We did replace it, almost 10 years ago. It was called Diaspora[1], no one cared about privacy then. No one really cares about privacy now, at least not enough to do anything about it.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
You could send a private message to a group of (7 or fewer) friends and then only they could open it.
I just have this feeling that people sometimes talk about SSB as if it is like "private by default" and thats not really the case, public feed is quite public (and I don't think that is bad).
I for example considered using private messages to myself as a diary. I know they will remain private.
Of course this is more into the future when Cellular ISP are better with less strict data caps and better upload speeds along with not having to connection to Apple or Google or Amazon for Voice to Text / Command / Action solutions and smart phones actually have a viable storage capacity.
I looked what they were up to now: Suicide, Snapchat, backerkit.com (crowdfunding related service), unknown.
It's about usability, and the flocking to Mastodon when there are better options around is the proof of this theory of mine.
1. Going to a mobile-first website or app.
2. Clicking a link.
3. Typing in your new e-mail and password.
4. Being able to add anyone in the world as friends.
It cannot be about local "hubs" vs the global "public" / federation, being forced to make that distinction would feel like a step backwards for the users. It can be distributed in the back end, but not in the front end.
It also needs to look beautiful.
If you want to build a reddit, you'll never end up with a facebook, that's just reality, the target demo is completely different.
Certainly anecdotal evidence, and I'm inclined to believe the largest user base may still match your description, but personally I feel like you're describing 4chan, not Reddit.
Go compare a reddit technology thread to a youtube comment section. Big difference in writing quality, avg length of post, use of source and data, etc.
You probably outgrew their age demo and realized that smart 18 year olds are still dumbasses.
While I think this is generally a valid point, I also suspect there's quite a bit of When in Rome effect in play. Uninformed r/Technology posters may step their game up to match the consensus style, while informed Youtube users may feel a bit of pressure to dress down.
(1) Everyone's identity is their email.
(2) The person whose email you're typing in has already signed in to the service (or meta-service if it's a federation), and agrees to communicate with you.
If you squint just right, this exact thing already exists; it's called email, and adding to friends means adding to a mail list.
I wonder why there were no (known to me) attempts to actually use the email infrastructure (fast, reliable, ubiquitous, near zero-cost) to distribute social network updates. It could use a custom pretty frontend app that makes posting or reading updates easier than e.g. gmail.
(As a bonus point, the actual emails can be reasonably human-friendly, as an extra archive of all of your updates.)
It's not necessarily fast, delivery may take only 1 second but I've also had email take days until it was delivered successfully.
Reliability is meh, it has some resilience to services being offline for a bit, so I'll give you that.
The near-zero cost is also not quite true. It's only true if you sell your data to the provider of your choice, gmail or yahoo or AOL. If you want privacy on email, you'll have to pay for it, otherwise you pay by other means first.
There is a chat app that uses email to function, it also features encryption but IIRC the userbase is very small and last i tried it for testing, it did quite spam my inbox.
How do you stay logged in if there's no cookies?
It also looks like they try to do too much. Cure-alls cure nothing (thanks for the quip, Sawbones podcast!)
"We don’t track you personally and we never sell your personal data. Here is what we track: we track how users use our site in general so that we can make it better. We are monitoring traffic, usage activity, site performance, and we use general analytic tools so that we can improve your experience. We do not associate any of this data with you personally. We never sell or share your personally identifiable information unless required to do so by law."
I'm going to give it a try but for the sole reason Tim Berners-Lee is an advisor[1] and seems to still vouch for it[2] 3 years on
[1] https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/590726480696573952
[2] https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/976553383564840962
As for putting session IDs in URLs I would not advise that in any way, that's one unsanitized href away from Google being logged in as and indexing your user's private account data if done badly and a nasty bout of session fixation if done less badly. More information here: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/14094
In my mind, when I read HN comments, I assume all the people who post here know what I know and more but then there's a post that comes along that reminds me of the sheer gulf of knowledge that can exist even between people on such a speicalized site as this one.
1. Chat (It could just integrate a javascript XMPP client and let people use whatever chat server they liked)
2. Event management and invites
When I suggest people leave Facebook, these are the things people complain there are no alternatives to.
Nothing to do with not caring about privacy, I really did try to use it. Even had 100 users or so on my open instance.
It was on par with running a public email service. Not my circus.
I do think people are communicating via other mediums more than before though. It's anecdotal but most of my family and friends just gravitate towards iMessage , Facetime and Telegram to communicate by default now.
Could it be that people don't care about this issue because they care about Facebook anymore? There are alternatives now, people will just use them more and more over time.
The question is, how representative are those people of the population at large?
Another question is whether people truly understand their privacy exposure? They know FB has some information on them because they submit it, but they don't know how much info in total (sites visited, location tracking, etc), how that data is combined/used, who has access to it, etc.
And, they assume that whatever FB is doing with their data must be OK/legal because laws.
I think that's what we saw with reactions to these recent revelations. When an inkling of the real privacy exposure surfaced, people freaked.
Of course they do. What sort of person is going to tick the "I don't care about privacy" box? I guess the same kind of person that ticks the "I'm OK with mass extinction" box. Those opinions are not very relevant in the real world.
It will take some time to wind it up. Even fb took a long time to build before it was relavant.
Nobody cared back then bc they hadn't felt they burn of foreign influence on our election.
And diaspora will have to grow. Even some basic things can improve the on boarding process. For example, uploading my profile was diverted due to a cap on picture upload size of 4.2 MB.
I spoke with several non-tech people about the facebook fiasco.
The issue is that even a brilliant neurosurgeon does not understand the TOS he has signed with Facebook and what they entail.
Surely, there is some naïveté from people that don't expect facebook to do much with their data, but tech has also failed to teach users about this.
Even self proclaimed privacy champions routinely make you sign dozen of pages of ToS that are updated on a whim.
EU Data Protection law (like the GDPR) helps here, requiring informed consent. If you don't understand something, then you're not informed, and it shouldn't be binding.
[1] When (say) signing a form for surgery, the surgon can presume that the person has been advised by a doctor. When buying a house, you can presume a lawyer was involved, etc. When signing a ToS for Facebook, we all know there was no legal advice recieved.
Not speaking for everyone, of course - but I know a lot of people who didn't like it for one reason or another.
It's remarkable how common this opinion is given its obvious shallowness. Nobody has to use Facebook. What are the consequences of not? You can't chat with your friends or view their selfies or see event listings. Or rather to do these things, you have to make an effort to use some other more private mode of communication like phone or in-person or classifieds or whatever. It's easier to use Facebook than to not.
That is an extremely far cry from "having to" use the service. The problem really is people are lazy, and use Facebook because it saves them time, effort, and energy. In most cases, people care about this saved energy more than they do their privacy.
Many people's friends communicate primarily via Facebook, and you can't just get around that by using phones and emails. People have discussions, invite people to events and post important life updates on Facebook. Often the primary communication mechanism for an organisation or even a local business will be Facebook. And they often won't re-circulate all that information via email just for the benefit of people who don't use it.
And yet people insist on trivialising these costs, and blaming individuals for this massive invasion of privacy because they chose not to incur these costs, rather than questioning the circumstances that have led to people feeling forced to make such a choice.
Do you really think the people who are having their privacy violated explicitly chose that trade off because they're "lazy"? Or do you think, presented with a choice between signing up to a seemingly innocuous helpful website, or encroaching social isolation as their friends start using it, they chose the former?
So to get gigs, I had to make a Facebook account. Granted, I tried to put as little as possible on it.
Until very recently, a few friends had me trapped their too. They couldn't pay their phone bill. So no texts or calls. Would just steal wifi from some store, use Facebook messenger. I harassed them to get email, IRC, anything else. But they couldn't be bothered to learn those things.
I know this sounds like the stupidest thing ever. It reminds me of people taking out payday loans or going to check cashing places, because they're too poor to go to the bank.
Anyway, two of them finally got phone numbers, so Facebook is deleted now.
I didn't mean that using facebook is a requirement for life and I'm not sure why your first inclination is to read others' comments that way.
People are mad at FB the same way people get mad when they realize they've been in manipulative relationships, but I'm not sure many people really want to accept that they gave into that despite all the warning signs that have been there for years and it's their own actions which enabled FB to be what it is.
Some of the issue is the belief that anyone really needs FB. We've conditioned ourselves into it, but you don't need it any more than you need TV.
Most FB users certainly do not expect that they are sending out their photos and opinions and chats to millions of people. They have a circle of friends and family that they think are behind a wall called their network, and that circle is usually a few hundred people or less.
To run with the simile, maybe some people remain in abusive relationships because of a reasonable fear that leaving will have consequences that are worse than staying.
In reality, people aren't upset about privacy. They're upset Trump won.
As soon as they can get rid of him, they will go back to not caring, even though it's more dangerous than ever and we've been telling them for decades.
When I read about the Cambridge Analitica story I was kind of shocked anyone was surprised by what they are doing. I have seen companies hoover up data from Facebook in a similar way so I have always understood that under their old ToS any friend could give away your data by participating in an app. It had been like that for a long time (they changed the ToS-- I believe in 2015). That seemed terrible to me, years ago. The fact that it took people so long to be shocked about it just shows that their is going to be a long lag between when these things happen and when popular consciousness catches up with the implications.
Can you clarify what you believe the New York Times' agenda is, as demonstrated by this opinion piece article, and how "Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia," has been employed to propagate the NYT agenda?
Also, why should the NYT be replaced, and what should it be replaced by?