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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

I can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking.

I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago.

Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be no "rival". I HATE Facebook, but I can't get rid of it without losing access to my family.

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I similarly relocated away from family. Turns out that if they know you don't use Facebook they will go out of their way to update you directly. Just believe that you are worth it, and my friend, you are.

That, plus if they don't update you personally and all you get from them is passively watching their facebook feed I have bad news for you. I'd take a bi yearly call from my grandma over the daily shitposts of any member of my family that I haven't talked to in 10 years.

Maybe think about calling your grandma more often, before it's too late.

Same here. Going off FB just gives me a reason to call my friends and family, and for them to call me.

Agreed! ^ My entire family lives pretty far away, but I facetime with them a lot more often since I got off FB.

I don't have WhatsApp in a country where practically everybody has WhatsApp, and while I certainly get included in enough things and am not dissatisfied (especially since quite a few have now also installed Signal), I'm also certainly getting left out of a lot of things still.

Again, not that much of a problem to me, but certainly something I wouldn't deny is happening.

I've been trying to get my family to install signal for our family group chat to no avail... i feel signal is so much smoother than fb msgr, but no one outside my techie / ativist friend groups ever agree to even try it.

I think a large part of the difficulty here is that mostly people already use multiple messaging services out of a group including things like vanilla SMS, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Snapchat, and some might eve use all of them, so they're hesitant to add yet another one into the mix. I'd personally be thrilled to delete all of the messaging apps on my phone besides one if the one that remained allowed me to message with my full set of family and friends, but unfortunately that isn't likely to be feasible anytime soon.

remember like a decade back there was a instant messanger aggregator? it was called like, chatzilla or something, i forget. but in the logic of today's walled garden system of tech fiefdoms, would never happen without some regulatory requirement.

I find a group chat on Whatsapp much better than Facebook for keeping up with my immediate family.

I fantasize about a product like that sometimes. A private, pay social site geared towards families. Your family pays a yearly subscription. Photo/video sharing. Event planning. Family news timeline. Everything purely linear. No manipulation to maximize engagement. No ads. Just real information about your family that you care about.

One side of my family has about 30 people that are all willing to travel to meet somewhere every few years. Compared to that expense, it would be trivial for us to share the cost of such a service, even if it were a few hundreds dollars a year.

Add to that network the ability to order physical printed copies of photos for cheap automatically sent to your house you could have a goldmine with people who still make photo albums/scrapbook.

You would have to only allow those in your family/inner circle the ability to order your photos but for families who use Facebook just to keep in touch/share baby photos having a social media centered around family groups could be lucrative.

Couldn't you self-host something that checks all those boxes for far less than a few hundred a year?

RIP Path.

I've been saying for years I want to make it, but every time I suggest it I get laughed out of the room. I have a few totally "out there" startup ideas, this is one.

The thing about this is, every family has that one person who will pay for this and they keep it updated. Most family members will just lurk, but some will be totally into it.

I bet they would even take things off Facebook and repost in this app so that people off Facebook can see too.

Like this? https://spokt.com/

I'm probably doing to do this by hosting a private Mastodon instance in our basement. We already have a private Matrix instance for all of our family chats.

I'm building exactly this! It's a very early product, but please try out Thread - https://get.thread-app.com

I know it's probably one of the most difficult features to add -- especially for group messaging, but e2ee is a feature that will get you an instant user-base, who will then help network in more users. Just don't make it the main selling point (like Signal).

I think Glassboard used to be something like this, but it never took off.

This essentially already exists if you put a little effort into it. You could set up a Diaspora, Mastodon or Pixelfed instance open to just to family members in some cloud cloud provider, and this way pay a monthly fee for a private social network.

It'd be awesome to see someone contribute back some automatic flow which gets you up and running in 5 minutes, instead of having to figure out how to run these in AWS yourself, for example. Could be a fun project though.

My extended family uses this: https://spokt.com/

There was some talk years ago about switching to Facebook but I and a few others refused to participate on that platform and we wound up staying on Spokt.

The service is ok, nothing special, but it does serve the purpose of ongoing communication away from the spying and trash and noise and dark patterns of Facebook without having to set something custom up.

Facebook's greatest threat is from Nextdoor, and I can't wait until it happens.

They really got me with that fake from-neighbor fake-printed-on-gridpaper letter, only realized it was fake after registering...

>From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking.

That makes sense, I don't think a social network and privacy advocating (WikiPedia donating, HN type) go hand in hand. I like the premise of WT.Social.

Facebook is where it is because it cracked 'real identity' when others were encouraging dog/cat names for profiles.

> when others were encouraging dog/cat names for profiles.

My dog had a facebook profile, so the Zuck doesn't allow it anymore? Keep in mind that was a very social dog.

Apparently yes, as per FB profile rules only yourself can create a FB profile but your dog can have FB page though.

My experience is that if you don't participate in social media, people call / message you personally, or meet in person. I don't think communicating with family or friends by broadcasting into an abyss and fighting for their attention is an improvement on one-to-one dialogue.

Be the unreasonable minority that you wish to see in the world. https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship...

> I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family

I use Facebook as a perpetually correct address book. People change address, phone number and sometimes email, but never their Facebook account. That single property of Facebook (which is something my generation attributed to Facebook, instead of it being directly coded as a feature) is why I could basically never leave.

I've tried to get my family off of Whatsapp, and utterly failed there. I strongly doubt my entire social circle would ever spontaneously move to something better than Facebook.

Are there any popular main-stream non-facebook or non-google owned chat properties? I've been looking for a family friendly alternative.

Telegram comes to mind.

snapchat

Hmm, I guess that I should poison my Facebook account with false information?

Facebook somewhat like linkedin is also used for socially acceptable bragging and puffery. So for example it's ok to post things that others would be jealous of (or think you are bragging) if done another way. That is definitely some of the appeal of those platforms.

And the best part is nobody even knows if the people reading are turned off or think you are bragging that never gets echoed back in any way.

People are so quick to label new apps/sites as Facebook/Instagram/Twitter rivals, but in really they are not. As you mentioned, just because you can friend someone, it's not a Facebook rival, or else, Imgur would be a Instagram rival because you can post pics...

I get the impression that for many people their main experience of Facebook is as a source of media with mixed social and commercial promotion. In this regard, Wales' social network is a rival.

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