Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by indigodaddy on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @11:30PM (#16761542)

Could a viable Facebook competitor be built on a distributed/p2p type network, perhaps something like ipfs and/or mesh networking?

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by toomuchtodo on Thursday April 05, 2018 @12:03AM (#16761668)

Have you heard of Mastodon?

https://joinmastodon.org/

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by newscracker on Thursday April 05, 2018 @12:11AM (#16761697)

Isn't Mastodon more of a Twitter replacement than a replacement for Facebook (which has time line, groups, pages, etc.)? I'm curious to know what's closer to what Facebook provides and is decentralized.

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by BadassFractal on Thursday April 05, 2018 @12:43AM (#16761826)

Diaspora?

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by im_dario on Thursday April 05, 2018 @05:07AM (#16763130)

I think no ActivityPub support should be an instant "nope" nowadays for any project willing to be considered as Facebook replacement/alternative: [0]

0: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by fabianhjr on Thursday April 05, 2018 @12:31AM (#16761782)

Yes, scuttlebutt even works great over mesh networks and intermittent internet.

http://scuttlebutt.nz/

https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by im_dario on Thursday April 05, 2018 @05:00AM (#16763102)

Although Scuttlebutt is a nice solution, I think it fails to replace Facebook because:

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.

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by netchkin on Thursday April 05, 2018 @08:32AM (#16764197)

I have been intrigued by scuttlebutt for a few months now, and these are pretty interesting comments you make. Did you try to discuss them with the community around scuttlebutt?

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by im_dario on Thursday April 05, 2018 @06:21PM (#16769287)

I left a similar comment in a random discussion around this topic in Scuttlebutt. I'm not really sure where I could address for a proper discussion as a) they have their idea, which is legit and b) they don't have any incentive to listen a random guy with some random thoughts :)

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by marknadal on Thursday April 05, 2018 @12:50AM (#16761866)

Yupe, and you can start building your own in as short as 4min and 40 lines of code - https://scrimba.com/c/c2gBgt4 (interactive coding tutorial, meant to go along with this article - https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... )!

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Re:Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It by jrs95 on Thursday April 05, 2018 @12:03AM (#16761672)

It seems unrealistic because people would have to make the effort to publish their content on that network to keep it available. Or pay someone else to do so. A distributed approach to this is definitely interesting, but it's more technically challenging and it's not a silver bullet.

The big problem is how to fund a social network that doesn't rely on selling it's users data, IMO.

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