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Comment by Brigadirk | Hacker News Reader

I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again).

I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative I'd be more than happy to become on of their first adopters.

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The problem with the alternatives is they don't have the budget and installed user base Facebook has. Sure, you'll get techie people to jump on board at first (remember Google+?), but all the family members who don't know a Twitter from an Amazon will stick with Facebook because the constant negative Facebook press isn't enough to get them to leave and no longer see pictures of their baby grandson. I'm not sure what the solution to this is.

I think the solution is for a photo sharing site to win over the tech crowd with well-thought-out, fine-grained privacy controls and a sustainable business model and then to make it dead easy for non-tech people to share their photos with other non-tech people.

ie. I create a single account and my friends each create a single account and I create groups out of those friends, and then I share my photos with a group, and my friends can see and perhaps comment on the photos that have been shared with them.

How much would it cost per user per month to make this sustainably ad-free?

> well-thought-out, fine-grained privacy controls

The problem with Facebook isn't that some people can see some things you don't want them to. "Privacy controls" are just a distraction from the real problem which is that Facebook can see everything.

It is possible that there are multiple problems with Facebook.

Just my 2 cents - but I would be ok with light, non-invasive advertising, like that by which DuckDuckGo operates:

https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-business-model/

This. I'd rather like the advertising model turned inside out - like the old days if you will. Instead of targeting me, target the content. If I'm looking at an article about sleep show me a few limited mattress ads. It doesn't have to track me after/before. Nothing goes into my account that says I have a sleep disorder.

I hate ads in general and so provide me an option to pay for and remove it as well.

Facebook's solution was initial exclusivity to college students. This made it cool to high school students. Then once high school and college students were all on it, their parents eventually got on.

So maybe we could shamelessly copy that exact model for the new federated open-source Facebook replacement.

But wouldn't that mean we won't be in there? Until, and if, it gains traction?

Edit: also, are we the problem?

> If we could just copy their model to acquire customers then....

Then you would be competing with every other social media startup along with the social media sites that have pretty much limitless resources.

Say your website is a success however, you basically have two options: go public and turn into facebook eventually, because your duty is not to the site anymore, it is to the shareholder and to the dollar.

don't go public and never get off the ground, because you won't be able to keep your programmers or compete with the tech giants.

Your argument is a truism: that any competitors don't have the budget/user base. Well duh, FB is by far #1 in both of those categories. The only way for a competitor to beat them is to come up from nothing to build a SNS and prove this naysayer argument wrong (and for its founders to have the stones to not get bought out). Until then, every FB post on HN is going to have people pointing to the FB network/userbase and saying "IMPOSSIBLE!"

It was impossible for Facebook once upon a time too... until it wasn't. Once upon a time Mark Zuckerberg was just an idiot with an idea, and here's where we ended up.

Not having my parents on the platform was one of the things I liked about Facebook when I first started up my edu account in college. MySpace was still more popular, but Facebook was where all of my college friends could be found. For me, it all gets back to what people use social media for. I liked when it was more about how to connect with people to do something in real life, not when it was the only place that people were communicating.

What would be really cool would be a hidden social network app that can pull data from existing facebook/twitter/etc social data stores with various high and low tactics of stenography and obfuscated data. It could have side benefits like completely scrambling the tracking information on someone on the aggregator size, use useful stuff like image storage and video storage.

Of course that would get routinely disrupted by the base providers, since that is direct intrusion into their precious data silos.

But it would be cool.

Because I'm not super interested in outright encryption of all my thoughts and activity. That actually broadcasts you/marks you. At this point I have a lot of trackers that have SOME information on me.

So I'd like a lot of obfuscation and noise inserted around what companies know about "me".

> if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative

I'm working on something at the moment. More experiment than anything else for the time being but the purpose of it is to have a minimal "social network" for keeping in touch with people, and that's about it. Very little in the way of notifications and most facebook-like features. Just a way to keep in touch and keep contact details for people you care about.

Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

You can monetise it the same way as facebook. I'd be more than happy for my data to be sold and analysed, as long as they were used according to strict ethical guidelines.

Perhaps worth giving DuckDuckGo a look, at how they're making money.

You could try indiscriminately selling users data.

I think there are ways to monetize. Duck duck go manages to do it, so why not? A company like this was never supposed to be the most valuable company in the world.

>Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

Sponsored ads and content is probably the only way, other than donations, to keep the service free. You can do ads without tracking, as long as you're transparent about what is or isn't an ad.

The other option is to segment the market with "premium tier" features that only finicky people care about. For example, everyone gets a standard page layout but you can pay to unlock custom style-sheets. Or you can pay extra to display higher resolution photos. Or you only hold onto posts and content for 3 years unless people pay for archival storage (at which point you're basically just running a backup service).

Alternatively, lots of community groups use facebook as a community forum. You can have moderators or forum administrators pay a hosting fee and that maintains the rest of the site.

> Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

I've been doing something similar. If your network is decentralized, I've been thinking monetization can be in the form of easy VM reselling for the service. Find a provider w/ affiliate $, integrate it into setup. They are the owners of the AWS (or whatever) account and everything's transparent, but you make it easy to install/upgrade. Or could hide the host details and be the "server manager" for them, i.e. managed hosting.

If you are centralized, there are several other ways. You can do a simple one like "completely free to use for companies < $1m revenue/year, $100/month otherwise" (wild number guesses, would need research). Other options can get a bit more sketchy, ala freemium/addons, e.g. pay to style your page, etc.

I've been observing https://www.minds.com/ , which appears to be an interesting open-source competitor in the space.

It's based on blockchain, which makes me nervous, but it does allow you to purchase a version of the product which removes all promotion from the product entirely.

why would blockchain be an issue? The idea is that you get trusted metrics instead of a black box that you can never see inside.

Not the OP, but I tend to associate anything cryptocurrency/blockchain related with snake oil.

Pretty much this plus the fact that I've not (yet) reviewed enough of the available literature on ETH, which this site is based on

I keep it around solely because my parents / grandparents use it and it's a means for me to stay in their lives from far away. My social circles have totally dropped it.

for what? Instagram? That's much worse imo.

WhatsApp threads for arranging get togethers.

Here you go: https://joinmastodon.org/

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try.

Do they support "events" yet?

You could give Hubzilla a shot. Though you have to opt-in to join the ActivityPub federation. And I'm sure the Events only works with users from other Hubzilla instances.

https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

Only accessing Facebook via mbasic.facebook.com works for me. I only really ever check it because I have local community forums that only post information on events there. Most of my friends have departed for Instagram at this point.

Which is probably why Facebook is trying to Facebookify Instagram and WhatsApp. Once they do I'm sure people will start to flee to knock-off services instead.

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