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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

>Like maybe, a social network that doesn’t manipulate us, or scan our faces without permission, or build dark profiles of everyone, or read our personal messages, or

Heh. Fat chance. The next generation of social networks will be coming from China because China is the perfect incubator for this category of software. You'll yet wish for Facebook.

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The next generation of social networks is already here. It's decentralized and open-source. Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, loads more, all part of the same network, the fediverse.

The only people who use decentralized and open-source social media are the people who care that it is decentralized and open-source. They are niche at best, no ones grandparents are on Mastodon.

I never said end-users should care that it's decentralized and open source. I am mentioning it because we're on HN, a tech-oriented website. The selling point of the fediverse is the governance model and sustainability, and the way these qualities are missing from Twitter/Facebook/&co has been in the mainstream consciousness for a few years already. Also the grandparents comment is nonsense. How many people's grandparents are on Snapchat or TikTok? How many people's grandparents are on Instagram? It's a completely arbitrary demographic goal post.

I'm a regular HN user, deleted FB three years ago, I've never even heard of any of those sites.

good opportunity for you to learn about something new then. ActivityPub is a W3C recommendation and is the protocol powering a diverse and healthy ecosystem of social networking sites.

I am building a few aggregators if you want to explore the fediverse without registering first.

https://mastodonia.club

https://pixelfed.club

I'm not sure it's really possible to launch new decentralized protocols anymore, and get any kind of mainstream traction. We have HTTP and email basically by historical accident. Even RSS was shown to really just be an implementation detail of Google Reader, and there wasn't enough of an organic ecosystem outside of that for it to survive.

the protocol has been launched already. it's only a matter of time before the network effect kicks in.

I would assume that once a major media company or government organization realizes they can adopt an implementation of the existing protocol this will move that network a bit closer to the tipping point.

>it's only a matter of time before the network effect kicks in.

Can you quantify that? XMPP has been around forever and the biggest chat messengers are proprietary. IRC has been around forever, but Slack and Teams are what's actually being used.

What is the evidence that an open standard for social use-cases can actually drive use?

I’ve never been to any of those sites, but Mastodon and PeerTube sounds like shady porn sites.

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