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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

Or, perhaps, these problems are reasons why large, centralized social networks shouldn’t be allowed to exist.

They exist because they're popular, you can't dictate what is popular among the masses without authoritarianism.

They exist because they’re popular and because the currently successful ones acquired or strangled all of their smaller meaningful competitors using investment capital and money from first mover advantages.

Can you give some examples?

Haha, are you serious? Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat... Instagram's Systrom explicitly said that he sold because otherwise Facebook would snuff him away.

Facebook never acquired Snapchat so I'm not sure what you're talking about there. Instagram and WhatsApp have continued to thrive since their acquisition, so from a user perspective nothing really changed, it's not like you need a FB account to use insta or whatsapp.

GP: > They exist because they’re popular and because the currently successful ones acquired or strangled all of their smaller meaningful competitors using investment capital and money from first mover advantages. Facebook literally copied Snapchat features into Instagram rightaway - Systrom even openly admitted it. That fits the bill of "strangled". Snapchat is in stagnation now, because everything it has is there on Insta.

Instagram and WhatsApp thrived only because Facebook acquired them, else both companies new they would be smothered to death. That pretty much fits the bill of "acquired... Using investment capital and money from first mover advantages".

They don't need you to use your FB account because they cross share data anyways. It's not like it's a painstaking operation to link different accounts, once you have all sorts of device data (which Facebook had, even on Apple devices up until recently).

That may be the case now, but Facebook did start requiring Facebook accounts for their Oculus VR headsets.

Much to the dismay of many. Maybe it's the test case FB is monitoring to look how to move ahead with their other acquisitions. Last I heard Quest 2 sales are good..

whatsapp. It's been drastically changed by facebook

There's definitely an anti-trust dimension here, but it's not related to first mover advantage; Facebook wasn't nearly the first mover, or due to capital; Facebook was somewhat widely thought to have over-paid for Instgram, it was Zuck's foresight (or perhaps risk aversion) that gave him the conviction to proceed with the transaction.

You don’t have to dictate popularity: just create legal liability frameworks that make a solution like Mastodon more appealing than a solution like Facebook or Twitter

People can still be banned on Mastadon, it changes absolutely nothing. In a world where Mastadon becomes more popular than FB people will complain about being banned from the most popular node instead of the most popular http website.

Mastadon is federated, so you can be banned from someone else's instance but you can always start your own instance, or join one where you're not banned.

Right, just like how you can start your own website if you get banned from someone else's, it's servers all the way down. The people complaining about being banned don't care that they can create their own instance, they care about losing access to the popular instance.

The advantage of mastodon is that banning is not monolithic: so, if I have instances A, B, C, D: B can decide (through whatever process it uses for such things) they don’t like A’s content and ban it without affecting users on C and D. But, the problem it really solves is moderation: if I start an instance with 10 friends, moderation of posts on the instance is almost a non-issue that can be handled by a couple admins in their spare time. Handling off-instance posts is more difficult, but you can either maintain a ban list to block a list of bad instances or you can adopt a default deny policy and only federate with instances that have content your local community wants to see. Either way, the Mastodon model seems better because it allows policy to be specified at the “local” level rather than requiring a uniform policy across the network.

> if I have instances A, B, C, D: B can decide (through whatever process it uses for such things) they don’t like A’s content and ban it without affecting users on C and D.

Yes, but this isn't really analogous to the complaint being presented. In the Mastadon world this article would have been titled "A Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them". The author is still free to use B, C, D etc, just like with http websites.

> Either way, the Mastodon model seems better because it allows policy to be specified at the “local” level rather than requiring a uniform policy across the network.

To be clear, I do think an ActivityPub-like architecture is preferable for social networking, but federation doesn't obviate the concept of popularity, it only seems that way now because the fediverse isn't popular, if it ever did become popular then we'd see the exact same complaints when people get banned from popular instances.

The only reason people care about Facebook disabling their account is because Facebook has all the users and their data in its silo. In Mastodon, A disabling federation with B isn’t really the same sort of problem because it’s not a global action across the network.

What A defederating from B is like a website blocking your IP. Facebook banning an account is more like your ISP turning off your internet access.

In theory, absolutely. In practice, I've heard of major instances using their power to dictate "If you federate with $out-group, we won't federate with you". Most admins want to federate with other major (mostly good, popular) federations, so they capitulate.

As such, being kicked from one instance leads you to sign up elsewhere, until a major instance notices and tells your new server admin to kick you out. When you create your own instance, the major instances use their soft power to ensure almost nobody else federates with you.

They exist because they’re profitable. They can become unprofitable through democratic legislation.

Twitter is only barley profitable as of a year ago, yet it has continued to exist as a large social network during that time, so that explanation doesn't fit.

Sure you can, just require interoperability with similar services and prevent them from straight up buying the competition and watch their "popularity" fade away.

I think preventing FB from buying competitors is perfectly reasonable, but that doesn't really mean much with respect to FB's popularity. It's not as if users have to choose "should I use FB or instagram" they can and do use both, and that would still be possible whether FB owned instagram or not.

How about the other part of the comment that you've ignored? If people could use Alternative X without losing their Facebook/Instagram connections, Facebook would fade into irrelevance. There's absolutely no technical reason for everyone to have a separate Facebook/Instagram/Twitter account with dozens of other IM services instead of picking one and communicating with others regardless of what they've picked.

That future is only one regulation away. The most common reason for staying on Facebook ("all my friends are there") disappears.

> If people could use Alternative X without losing their Facebook/Instagram connections

They can already do that. Using an alternative does not cause someone to lose access to FB.

> There's absolutely no technical reason for everyone to have a separate Facebook/Instagram/Twitter account with dozens of other IM services instead of picking one and communicating with others regardless of what they've picked

This is already a thing.

https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=

I feel like you're just trolling at this point.

> Using an alternative does not cause someone to lose access to FB.

Deleting Facebook causes you to lose access to your Facebook connections. Why can't you just use your Twitter account to communicate with someone on Facebook? There's zero technical reason for this not to be possible.

> This is already a thing. https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=

It's not. It's a third party workaround that Facebook could kill at any point if it gave a shit. Do I really need to explain to you how that's different than first party support for something so basic? Just like with email, you should be able to enter a username and a IM provider and just talk to them as if you're using the same platform. It's really not rocket science.

Fediverse (Mastodon and compatible providers) already does that without any hiccups. It's possible, we know it works for decades (since we all use email), and it should be a requirement for every social network / IM service in existence.

We split up Standard Oil, and many other trusts, without resorting to authoritarianism. I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's probably not harder than breaking up AT&T (also a network to connect people) was.

Just don't use them. And try to convince people you know not to. A ban isn't even necessary if enough people decide a platform works against their interests and cease to pay attention to it.

This argument is basically “I don’t need privacy because I have nothing to hide”

I think it's more, "don't consider any part of it private." I always ask people for their email password when they say "I've got nothing to hide" I think it's rubbish.. At the same time, I treat facebook (all of it) as if it were public. If I wouldn't wear a t-shirt with my DM's on it, then I don't write them.

Not at all, I would very much like to protect personal privacy rights. I'm saying a small number of businesses have convinced the general public to invest a massive amount of time, money, and attention in virtual spaces. These organizations intrude in our lives because we use their platforms. We need to quit using their platforms.

Sorry, I was trying to characterize the sort of argument given: "Just don't use it" only works if the people you want to interact with are available some other way in a nearly equivalent fashion: if one's friend group is mostly on Facebook, you sort of have to pick between using FB and missing out on a certain set of social interactions.

Oh, then I agree, but I would suggest it's a worthwhile inconvenience. The more people quit these services, the less incentive other users will have to remain. It's surprising sometimes how even one person's decision can generate mimicry.

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