Hacker News Reader

Comment by plusquamperfekt | Hacker News Reader

We need a competitor to FB ... sadly options like Diaspora are very problematic b/c you need to either run a server or trust a private person with it.

View on HN

We have many like Google plus, twitter, linkedin, reddit and even hacker news (catering to a specific niche). Problem here is that too many people whom we may call "less tech savvy" won't leave FB. So, in order to stay "compatible" with them, we need to keep our FB accounts active!

- Google plus: that would be kind of pointless, wouldn't it?

- LinkedIn: The worst of the worst ... :D

- HN / Reddit / Twitter: How do you share pictures privately with friends? (to name one necessary feature)

You could have a private subreddit I guess? Still super clumsy compared to FB.

Further, HN/Reddit/Twitter etc. each only have a subset of my friends. ALL of my friends are on FB.

> How do you share pictures privately with friends?

Flickr. Some of the holes in the group management are a weakness there (no albums in Groups, for example).

Reddit and Hacker News are rather content aggregators rather than social networks. Google+ and Twitter have the same issues than Facebook on these specific issues. LinkedIn is a bit too specialised for professional messages and they too like Google+ and Twitter don't have a great track record concerning privacy and abusing their position.

Reddit may have started as a content aggregator, but there are plenty of subs that mostly or only have original/self-posted content. talesfrom*, various hobby groups, support groups, crowd-sourced advice columns like legaladvice or relationships.

It's well past being solely an aggregator.

Do actual humans still use G+ and linkedin? I thought they were mostly just playgrounds for bot-wars.

Back when I played Ingress, most city-level activity was coordinated through private G+ communities (with neighborhood-level activity being done in Hangouts group chats), and the more social stuff (i.e., the stuff you don't care about keeping secret from the Smurfs) tended to happen in public G+ communities.

LinkedIn is a good tool for viewing someone's public resume, though I don't regularly log into it. Every once in a while, I'll log in to check out how a previous employer is doing (e.g. see which of my ex-coworkers are still at the company, what new positions have been created, etc.). I still have dozens of unanswered connection requests from recruiters, though (I don't accept people I don't know), and the site has gotten progressively spammier over the years.

Did you mean: twitter?

Joking aside I almost never get followed by spam accounts on g+, weekly or more on my English speaking twitter account.

None listed by you come even close to what Facebook offer to majority of users. Linkedin is work environment and people wont go personal there, Twitter is just status update thing that really tries to become something bigger but fail to see what people outside their user base want and Google Plus is a joke - I am to this day surprised that they created it as Facebook killer, not as LinkedIn killer since obviously it is corporate style network, not a place where you go after the work, relax and see funny pictures.

Same thing with Google Buzz before.

This is a great comment, because it leads in right to the heart of the problem. Why is running a server so hard? This is actually really weird -- the cloud should mean that you can set up a server with a single click.

Of course, a Linux VPS needs a fair amount of love (fiddling with settings, updating, and so on). But there are other ways: https://sandstorm.io/

Interesting perspective! It's true that it should be very easy and cheap - something like setting up an E-mail account or installing an app.

Thanks:) I really feel like this is the core issue here. People complain a lot about Facebook, but what would happen if by some heroic, Odyssey-worthy effort they actually get people to switch to some other social network?

. . .

The exact same thing. The exact same thing would happen, because the new social network would have _exactly the same incentives_ as facebook.

I have some more thoughts on this here: http://housejeffries.com/page/3 Not sure how clear my writing is, but the "Inspiration" section at the end has some links to great projects trying to fix this problem.

Sandstorm is interesting, but fundamentally the dichotomy is "leave the running to someone else" vs. "spend significant time and effort acquiring the skills to make your own administrative decisions".

If you're running on someone else's platform and automatically accepting updates, are you really "administering" it yourself?

Nope! But that's OK:)

A majority of people will never develop any real skill level at administering servers. We still need them to be able to use reasonably humane software though, because the consumer software industry revolves around them. If they continue to be easy pickings for predatory software (lock-in, etc.) the incentive for industry will be to continue improving at making predatory software . . . not ideal.

So empowering normal users (even partially, Sandstorm certainly doesn't give as much freedom as becoming a unix guru or whatever) is good for expert users too.

The heart of the problem is not publishing, it's discovery and curation. Grandma is not going to visit 20 dedicated servers for her grandkids picture fix, she needs it accessible in one place. But then how do you safeguard that place from the likes of games notifications and various spammy/fraudulent apps taking over?

> Grandma is not going to visit 20 dedicated servers for her grandkids picture fix, she needs it accessible in one place.

This is certainly a problem. If only there was some kind of . . . mechanism . . . by which her computer could collect photos off her friends servers and display them locally? Sounds almost impossible!

(Sorry for giving you a hard time:-) I appreciate your comment, but think that's a very solvable problem in practice.)

Since I can't edit anymore:

Your comment actually deserves a better response than I gave it. Spam is the open protocol killer. It's a totally serious issue. If our goal was to replicate HN or Reddit via only personal servers, I would be pretty dang paranoid about getting our anti-spam solution perfect:/

Happy in the case of Facebook-on-personal-servers, we have all the advantages and the spammers have all the disadvantages. Social network's main purpose is communication between people who know each other. Ignoring the Pages part of FB (which is really more Reddit-like than it is essential to a social network) communication happens between friends, or friends of friends commenting on photos or whatever. Spammy friend requests will be a problem, but that's not too big of a deal.

And then, once that's done . . . ahhhh. Your own filtering software, blocking game notifications to your heart's content (since it's your own server you can install whatever filter you want, though of course there will be good defaults). Guess where most of the unwanted posts on Twitter or Snapchat come from for me . . . Twitter and Snapchat. No more!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com