitter-like platforms, it doesn't necessarily mean we
should be restricted to "micro" blogging by those platforms (besides, sharing
pictures, and such is somewhat still valid "micro" blogging just look at
Tumblr). If the limits are too much you could still at the very least send
over a summary between hubs and if the person wants more info they can visit
the originating site for the whole post.

I think the path forward is to use open and standardized formats / protocols.
We have the technology... There's a couple of implementations for
ActivityPub/ActivityStreams already[2], you could either join one and
contribute or just start one yourself if none are in the language / license
you prefer.

[0]: [https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-
activitypub-20180123/](https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/)

[1]: [https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-
core/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/)

[2]:
[https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implement...](https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implementation-
reports)

~~~
dane-pgp
If we can get some good examples of social networking sites interoperating
with each other using W3C standards like the ones you mention, then things
will get very interesting with the introduction of the GDPR in Europe.
Specifically, it includes a right to data portability, with the wording:

"In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1,
the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted
directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible."

[https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/)

Conceivably, a Facebook user could demand that Facebook support automatically
sending their Facebook posts to their friends on third party social networks.
I imagine that an EU court would not be very sympathetic to Facebook claiming
that it isn't technically feasible for a (large, monopolistic, American)
company to support this use case when small open source (European?)
competitors have implemented the W3C standards with no trouble.

Once Facebook is forced by the GDPR to publish data to competing sites, I
imagine it will feel compelled to also support receiving data from people on
those sites, otherwise the one-way flow of data would put Facebook users at a
disadvantage. But then there is basically no reason to use Facebook, as users
of competing sites would still be able to see and be seen by their friends on
Facebook.

This is such a disastrous outcome for Facebook that I wouldn't be surprised if
lawyers at Google (or some other big company) were already working on the
legal complaints they are going to launch come May, when the GDPR comes into
force.

------
natural219
A fundamental distinction needs to be made between blockchain-based and non-
blockchain-based decentralized services. Blockchains are insanely ambitious,
century-scale, state-killing, finance-replacing behemoths. WE DON'T NEED ANY
OF THAT STUFF TO REPLACE FACEBOOK! You're exploding the problem way out of
scope, and constant focus on blockchains seems almost like a false flag to
demotivize people who just want to build _decentralized alternatives to
Facebook_ , which is already an astoundingly huge problem.

Stop trying to put blockchains in web decentralized systems. They're not going
to work for several more decades. All we need to do to kill Facebook is solve
the self-hosting P2P UX problem, and create a W3C-like body that allows
developers to participate in standards creation process for how we schematize
common social data. That's it. Once everyone is running a federated node in
the cloud or in their basement, _then_ you can go back to doing blockchain
stuff.

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

~~~
skinnymuch
Facebook has lists or do you mean it should be more intrinsic to the social
network like Google Plus was?

------
memorymappings
This is so annoying. "A world without Facebook" like it's some kind of almost
apocalyptic reality. I'm only 27 and I remember when Facebook came out when I
was in highschool. Miraculously, I also remember life before highschool and it
was just fine too.

I deleted my account in 2014. Wow big woop. I didn't die, and I still stayed
I. Touch with my family and friends I cared about. I spent less time passively
stalking people I don't care about. Wow. Amazing. Mind boggling.

I also deleted my account before it became a fad to write some emotional diary
about what it's like to get rid of your account like losing a child or
approaching the topic like you just jumped to the other side of a heated world
wide political debate and too a stand, about the same time as women started to
post with no makeup (like wow, you are some kind of fantastical hero making a
YouTube video or posting an fb or Instagram pic without spending an hour
caking on foundation, more girls should "be brave" and step out like you) and
I honestly can't tell them apart.

Stop making getting rid of Facebook a big deal and it won't be a big deal to
not have one, the same way I'm a girl and never gave two cents about makeup,
quite literally, and I don't make it a big deal to not wear it. I don't waltz
around like some superior than thou feministic hero that girls should tremble
to their knees.for guidance on how to give up their addiction to drug store
eyeliner.

News flash. Your social life will not dissapear, in either case.

What is the deal. We have better things and more interesting things and more
important things, all of us to focus our time and energy on than how other
people perceive our obnoxiously curated profiles.

Stop giving Facebook so much power. They have power because you give it to
them. Theyve been openly untrustworthy for years. So don't give it to them .

------
halvardo
We can never replace Facebook with another Facebook, decentralised or not. It
needs to be disrupted orthogonally.

Think of the individual components of Facebook that are keeping people from
leaving, and create better stand-alone versions of those. Can they be
integrated with other things that Facebook doesn't have? Sort of like the
concept of disrupting an incumbent by integrating a different part of the
value chain from – except there isn't really a (known) value chain.

We have to find new points of integration, new ways of bundling valuable
features that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. It would likely
have social components, and probably be defined as a social network, but don't
start in that end. Start with the components.

I don't see any other way Facebook is going away in the short term.

Personally I'm really only there because of work and for discovering events.
Oh, and stalking.

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

------
jobvandervoort
Is a world without Facebook one with a real alternative (everyone in the same
place), or one where there are many alternatives?

Reddit is a single platform with many mostly-independent communities. Could a
similar thing in the shape of a social network exist?

------
wellboy
The tech that is proposed in the article sounds a lot like Nano's block
lattice, where everyone has their own blockchain.

You could even potentially use it to run this social network by just
increasing transaction data size.

~~~
TimJRobinson
Yes! After reading the Nano whitepaper a few months ago I realized it could be
a protocol for a general, free, scaleable social network. I've been
prototyping and designing it for the past few months. You don't need to
increase the transaction data size, just make the transactions pointers to the
data which lives somewhere else like IPFS or S3, keep the chains small.

However a week ago I discovered scuttlebutt.nz who also had the same idea,
about a year before me, and already had a working useable app. So I've been
using it and will probably be hacking on this for a while and see how I could
incorporate some of the ideas I came up with prototyping my own network.

~~~
wellboy
Ha very cool. Though who pays for storing the data then?

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

------
Invictus0
I'm unconvinced that the US population cares enough about its data to get rid
of Facebook anytime soon. The media goes berserk with every new breach, but
even the Equifax debacle barely registered in the minds of most Americans. I
don't see Cambridge Analytica as a tipping point, because most people are
oblivious to the fact that people are deleting their accounts in the first
place. Their infinite newsfeeds will be just as full of crap as ever.

------
tammer
The blockchain is a potential solution. But deep down I have high expectations
for IPFS — I think a workable, usable alternative for Facebook there could be
the beginning of a real movement towards a decentralized Internet.

Also, for anyone in this space: the Facebook killer app is Events. I can share
photos & statuses in myriad ways, but I truly only have one way to access a
complete events calendar for my city, organizations & social groups.

~~~
Spearchucker
IPFS claims to use a blockchain, and that nodes in the directed graph cannot
be changed. This means IPFS is of no more than cursory interest to me. I want
to be able to curtail and even delete my stuff. When I delete a thing, it must
be gone. I don't want a record of it, or that it existed. If I retain a thing
privately, I don't want it known publicly that I have it.

------
shmerl
Why should decentralization equal blockchain? I didn't quite get the idea.
Decentralization for social networks was proposed a long time ago. The problem
is not in application of it, but in the fact that good social networks aren't
supposed to be commercial. And that means someone should invest volunteer time
to advance them.

Diaspora grew over the years, and it's still growing. But the growth is slow.

------
jjguy
For those of you who read this article and believe there may be a thread of a
good idea within, go read Neuromancer.

Gibson had a vision of an Internet with decentralized social media, including
decentralized code execution, 35 years ago, and we have not yet realized it -
or anything remotely close.

~~~
ballenarosada
Gibson's cyberspace is a terrifying place where corporations, who execute
total control over financial reality, operate centralized computer systems
powerful enough to fry a human mind. It's not about a decentralized execution
model.

------
nkkollaw
I tried to follow the article, but I don't get what the blockchain technology
has to do with a social network.

Also, given how innefficient Bitcoin became with just a few transactions, how
could the thing handle the billion of pictures that get shared every day?

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

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

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

------
msangi
I find it curios that the article is calling the 'blockchain people' to save
the world from Facebook when the blockchain is a _public_ ledger.

------
Froyoh
What did I just read

~~~
iKevinShah
"Towards a world without Facebook"

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

~~~
rootlocus
Yeah! Any technology that affects the lives of millions of people in potential
harmful ways should die because it gets to the front page of my favourite news
aggregator TWO days in a row!

------
jasonkostempski
"wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location
of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve"

I'm probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is
exactly DRM for the individual. I don't want anything with DRM and I don't
want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and
for this.

~~~
JKCalhoun
> I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

It seems pretty simple to me. People oppose DRM because it is content they
paid for and disallows their modifying, repurposing it, etc.

None of those things apply to content I have created. I have the original,
non-DRM'ed content that is always editable, I am the owner fo the content....

~~~
jasonkostempski
So if your proud mom wants to share everything her kid is up to with everyone,
including Zuckerberg (because he gave her a way to automate reposting your
feed for her directly to Facebook), you don't want a way to prevent that?

