Yes, but only an individual Facebook user. The problem is that my friends' friends' friends' friends' friends' friends encompass the entire human race: at some point, as I invite people who invite people who invite people, the underlying technology has to be able to support all mankind.
Indeed, I suspect that this — not some momentary privacy-failure flash-in-the-pan will be what leads to Facebook's actual downfall. It's ultimately building a proprietary Internet (in the sense of a fabric which connects people), and that's extraordinarily expensive. At the end of the day, the actual Internet is able to do that far more cheaply.
I imagine that the replacement for Facebook will be something like email: something under the control of its users, something anyone will be able to add himself to and anyone will be able to block.
1. Different use case: trying it out it reminded me more of a Slack/IRC/bulletin board than anything else.
2. Different framing: it uses a public square (Twitter) framing (follow, follower, channel) instead of a personal relationships framing (friends, groups, etc).
3. Too complex for casual users: this is kind of ironic because Scuttlebutt is modeled after real life interactions but in a way it ends being too complex with pubs (public and private), long and cryptic user IDs, etc.
These are some reasons but there are more. Happy to discuss them.
The big problem is how to fund a social network that doesn't rely on selling it's users data, IMO.
"I imagine the replacement for Facebook will be ... something under the control of its users..."
This is what I am trying (poorly) to articulate. I use a very small proof-of-concept application to accomplish something like this; no website, no third party managing a "service". I paid nothing for this application.
Zuckerberg says, "The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay."
Its difficult to understand what he means by "a service that helps connect everyone in the world".
Users already pay for internet access. This internet service is what allows the subscriber to connect to everyone in the world. What he is describing sounds more like a central registry of contact details.
What was the most elusive "starting material" to create a Facebook alternative: the contact and other personal details for most of its users. However this information is, as the world now knows, no longer in the sole possession of Facebook.
For example, 420 million profiles from 2007-2010 were expropriated some 10 years ago. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724375
Today in response to media pressure, Facebook announced publicly "most" of their users have likely had their account info expropriated. "We believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."
Moreover, with the recent changes Facebook has made, every user now has the means to easily export her data in a portable format.
As a user, I might look up a contact in the "Facebook directory" (of which there might be many copies in many places) and then choose to communicate with her through a different channel, one that Facebook does not control.
This channel does not need to be managed by a third party seeking to profit from selling advertising. It does not have to appear anything like Facebook or any of it subsidiaries, although it could.
Once the contact and I are in touch there is no reason to involve Facebook or any other ad-supported web company going forward.
Nonetheless, these are the assumptions I see:
1. The software alternatives or successors must be commercial.
2. The software must attract a certain quantity of users to be viable.
3. The software must enable networks comprising large numbers of people, perhaps in the millions or billions.
This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends.
Over the years Facebook may have morphed into a "public square" for exercising "Free Speech" but in the beginning as I recall it was not a means to broadcast to other users outside of ones social circle.
Its primary utility is arguably still in enabling communication within small groups, not enabling broadcasting to the general public.
Wu's assumptions point toward a Zuckerberg-like centrally-managed approach to what I see as historically a locally-managed activity: the human tendency to form small groups.
For many years, gamers and others have been writing software to enable small groups to communicate over peer-to-peer networking, without any funding from advertisers.
Wu writes, "So what stands in the way of a genuine Facebook alternative? It isn't the technology."
Thats exactly right. IMHO.