> The "people directory"

I think this is Facebook's biggest issue: they moved from being a very useful tool to being the app that tries to drive traffic and engagement so much that it becomes less useful. I think they should refocus back on being a useful tool to keep track of friends, and keep in touch with people you meet, and then do the other stuff they want to do separately. Facebook IS still useful, but because of all the noise now people mostly use it to be able to contact old friends OR they don't use the close social network features that use to make facebook useful.

> I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006

I think that's projecting. Many countries don't care, and many groups of people don't care.

The problem I see is that kind of stuff is just not profitable anymore. IMO it shouldn't be a company like FB running a people directory, it should be something mastodon.

The utopian future I would like for social media is if we had a protocol for a people directory social network. It would function in much the same way as facebook pages or your myspace page. Most users will just sign up for a service, technical users will have frameworks and API's they can reach for to build their own "custom" pages. I realize I just described the fediverse but seriously, fediverse needs to go mainstream.

>fediverse needs to go mainstream.

Mastodon has been around for more than five years, and the idea of decentralized social networks long before that. Email, from a user standpoint, was much like Mastodon: a protocol that you consumed with software of your choice. But it was never a great experience for the average user, then gmail made it a great experience. People switched very quickly.

The experience has to be first.

I remember switching to gmail only because they offered 1Gb of storage, which at the time other email hosts were only offering for paid subscribers. In my circle this was the biggest reason to switch, not because the UX was much better than any other providers.

Storage capacity is a part of the eXperience story.

Before Gmail's groundbreaking 1GB limit, you had offerings like 15mb or 100mb from yahoo or hotmail. What that meant for your day to day experience would be that you would literally run out of space and then have to manually comb through your inbox to delete things you don't want. And if you wanted stuff, you had to harshly prioritize between treasured message threads.

These are all part of the UX

Just want to highlight that this is a very tech-focused perspective. "If we make it good enough people will use it!"

Also is there room in this utopia for people who want their privacy and secrecy? Will they be disadvantaged if they don't participate in this digital phone booth? My gut tells me yes.

I don’t think they’re making an argument that it’s sufficient to attract people, but that it is necessary.

Obviously any sort of serious effort will need some sort of marketing or other social push, but you can market a pile of dog poop all you want and nobody will be interested.

Those that don't have Facebook are already disadvantaged in that way. They don't get invited to the party, they aren't told about life updates via the feed. But you soon self-select for friends that don't use Facebook and that do invite you to parties and tell you about things.

That same divide isn't going to go away, no matter the technology. (ofc replace Facebook with whatever app is popular with your group.)

Perhaps from your vantage point. My vantage point is more and more people are ditching the social sites for real connections again. A few years ago when privacy issue after privacy issue came out, and the revelations on how manipulated we all are on social media by algorithms, my circle decided to ditch social media. I was always the "pioneer" in this front, having ditched it around 2015 or so.

The craziest thing started happening when I got rid of it. I started getting these crazy old things called "phone calls." And people started sending out these really cool decorated cards called "invitations" that apparently come to my house through this really old but fascinating technology called "mail". Real life actual people started walking past me on my neighborhood road and inviting me to house parties or get-togethers again. I met so many wonderful neighbors since!

It had this amazing other side effect as well: it acted like a filter for all the events I used to "miss". Suddenly, it's as if the weight of FOMO was lifted off my shoulders.

But illustrative snark aside, I suppose its going to vary from circle to circle and group to group. My hunch tells me a lot more people simply tolerate social media because they realize much of society has hitched it's wagon to it, and they see this as an unfortunate thing, and it will take just one person in the group to break the mold.

I too see people in my circle ditching social media, but the transition seems to have been to messenger apps. People will message directly to each other, or in group chatrooms.

Yes I have definitely seen signal use increase by my very non academic estimate of 10x. I see a "so and so contact has joined Signal!" notification every few days consistently for a while now.

Email and Mastodon have a similar issues in that they combine two different layers of functionality into a single protocol. The bottom layers (identity and social graph respectively) would be better served by not being tied to specific form of communication (the top layers).

If we could separate out these layers I think you would find that the user experience would be easier to improve and evolve more cleanly over time, with multiple formats and protocols being built upon a base abstraction layer.

"if we had a protocol for a people directory social network" -- back around 2004, that's exactly what FOAF was for (Friend Of A Friend). I set up mine, a lot of people did, there was excitement around the blogosphere for this, but in the end it lost out to walled-gardens like MySpace and then Facebook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)

> IMO it shouldn't be a company like FB running a people directory, it should be something mastodon

It really is not a technological problem, it's a "how do you get everyone to sign up" problem, which FB has solved. I don't think we'll see another company solve this in a very long time, unless they hit the jackpot while really focusing on creating a USEFUL product for their users.

That said, there is a concept of friction for signups, and that's something TikTok does well with their UX. You open the app and are immediately in the app, no sign up. After using the app for a bit you can go and customize your username and such so that you're not a generic username, and you're able to find and be found by friends on the app, but that's optional.

This might make more sense implemented as personal servers. A linux image you own and run in the cloud somewhere, that has whatever server-side software you want (a blog, your important documents, maybe a discord or minecraft server or whatever) that is easy to move around from one cloud provider to another.

I know server-side software is traditionally hard to run, but there's no law it has to be that way forever (especially if the cloud hosting providers realized the immense untapped sales potential of regular people suddenly having a use for a cloud server, and underwrote some of the open source software that would make them more useful).

> that kind of stuff is just not profitable anymore.

It wasn't profitable back then either, alas—which is why Facebook has repeatedly pivoted to less useful, more annoying, but more monetizable offerings.

Facebook takes in giant piles of money, it just doesn't have the growth wall street has come to expect.

I see this as a consequence of the overarching ideology of markets and capitalism standing in the way of humans exploiting the full potential of digital and internet technologies.

at this point this is a social problem to be solved politically

But how would you make as much money as FB does off a very useful tool?

Probably the money that FB "generates" is literally insane, and doesn't make sense for a single company to generate.

Possibly a mastodon based solution where users pay a small recurring fee for server management and some R&D and offering privacy, could generate enough benefits for a company (or companies) to strive.

FB (among others) made us forget the sense of scale and the value of things, including the value of privacy and brain time. I would rather pay today from 1 to 5 USD a month for a service that works, where I can share my kid's pictures with my direct family and only them, with no ads.

Most people would not be willing to pay for this, QED

If people aren’t willing to pay for it, its either a social service or it shouldn’t exist. Facebook continued existence is subsidized by extremely lax regulation in the advertising industry.

Most people do not agree with your extreme opinion

At one point it was estimated that Facebook gets $40/month in advertising per US user - how do you then reconcile that with you only being willing to pay $1-5?

I make a difference between what FB customers pay for promises of brain time, and what the service FB provides actually is worth for _me_ (people are no customers of FB). $40/month/user might be what FB get from their customers. It does not mean that it is the value it is actually providing to its own end users (excluding ad afficionados if that exists).

There is also a difference with what it actually costs to provide the useful part of the service. Mastodon is open source, yes it requires hardware (virtual or actual) and operation, none of which is free, but the cost of these certainly doesn't match the cost of running+developing game changing (advertisment/recommendation) ML models and ultra high scale infrastructure. Running a mastodon server for a thousand users with acceptable availability, and no fancy ML or R&D, I think should be doable for $5.000 a month, yes.

But that doesn’t mean an equivalent service cannot survive on just a dollar a month.

I think this is why youtube without ads is sooo expensive.

* use the very useful tool to launch other platforms that do not take advantage of the social graph (that you can monetize)

* use the great social graph that you now have to create other useful tools that you can monetize

> And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant

A quick dismissal of the fact that this data collection was and is happening and has already had massive effects on society.

Just because it is in the interest of "old" media to point this out doesn't mean they're wrong.

“Old media” suffered far more from the competition by Craigslist and eBay, which drove away almost all their income in classifieds, which made up around a third to half of all income at average newspapers.

And yet… there just wasn’t any criticism of those companies at any scale comparable to what Facebook gets.

That’s evidende against this theory that journalists are somehow working for the commercial interest of publishers. Which was always quite silly anyway: if there’s one thing a journalist will always brag about, it’s how they screwed over their publisher with some story.

That’s an excellent point. For all of the scams and abuses that could emerge from Craigslist, there was never a concerted media effort to label the platform as dangerous or untrustworthy.

That's the image the media gave but this happened 10-15 years ago before the press turned on companies.

Craigslist was untrustworthy, ebay as well. The whole internet was untrustworthy. Things only became dangerous when non-computer users got a cell phone.

What's important isn't whether they're wrong or not; it's whether anyone cares.

> people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006

I disagree with this one. They might be afraid of sharing their data explicitly i.e. sharing everything happening to them for everyone to see (even strangers). The trend now is sharing content to people they only have very close relationships with. But them being afraid of big tech collecting and analyzing their data? I don't think so.

I think social media gives a distorted view given anyone you see has little problem with it. I've met a lot of people (out in the real world) who express disinterest in starting/restarting because of all these little razor cuts and extremely vague upside. In the early noughts, a lot more people expressed regrets like limited computer skills or some other personal limitation as a reason they felt left behind or less involved instead of having a reason they chose not to opt-in.

What I see with my circle and Facebook isn't so much people having rage quit but just a lot lower level of overall activity.

The only reason I keep my Facebook account is because my wife uses it on occasion.

I believe the world is way more anonymous now when I grew up you could basically take the phone book look a name up and just call them. That's now mostly impossible.

Well, that's one specific communications channel. You mostly don't socially call people out of the blue outside of a very tight circle of friends and family--and cell phone numbers can't be looked up in general. However, many people--especially professionals--have LinkedIn profiles. And many in general can be searched on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Given someone's name and maybe a little more information about them, you can often look up a lot more than a phone number and address.

The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it, and now there isn't, and probably never could be again with how we all now feel about and regulate data privacy.

There are so many services now that have data scraped from various sources - many of them charge money, but they're readily available, even with increasing privacy laws.

> The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it

There was never a big book with everyone in it. Maybe everyone in your city (more accurately, every household). But it was never even close to the scale of the internet. Linkedin has orders of magnitude more people than your phone book ever did.

Do you honestly think that you can't find out a heck of a lot more about people in general quite easily than you could in the white pages? (Which also required you to know the town/city where they lived.) For one thing, if you own a house, that's a matter of public record. Fortunately most of the deep search tools have gone behind paywalls but it's still trivial to find out a lot about someone especially if they have an uncommon name or you already know something about them.

> Do you honestly think that you can't find out a heck of a lot more about people in general quite easily than you could in the white pages?

No. I never said anything of the sort.

Yes it's possible, but not as by design as a book delivered to everyone's dwelling with the express purpose of giving you some of their information.

There isn't? I still get phone books every year from my landline provider. I haven't opened one in over a decade, but I still get them.

Not really. I had to look up the addresses of 50 distant relatives for sending out a graduation announcement and it was almost trivial to find everyone (along with their past addresses and possible associates). It just isn’t on well-known sites.

I thought I would love Facebook but apparently people don't.

My family do not share more than a few holiday pictures.

No one really shared normal likeable lifevents.

WhatsApp groups are totally fine and even showed me how little I care about constant updates from other life's.

And no people also don't care what I do.

People are busy. Family people think about school issues and handling their daily life and planing a family holiday.i care about science and politics. My mother cares about the next hiking tour.

Google+ circle feature was already the technology highpoint of handling social media and no one really had the motivation to setup their circles or even use Google+.

Even sharing specific things is hard. Over or under sharing: I would have loved to see much more of a friend's house building for example.

While it feels like digital is the future, the people around you are. That's something Facebook and co teached me. It's a bad substitute.

Google+ fucked up for a variety of reasons. If you had a Google Apps account, you couldn't sign up at first. You had to have an email address ending in @gmail.com. With that move, Google alienated their most enthusiastic users from the start.

When I finally was able to get a Google+ account with my Google managed email address, it immediately had me following some celebrity and it suggested following other celebrities. I use Facebook for the same reason I use(d) instant message protocols like AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, etc. and now still use Facebook, Discord, Hangouts/gchat/whatevergooglecallsitnow, etc.: To talk to my friends, and to share stuff and organize events with my friends. No interest in using anything Twitter-like. So I didn't. Facebook also has surprisingly good private interest groups, still based around talking to people rather than celebrity/influencer culture.

Or, like forums with off-topic sections. Slow paced, the shared interests are obvious, you can private chat if you want and you can join multiple forums to meet your needs.

This is only my opinion, but I think forums do everything necessary really, with the only difficult things to manage being:

- good moderation

- site maintenance

Which Facebook et al really fail at with the former. I also personally dislike how Discourse attempts to make forums more like chat apps.

specific niche forums foster good communities IMO. I've been on a rocketry forum for about 4 years and it's a very close knit healthy community. There's a forum called "the watering hole" for general off-topic discussion, i'm not there often but it looks to be a good place.

It also helps that the only ads/monetization going on are some banner ads from various rocketry store websites. The forum is run just as a service to the hobby and not to make money.

How does Discourse do that? With their home page design?

I don't think that gap actually exists. That "directory of people" is now people's whatspp/discord/snapchat/instagram/messenger DMs. I think people are over the one giant hirehose of people you're loosely acquainted with, so social media has split into two extremes - a big feed of content from others, like reddit/tiktok/twitter. And a lot more closed/private groups, like DMs, group chats, and discords.

Yes, the gap does exist. Back in the day you would meet someone IRL, get home and then find a friend request from them on Facebook because they found your page. Sure a lot of those went nowhere, but I became closer friends with a lot of those people as they kept engaging with my posts and uploads.

Adding someone to private groups has a ton more friction. They need to download the app, you need to send them an invite, etc. It’s nowhere near the same as before.

I just met someone at the park - they added me on whatsapp and invited me into a local community group.

People the age as you were then are not having that problem now.

Nobody wants that stalker product, and I hate having to play with Gen Xers fawning for the vestiges of that product once per year with new Facebook account just to coordinate with a Burning Man camp.

How is this definitively true? Not everyone is great at socializing or having lots of friends or acquaintances where they’ll have other people’s info on the networks mentioned above.

Because the current/younger people all have the different apps that provide that already

People understand that their social graph is optionally transportable

They can recreate it on any app just by putting in their phone number or letting the app access their contacts

Right so this is all assuming you have people’s numbers. Which was my whole point. You may not have that. I said “other people’s info”

This is no different than when gen X or older millennials were kids on different apps too like IM apps. Which weren’t the same as FB early day either.

its assuming that you have one person’s contact info who is tangentially associated to the other people (number or username or email etc) or that they have yours.

Then you get recommended all the same people and can also browse the same people’s friends.

The recommendation and browsing is the same as Facebook’s early days, the same as now, and very different from instant messaging apps.

None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis. Recreating the mid aughts wont do it either. You have to be proactive in getting a variety of people’s contact info by interacting with a variety of people.

That’s not how IG or TikTok work. Not as well as FB’s recommendation system years ago. For example I had to gather everyone together from an online community on both platforms even though everyone was linked on Facebook. People weren’t finding recommendations to connect with other community people themselves on those platforms.

> None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis

What do you mean? Are you okay?

Recommendation engines break or change every sprint on every app, so I am surprised your community had this issue, but not sure your conclusions are really the direction of these platforms.

Either way, I don't see those as problems or a market gap people want.

Many groups just share a google form or spreadsheet. Accurate observation that this is something that would work even if we were just using old instant message apps since a list of screennames could be shared just as well. But since you already had an existing community to transport, its not a problem there and not a problem I see in my own communities.

The community didn’t have an issue themselves. They weren’t going out of their way at all to find one another. I have an interest in connecting the community members though. What I saw from many years for myself and based on who others follow/are social media friends with is that the FB connections were far higher than the IG or tiktok ones.

Not all communities or links of people will be the same. For example if someone is a 20-something who went to university, they won’t run into any issues yet, they are too young and experienced the world mostly being with a ton of other cohort people.

> None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis

> What do you mean? Are you okay?

There is a well documented loneliness epidemic. Thought you were referring to it inadvertently by fawning over an old form of technology.

Yeah I agree there’s a documented loneliness epidemic. You used “your” the first time with me. Which I found strange. Looking now, I seem to have engaged in assuming bad faith. My apologies.

Tho no I wasn’t referring to it in terms of comparing the aughts with now. I do believe in the loneliness epidemic. However not that it has gotten so much worse in 15 years.

We have moved from a people focus to a content focused UX design. TikTok is this in perfection as while "creators" get millions of views, remembering them on scale is hard and following usually doesn't alter the experience much. The reality is that a "people directory" doesn't have the same level of engagement.

The assertion wasn't that that model was somehow better or "more engaging" (as if that even means something is better...): it was that it is essentially now missing as Facebook pivots from being a social network to trying to do this other thing that is competing with their strategy to force people to "engage" more with their friends (which I 100% agree doesn't scale as well as engaging with dedicated creators).

TikTok is basically an algorithm to crowd source superficially engaging content in order to keep people staring at the app as long as possible to show ads (and propaganda) while the app hoovers up data.

True. Yet if you look at it from a UI perspective. The name of the "creator" is tugged away on the most left which in most cases you wont see as you swipe away. Yes, you might see the face of the person who made it, but there is a multitude of videos without personally identifying features.

Contrast that with LinkedIn, you see a post and the immediately visible information is the person who wrote it, what's his/her role is, and only then the content.

Personally I think Instagram (The core product, not stories or reels) is to today what Facebook and MySpace where back in the day.

Obviously though that is being eroded away by Instagrams lack of confidence and insistence to fight TikTok, which I also find strange I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.

Instagram just did a huge update I think a week or two ago that makes it more like TikTok and people are revolting because it went from "see what friends are up to" to constant ad spam, worse than before.

I always think FB/Meta is about to go the way of Myspace with a popularity drop off but I'm clearly biased as I deleted my account years ago and people still talk about using FB a lot.

I was an occasional IG user and that update was really jarring. I figured alright, I guess I’m not an IG user anymore, and I uninstalled the app without much hesitation.

I think the ad spam was what did it. There was enough already, but it’s way over the top now. I had to constantly stop and check if I was seeing something relevant, as though there was never a long enough break from it to just enjoy my friend’s photos.

This specific decision might actually be that bad and may get rolled back, but people have gone up in arms about Meta’s decisions since the wall was introduced and the news feed was introduced. Plus other features like the FriendFeed acquisition cementing the like button. These are all things that people assume are obvious near requirements for social media and some other Web 2.0 sites.

> I mean yeah its a vertical feed of video but really why you go to it is really different for why you go to IG, TikTok has more in common with YouTube than IG.

I imagine that's actually the point. IG has little need to build for the people currently on Instagram. They're getting that ad revenue already. Their goal is to get new people to join IG and trigger ad views, and TikTok proved that there's a huge crowd of people that can provide for that goal. They just need to expand the product to appeal to them. So that's what they did.

I get what they're thinking but it's very small minded of them to just assume the existing people will stick around if you change the fundamental product they signed up for.

I think it sort of used to be, but now it too, has passed on.

Once Instagram Stories started more and more real friends started just posting Stories clips and less photos and updates. Now my feed has all my friends just posting random Stories clips, and actual photos are dominated by advertising and influencers.

IG doesn’t have any of the people directory. It’s heavily focused on bigger brands, profiles, influencers, and seeing random stuff from these entities I have no personal relation with.

Facebook of old was like what the OP was saying. IG is only marginally like that with friends pic posts.

This is regardless of whatever tiktok stuff since I don’t use IG much for the same reasons as OP.

Facebook was popular in the era when it wasn't used as a people directory however. It was used as instagram is currently until older people came in and the website became very commercialized.

I don’t literally mean a people director but closer to that than what IG is. Are you referring gtfo Facebook pre 2008? That’s a small time period to look at since that’s when it exploded in popularity and would otherwise be a relatively quaint site and company if it stayed the way it was in 2006, 2007. It still remained close enough to the same for me until maybe 2012 at earliest.

I agree - the best memories of FB I have is when people I know used it to post updates about their lives, often via sharing photos. AKA what Instagram used to be like before Stories took over.

> IG doesn’t have any of the people directory

Maybe it's just my country but I can find anyone I know or work with on there by typing their name in.

I uninstalled Instagram this week because of all the video. Its not what it was when i started using it. Seems crazy that Meta can ruin FB and Instagram the same way at the same time. Bye.

>Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers.

This was Social Networking 101 and Zuck got it right and he won big but there are so many different forms of social networking that are possible and are happening today like ephemeral content(Snapchat), short videos(TikTok) etc.

Video was and still is huge opportunity and you could see that from the astronomical rise of YouTube since 2005/2006 till today. YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world and the second most visited website in the world.

Speaking of TikTok; the rise of TikTok was inevitable since Vine was also huge video opportunity but Twitter simple blew it away. If Vine had good leadership TikTok probably wouldn't exist or it wouldn't be as popular as it is today.

And also YouTube and TikTok are sort of hybrid social networks in a way that they are modern form of TV entertainment platforms because you can passively watch videos and get entertained nonstop without interacting with anybody. So they are not really at the same conceptual level as Facebook is.

>I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006.

Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.

When you share your data on Linkedin you get part of the financial value of that data collection. This is different than any other social media platform.

You get fast, powerful and easy to use communication tools for free when you use Facebook and its family of apps. Why do you think Whatsapp is so popular now and not SMS anymore?

>Why do you think Whatsapp is so popular now and not SMS anymore?

Is this actually the case? I've heard Whatsapp is popular outside the states (something about differences in phone plans, in the US unlimited SMS texting is basically universal) but it's definitely still in the minority here. Anecdotally I feel like each friend group here has a different, idiosyncratic method of text communication in the US. Some people communicate through SMS, others through instagram/snapchat, others through discord, or whatsapp, or facebook messenger, etc. There are some interesting trends in the distribution along age and gender lines too.

In Germany, it is absolutely the case, yes. We have unlimited SMS as well, but I think we didn’t have it back in 2011 or whenever WhatsApp launched.

Almost everybody is on WhatsApp. Groups for local stuff, extended family, parents of kids classes, whole school classes etc.

Some people are also on Instagram, but not as a first for communication.

Telegram is a thing, but more in working class circles.

Nobody uses Snapchat. Some kids might use TikTok, but hardly as a replacement for WhatsApp. It’s really that strong.

Yes, but the data collection is tangential to that value. With Linkedin, you get direct financial benefit from having recruiters able to search Linkedin's database and target you with opportunities.

> Then why the hell all wannabe successful people are on LinkedIn aka the directory of professionals. They keep signing up every single day because they want to be looked up and found by their fellow professionals and potential employers.

That's an entirely different thing than individual sharing private details of their personal lives.

Your business career is also your private life. Why would the whole world need to see it or anybody who uses the internet?

Your business career is your public life. You would want people to see it because they may want to work with you.

> because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006. And this narrative that big companies are sucking up data and ruining society was pushed by "old" media in a struggle to remain relevant

What are you talking about? These assholes invented panopticon surveillance based advertising.

Instead of making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars selling normal ads to normal people the way it had been done for decades (buy an ad on a page people who see the page see the ad) they pushed and pushed to climb into every corner of your digital life to know exactly who you are to squeeze out even more profits.

Then they used monopoly power so gained to illegally crush all competitors while buying off the political leadership that should have stopped them.

But this is somehow the fault of “old media”? Come on.

The reason it would be hard to start something like that is because of overwhelming monopoly power these platforms hold and their commitment to using surveillance. In a sane freely competitive world these alternatives would already exist.

>because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006

People may say they're afraid of big data, but it's just mindless repetition of something they heard and doesn't affect their behaviour at all.

70%+ of them are mobile users on a first party app and happily receive targeted ads.

Realistically, how many people use instagram etc. on a browser with an adblocker (especially on mobile), less than 1%?

>Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

Like this? https://jasonrobinson.me/ (uses https://socialhome.network/)

> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

It has been 6 years since Mastodon should have accelerated to be a viable alternative to Twitter and today the only successful Mastodon-derivative that is in operation is Truth Social; a centralized social network and even that has more users than Mastodon itself.

I don't know but that already sounds like a failure, where it has helped the 'undesirables' get their own platform, unfortunately.

But that's free software folks, where anyone can use it.

Does Truth Social have more people than the rest of Mastadon now? I thought it was mostly a dumpster fire. The SPAC stock isn’t doing well nor the insider behavior.

We probably need a social media craigslist that implements the basic features you are describing and then is ok with keeping things running without the need for growth.

The problem with social media is that most people want to fill their free time consuming social media. But you have to have creators that want to create content for everyone else to consume. So you need to have some kind of addicting reward mechanism to get people to create content. (The simple upvote here and Reddit)

Have you looked at Tumblr lately? It always sounds just like what people say they miss nowadays from social media. Its feed is chronological by default (for now), and it does allow you to customize your own page in a lot of ways. I feel it's inevitable that it'll become a soulless ad space like all others eventually, but it's not there yet.

They're trying to monetize it with different approaches at the time like being able to boost a post's visibility without giving you any targeting tools, tipping, or giving another user a button to spawn crabs on the UI for a day.

Will it last? Probably not! But it's not a terribly awful dystopic place yet.

Yeah I very much agree about tumblr. I’d plug mastodon as well.

I think we basically do have social websites that work, are enjoyable and aren’t soulless.

A big question is why are people complaining about one platform when they could be on another.

Social graph lock-in. :( I use Mastodon and love it, but all of my IRL [weak ties] are on FB and IG.

[weak ties]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties

Tumblr puts an ad for the Tumblr app on your pages even if you put it under a domain. I don't mind plugging the platform I use, like the customized Posthaven plug on my blog, but I don't want an app install nag.

As long as people are unwilling to pay for social media the Insta's and Tiktok's will have to make money with ads which leads to data collection.

Make no mistake the very fact that these services are free lead to their popularity.

I think there's a substantial part of society who don't want to be part of the people directory.

“Once the FOAF standard gets adopted, blogs will take over Facebook!” 2006

Yeah. So. What exactly is your point here?

- a distributed, technically suitable protocol existed for describing yourself and your network?

- that you had control of it? And thats... bad?

- that large social networks saw interoperability and decided No! - it would unprofitable if we didnt own the whole game?

Foaf was - and is - a very good vocabulary for a social network. Having a corporate centralist version lead to what exactly? Qnanon? Antivax? Neonazis? Astroturf?

While foaf would not have been immune to this, the seperation between protocol and filtering aggregator would have at least provided a choice.

My point is that I miss the mid 2000s. Better vision for the internet. We can still build it, though!

I completely agree that the “people directory” isn’t coming back due to to social hesitation. And I think I stand counter and say it was an anomaly that it existed. It existed solely because it was new. People have different identities across the internet and it’s best to keep them separate. You don’t use your work email for personal stuff. You don’t use your LinkedIn account when you want to create a Tinder account for a reason.

I also agree that the “old media” trashed tech until people finally agreed it was bad. I think some of it’s justified but not all. I’ve long complained about the bias here. I think the shift of democratizing the voice of the people is only going to change society more (in the short term we may call this bad for democracy but I think it’ll be good in the long term). For example, no news site would have run a story about George Floyd, but thanks to social media we don’t need them to. The flip side is misinformation, of course.

I think facebooks drive to video is probably benign trend chasing. I don’t know if it earns them more but I’m sure they’re lowering ad value in the short term until advertisers figure out how to make good ads on it. I don’t have data but I suspect the “home page and FarmVille” era died on its own and the newsfeed was facebooks way of injecting new life (as opposed to the NF killing individual postings)

I know it will never happen, but I would love a resurgence of micro-blogs.

All this talk of decentralised social media and all these new solutions, just to full circle back to self-hosted personal blogs.

I feel like in the tech circle they never left, but they aren't consumed by the general population.

I don’t think self-hosted will ever happen. Centralisation wins for consumer services. This has been proven even with the crypto shitshow, which revolves by and large around a few centralised platforms.

On the other hand, are micro-blogs so different from TikTok stories, other than the format of the content (text vs. video)?

I don’t think self hosting can win either. As you’re saying. I do like the idea of everything like micro blogs not having to be on a central site. Though even that seems unlikely. It would be nice to have the format of blogs again where there’s different subdomains or domains and you can’t directly click thru to get to the rest of the “social media” bigger org.

I sort of described substack here but a bit more personalization and independence if possible.

is geocities.com available? i like being old enough to witness how back and forth the pendulum swings...

There is NeoCities. https://neocities.org/browse

Microblogs are _the thing_ just have always been "too early". Not sure _how_ this will work but I strongly believe that microblogs are the _end goal_ here.

Or just a personal webpage with a guestbook.

> Maybe a Mastodon-derivative which deemphasizes the feed, but lets you design your personal page more creatively would be a cool thing.

And no body will use it, like how no one uses Mastodon. Because discovery on Activitypub is one of the worst especially on an independent server, where you are basically "tooting" to your self.

Normal users don't understand what is an instance or what is a server. Which is fine, if advanced users adopted Mastodon it would be enough for the HN crowd, but they didn't because of the network effect.

For some reason before MySpace was high school friends websites, that bordered on stalking platforms. In 1999.

Of all the platforms today, linkedin might be the closest to that. Maybe that's part of why it's become so garbage - in filling a niche as a people directory its accidentally providing a half baked solution to the gap that used to be filled by old facebook.

This.

Is such a business model like Facebook circa late 2000s simply not viable? How did Facebook make money back then before they turned "evil"?

To quote Abe Simpson, "I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you..."

Facebook late 2000s was a very utopian vision of the social graph with Obama staffers bragging about the same tactics that were demonized by Cambridge Analytica. If anything, Facebook was more evil because of the data leakage then. The way that they made money then was still ads.

as a FB sceptic and part of a Berkeley data science community, I visited FB on a group tour, in the first weeks of opening the Menlo Park Campus. We were told explicitly, with a ten meter wide screen in the back, that any analytics could run on their Map-Reduce stack for pay. The example was "people who bowl in the Minneapolis area" or something. Some nod to political or sexual extensions to that was implied but not explained. "You can run your code jobs on this data. We have customers now" the spokesperson announced to the Berkeley data science crowd of about 45 people. I regret not recording it on video.

Much later, after personally running away from anything FB, this Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, and a picture of Zuck and wife walking with the King of Spain was publicized, and a picture of FB COO Cheryl Sandberg on a tour of a US Aircraft carrier and the fleet admiral in dress uniform was publicized -- I do not know how these transitions were managed socially but ... ?? How could anyone not see this?

ugly, creepy.. against the whole FB consolidation here, from Day Zero.

They weren't making money, were they?

I guess it depends what you mean by Evil. Force-pushing ads and sharing updates about people you don't know because it could keep you connected so that you could see more ads, made them profitable. A free service that doesn't push ads can't be.

Shameless autoplug. What your friends are doing (and you are invited to join them) is the focus of my app Ferris.app

Not a real directory as it's limited to the core circle of friends.

Also no data-selling, ads.