
Facebook Alternatives - alollou
https://deletefacebook.wiki
======
danso
This list could use substantially better editing. "Google Allo" should not be
one of the alternatives for messaging, given that Google has announced its
shutdown. eBay should be on the list of Marketplaces. And how are Digg and
Tumblr alternatives to Facebook?

Ultimately, I don't think it's helpful to most users to throw a smorgasbord of
possible vaguely-related alternatives at them. A more useful resource would be
to take up the strategy of Wirecutter, in which the best and second-best
options are highlighted, with actual explanations and thoughts. I think if you
had to sit down and try to explain how Digg is a good alternative to Facebook
to the average user, you'd realize how annoyed those users would be when they
find that Digg is no such thing.

~~~
porpoisely
Almost every post about facebook has been marginally informative or complete
nonsense. And yet, I see them here everyday. I keep wondering why?

"deletefacebook" is just so blinded by agenda that they can't see the list
they provide actually makes facebook look good in comparison to everything
they listed. Rather than getting facebook users to leave, it'll make them
value facebook even more since there aren't any better alternatives -
according to "deletefacebook".

They might as well create "QuitYourProgrammingJob.wiki" and then offer the
following alternatives - coal miner, septic tank cleaner, bedpan replacer.

------
ilovecaching
My wife makes all of her income through Facebook products. She's tried other
platforms, and none of them were sustainable over Facebook and Instagram,
partly because of the difficulty of building a following like the one she has
on Instagram, partly because they market isn't using other products. For her,
people walking away from Facebook or Instagram means losing her livelihood and
giving up her dream job.

Facebook is also the place where we keep in touch with relatives living
thousands of miles away from us, who are just technologically literate enough
to get on Facebook and post, but not much else. We also met on Facebook, so we
owe our entire relationship to the platform.

So for us, Facebook has done a lot of good, we rely on it for the nice life we
have together, and it provides something that can't currently be replaced by
other platforms.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
It's great that you've been able to carve out a successful niche, but it's
also an extremely tenuous one: at any time, minor policy changes by Facebook
(even without malice) could destroy your livelihood. What's your plan for when
that happens?

~~~
ilovecaching
We appreciate the fact that influencers are susceptible to the tumultuous
nature of social media, but most jobs come with the risk of your company
suddenly tanking or letting you go. In a way, she works for the companies
she's using to sell her products and generate revenue from, and I think that's
ok.

------
wodenokoto
I think that list really shows how strong Facebook is.

Twitter? That's even less private than fb. Reddit? Seriously, you want me to
post my wedding pictures on Reddit?

And for events, who is going to invite friends and family to their birthday
via Eventbrite? Doodle? It's not like we need to settle on a date for my
birthday.

~~~
stupidbird
I guess you could start your own private subreddit and invite all your
friends?

Though of course, I'd imagine all your friends would tell you to fuck right
off.

------
libraryatnight
I haven't had a facebook account in many years and I don't miss it, but holy
shit does this list just show how badly facebook needs an actual competitor.

Isn't there a happy medium somewhere? Where someone could use a facebook like
model with ads to let users in for "free," but also accept payment for
absolute privacy and content control.

Part of me thinks even if you made the best, most amazing platform it'd still
be a gamble if you'd get the user adoption momentum necessary to be a serious
competitor. Google couldn't do it.

~~~
a13n
I also wonder, if you got any traction whatsoever building a Facebook
competitor, would they sue you for some kind of patent infringement? They'd
definitely try to acquire you, and likely make it difficult to be successful
if you didn't sell.

I guess Snap is an interesting case study here, but we can all read the
writing on the wall.

~~~
solarkraft
Mastodon is doing very well in getting adoption - mostly from tech folks, but
maybe/probably they'll pull people with them.

Facebook users in general seem a lot less tech oriented, so the initial push
could be less.

Diaspora seems like a very well built-out alternative to Facebook in terms of
features and speed (speed&cleanliness are much better). However the network
effect is of course a thing. Maybe when Diaspora gets connected to the
Fediverse via ActivityPub the Fediverse enthusiasts will tell their parents
and grandparents to move over.

------
butterfi
What problem are these "alternatives" addressing? If I'm concerned about
privacy and data sharing, Twitter, Snapchat, and Tumblr don't seem like good
candidates.

~~~
echevil
Agree.. Are there any major social app that you can absotely trust your
private data with?

~~~
Barrin92
Diaspora and Mastodon are good alternatives (but are ironically not on this
list). Both are federated solutions that let you set up your own instances, or
use public ones.

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

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

~~~
echevil
It’s hard to see if any of these self-hosted or decentralized solution would
ever take off. For a social app, you need to get your friends and also public
figures to use the same thing for it to be worth using at all. If it is more
complicated to use than Facebook or similar, it will probably never be adopted
by general public. And if the general public actually got into the same app,
it would then become a new target for attacks.

~~~
Barrin92
they're not decentralised in the sense that you seem to be implying. They're
all federated, meaning that your data is situated on your own or a server of
your choice, while the posts and users are still visible globally. You are
_not_ limited to only interact with people on your own instance, this is very
much the point.

Diaspora allows for quite easy interaction with the mainstream social media
apps as well. Also I haven't used diaspora much so I can't speak from
experience there, but creating a mastodon account is no more complicated than
signing up for twitter.

~~~
echevil
Sorry I was talking about the french solution
[https://movim.eu/](https://movim.eu/) when I say decentralized.

Thanks for the recommendation and explanations though!

------
amelius
The problem is that these alternatives only tackle one part of Facebook, and
are basically silos themselves.

PS: In what way are these alternatives "crowdsourced" and why is it in the HN
title and not the article title?

~~~
wccrawford
It's a wiki. The list is crowdsourced, not the sites that it lists.

------
the_other_guy
Yeah, I should definitely trust your broken website that can be made in 30
minutes with 24 blocked ad and tracking scripts and promoted on the fakest
online community aka ProductHunt. Sounds very legit to me. This is exactly the
type of bullshit that shouldn't be promoted on SHOW HN

------
tinfoilboy
You can always list alternatives for Facebook, but the problem comes in
actually replacing it. Facebook isn't popular for being a well designed
website, if you think about it, Facebook is a very bloated and clunky
experience. Facebook is popular because that's what everyone uses.

I think the issue isn't about finding alternatives to it, it's convincing the
people completely entangled in the Facebook ecosystem why they should jump
ship. Another issue comes with, a number of people don't use Facebook, but
they use Instagram, which is just a rebranding of the same evil at this point.
Getting people to switch from that would prove tough.

~~~
echevil
Exactly! It makes no sense to switch to something else if all your friends are
still on Facebook.

Also, who knows if the app you switch to will have less problems in future
than Facebook does now.

~~~
chillacy
Wasn’t that what people said about MySpace? And business analysts see weakness
in fb for that reason too, they’re vulnerable. Just look at snap’s users
leaving to see, stickiness works both ways: as soon as something better
exists, people switch quickly

------
mp3il
Weird. Why would I delete Facebook when its 10x better than all the listed
alternatives?

------
schnable
#1 alternative is Twitter, the only mainstream social network more toxic than
Facebook.

~~~
egfx
Another interesting alternative is to connect them
[https://2fb.me](https://2fb.me)

~~~
catacombs
Oh, god, no. Please no.

------
PascLeRasc
Well Nextdoor is a perfect alternative for all your racist relatives who just
want to rant about poor people moving into their neighborhood. My whole family
has accounts in several different areas of Pittsburgh and most of the posts
are people taking pictures of someone walking past their house or parking on
their street and asking "Does anyone know this guy? Does he even live here? I
think they're planning on breaking into my house!!"

~~~
aglavine
It is quite different being racist and being concerned about safety.

~~~
bdcravens
Yes but on Ring neighbors for example, it seems most of the “concerns” are
just people walking up to the door while having pigment in their skin. Usually
it’s obvious they’re doing door to door sales or the like, but the comments
imply something is amiss.

~~~
aglavine
I don't know.

I tend to avoid such generalizations. I lived in an unsafe neighborhood and
saw people do what they can to improve their situation, with poor if any help
from government. Call them racist seems unfair and totally misunderstanding
their problem.

------
raintrees
I would find it helpful to also have listed the sites' revenue models.
Advertising-based funding is an Achilles' heel apparently easily exploited by
groups with coherent goals... Those sites that use donation models (especially
anonymous sourced) seem to be more healthy, especially if said sites suddenly
come under the glare of the latest "unacceptable of the moment" meme.

De-platforming seems to be a powerful tool for censorship.

------
Jaruzel
May I suggest that you add the opengraph and twitter meta tags to your page
code[1], that way sharing your site via existing social media channels will
result in a much nicer preview 'card' as opposed to just the text 'DELETE
FACEBOOK'

\---

[1] Yes, I know that doing this is somewhat ironic, but it will help your
engagement if people know what the site is before they click on it.

------
parliament32
This is pretty bad -- clicking thumbs up on an alternative has no
feedback/doesn't do anything, submitting a new alternative also doesn't do
anything, and the lists aren't curated at all (is Reddit really an FB
substitute? Google Allo is dead, why is it on the list?).

------
keb_
I also found this site recently:
[https://switching.social/](https://switching.social/)

Similar in concept, although probably more critical and privacy-focused. Not
perfect, but I think it's an admirable idea.

------
giancarlostoro
I still wish Signal would allow you to register with just a username or email.
One thing I liked about Wire more than Signal, but even less people I'm likely
to meet will be using Wire vs Signal, which is already rare enough.

~~~
rabidrat
Yes! I have an older iPhone which can't be upgraded, so it can't install new
apps...so I can't use Signal.

------
echevil
Where you go largely depends on where most of your friends are. I spend more
time on WeChat as most of my friends are there. After I installed SnapChat, I
don’t think I ever come back because nobody I know is on it.

------
zeroego
Speaking of Facebook alternatives, I discovered a neat app not too long ago
called Aether. It's like a decentralized P2P reddit. The community is fairly
small but the app itself is really amazing, and I think was made entirely by
one person. I'm not associated with the creator at all, and it doesn't
necessarily fill the same niche as Facebook, but I think it is worth sharing
nonetheless. [https://getaether.net/](https://getaether.net/)

~~~
PavlovsCat
I enjoyed Aether, until I noticed my backup job was very busy with a few
directories, and saw that Aether created a _bazillion_ tiny files, even just
deleting them all took a while on a SSD. If that ever changes, I might try it
again, but since I never saw it mentioned as an issue that will be done
properly later, I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
zeroego
Huh I haven't noticed that myself. I'm using it on OSX. The dude who runs it
is pretty personable. You should mention it to him if you find the time.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I know, he's really great, and I've been meaning to say something on the
forums about this.. I'll make the time.

------
simplecomplex
Alternative to what, exactly? I can email updates of my life to family pretty
easily. No ads, totally free, private, supports replies, images, whatever
really.

This is what my family who never joined Facebook did. We all just send
everybody email updates once a month. No need to see ads or Grandma's racist
reposts every day!

------
danso
I thought HN had a feature that automatically stripped sentence-ending
exclamation points from submission titles? Similar to the feature it has that
turns "1 million" to "1M"

------
mayurbhattit
What about vk.com, plus google ?

------
jinglebells
Digg?

------
robertsd247
What?

------
darkblackcorner
No Mastodon? [https://mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social)

~~~
Jaruzel
Looks like you can add it yourself - it's a 'wiki' type list.

------
0xmohit
Curious to know why do you need Google Analytics on the page.

~~~
soared
Not op but an example is to see what links people are clicking, so op can move
popular alternatives to the top of the list.

Or identify if a lot of users from (ex. India) are visiting and can provide
local options for them.

~~~
danmg
You can do all that from log files.

~~~
stupidbird
It's easier to do with GA

