A Year After Diaspora Another “Facebook Alternative” Emerges | Hacker News Reader

A Year After Diaspora Another “Facebook Alternative” Emerges

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38 pointstilt51 comments

This seems to be nothing like Diaspora. Diaspora sought to free users from a single entity owning and controlling their personal data. Altly seems to seek to simply be another single entity with control of your personal data. I don't see how that's a good thing for users.

I also doubt it'll be much of a threat to facebook...if your only argument is that Coke has a Pepsi and Chevy has a Ford, you've got a pretty weak grasp of how markets work. New colas pretty much never succeed; Pepsi and Coke were strong regional brands that went national, and there has pretty much never been a credible threat to that market from a new company. New car manufacturers are practically impossible to build in the US (Tesla is the only new car manufacturer of note in decades, and it remains to be seen how well it will fare; Saturn doesn't count, as it's just a subsidiary of GM; AMC went under after a long struggle). Markets, in general, don't care if there's competition. Markets just insure that when a dominant player shows weaknesses, someone steps into the gap. That's happened with facebook; there are many social apps that tackle small bits of the problem (like Twitter). In order to succeed, a direct competitor to facebook needs to find a chink in facebooks armor and exploit it...not just assume that everyone will flock to an "alternative to facebook" because it is an "alternative to facebook".

Agreed 100% and I would just add this one point. Social networks are a winner-take-all game. You're either dominant or nothing. Nobody wants to use a social network with only 400 other people on it. That would defeat the whole purpose. Of course, there are specific niches such as Twitter, but Twitter dominates its niche.

In a way, social communication and network sites are anti-competitive.

I think its rather early days to reach this conclusion. A social network is just a network of people. In the real world small networks of like minded people have often had a disproportionately large amount of utility. The one thing for large social networks right now is that they provide a global namespace of people which helps discoverability. But perhaps in the coming years we shall see social networks emerge for vertical talents where likeminded people can work productively (Mendeley etc come to mind). You could arguably make the point that within each of these verticals a single player will dominate.

Yes, I see where you're coming from. Let me refine my point. Niches will probably get smaller and smaller. Facebook may lose market-power to smaller, more focused networks. I'm just not sure if that will weaken Facebook to the point that Facebook stops being "the" social network. Facebook is still the ultimate place for global connectivity. Perhaps Facebook will remain Facebook, but people will stop using it as their main social outlet.

Like you said, this could result in dominant players within a vertical space. But, how large will these vertical spaces be? I don't know. If i knew, I'd be a millionaire. (I'm not.)

Thanks for the mind candy though.

I wonder if Facebook could actually become too big. If everything i write into Facebook will be read by friends, bosses, grandma, and father-in-law, i will probably write nothing or only simple jokes. So there might be a point, where everybody has a Facebook account, but nobody uses it anymore. This might be counter by introducing more controls, but that complicates the interface.

There are privacy options on each post you make.

I do see that the point is that on facebook currently its not an intuitive and simple process.

I think this is already happening. There are successful niche social networks broken up along at least two lines:

1) Geography. VZ-Networks' sites are bigger than Facebook in Germany, Vkontakte seems to still be #1 in Russia.

2) Activity. CouchSurfing.org and meetup.com have completely different use cases than Facebook and are thriving.

That's exactly the same argument that was made about content, back in the days of PlayNet, AOL, Prodigy, and the like. Yet, somehow, open websites won; you could also make the same argument about email.

Why isn't it possible that social networks will be like the web, and that all these proprietary services will wither away in the face of an open protocol? I'm not saying that's inevitable; I just wonder why everyone believes that the converse is inevitable.

Oh, good ol' days of the internets...

You know, your question got me thinking. I've been trying to imagine a open platform for social networking and I just...can't...conceive of one. Maybe my mind is too limited and uncreative, but I just feel like a open platform would defeat the purpose of social networking sites.

For example, LinkedIn - a social network for professionals. If LinkedIn became "open," its utility disappears. You would not be able to trust your "connections" because the network wouldn't be full of professionals. Closed platforms are a bit more trustworthy (and only a bit!). Facebook is probably as open as it gets.

That's my guess anyway.

Huh? LinkedIn has absolutely no restrictions on who can be a member or who can be connected. They only data they curate is the global search index, but that can be replaced by anything else on the Internet, like email or XMPP.

I'll disagree with the notion that "Social networks are a winner-take-all game". I, and i'm sure many others do too, use different social networks for different group of friends.

I.e. I use Facebook primarily to keep in contact with my family and friends who i don't see on a regular basis. I use LinkedIn to keep in touch with people I met on a professional basis. I use Whatsapp to keep in touch with people who are really close to me.

I know Whatsapp is not exactly a social network but I believe that it is a first step towards fulfilling a niche that is ripe to be disrupted: A social network for your INNER circle of friends; close friends/family that you interact with on a regular basis. I don't believe any "social network" has fulfilled this niche yet.

So in short, social networks is NOT a winner-takes-all-game and there are opportunities to disrupt. I myself is attempting this by taking the Whatsapp model and expanding on that.

I hope they pick a new name before launch.

Not just because 1) it is a cliché -ly suffixed name, but because 2) "Alt" doesn't tell the user what it does and 3) automatically puts its existence in opposition to something (facebook in this case) instead of being bold and claiming it is/will be the de facto social networking site.

The founder's blog post says the name will be changed. I agree that it's unwise to define yourself relative to a competitor.

Facebook is an alternative social network to email. Real competition to Facebook won't be 'the Pepsi to Facebook's coke.' Instead, it will probably be something totally different that makes Facebook irrelevant, or at least different enough that comparisons to Facebook are not relevant.

While we are at fb alternatives, here is one more that attempts at protecting user privacy: Privachi. Privachi is a privacy-centric social network which attempts at putting users back in control of their social data with a combination of scattering user's data online so no one service provider knows everything about the user, and "locking" user data in such a way that only the user and her friends can "unlock" the data. Even Privachi will not be able to "unlock" the data.

Not sure why you were downvoted. Your site is a little light on the details of your encryption scheme, would you care to elaborate?

Sure. Public/private keys for all users. Private key encrypted with a user's pin that is not known to us, and encrypted private key stored on servers. All of this happens at the user's browser. We don't don't have access to your private keys, so, can't decrypt posts on the server.

Doesn't that lead to a lot of overhead? If i have a hundred friends and i broadcast a message, then the message must be encrypted a hundred times with each friend's public key.

Yes, you are right there is overhead involved. In our tests, however, the delays didn't end up being too high for users with up to 125 friends (even on mobile devices). Delays will be worse beyond that, but will have ways around it if it comes down to it. Will be a good problem to have :)

Until a user provides their pin, and you decrypt their private key. Then you have the private key, although you may choose not to remember it.

This doesn't solve the privacy issues such as with Facebook and other centralized servers, where you distrust the host as much as hackers or other users.

EDIT: You may want to read this:

http://wiki.appleseedproject.org/doku.php?id=future:encrypti...

The decryption of private key happens in the user's browser, not on the server. We still don't know user's decrypted private key on the server.

Thanks for the link.

So you're doing the data encryption/decryption through a browser plugin, then? Is the source available?

If it occurs in the browser, why are the (encrypted) private keys stored on the server? Why not store them in the browser?

Nope. No plugin involved. Encryption/decryption carried out in JS. Storing it on a particular browser will limit user's access to the service from any other browser :)

Hmmm, again, that assumes trust of the host serving up the Javascript. I know it may seem nit-picky, but it's not a concern that can be easily dismissed.

At some point, you're going to have to trust software that someone else has written. I understand that you see Appleseed as the solution, but it really doesn't solve the problem of 99% of users downloading a binary that they blindly run. When you're at that level, a Javascript file is as transparent (if not more) than an Appleseed binary.

I think you're missing the point, though. When you have a centralized site, one of the problems that we've seen with Facebook is the issue of being "host-safe". There's too much financial incentive to do something with that data, and no other viable business model has been proposed. A site which promises to solve Facebook's privacy issues can't make those promises while serving up Javascript decryption code. It's too easy for the host to inject a simple line of code which pulls the pin number and sends it back to the host, which can then decrypt everything. They could do this with a single page load, and then never do it again, so that you would have to catch the malfeasance that one time. It's a case of misplaced trust, simply because things are "encrypted".

They could get around this via an open source browser plugin so that it can be peer-reviewed, or (more desirably) the functionality can be integrated into browsers via the HTML5 spec.

There's no such thing as an Appleseed binary, btw, it's written in a scripted language.

Your issue applies to any system that can pull executable code from the web and dynamically execute it, including almost every scripting language. You could pull the password before it hits the browser plugin. There is no remedy to this under the circumstances -- not open source, not peer review, not SSL, not distributed systems. You'd have to use a signed binary whose source you had examined yourself, at the least. So even the distributed FOSS argument is snake oil.

BTW, I'm not trying to imply that these guys have solved the problem -- there are numerous problems, as you pointed out.

You could pull the password, but you couldn't pull the private key from the browser (or plugin). Encryption/decryption is done in the browser, and the host server acts purely as a data store, incapable of doing anything with that (encrypted) data. The trust question then gets moved from the host to the browser.

Have you read the link I posted about how you could approach encryption at the browser level?

Far from not solving the situation, I think they fall into the category of "half-way encryption is worse than no encryption at all", and they don't seem to understand the social concept of trust. As Jon Callas says, "Encryption is not magic pixie dust that makes everything okay."

Nate Lawson on in-browser JS crypto: http://rdist.root.org/2010/11/29/final-post-on-javascript-cr...

For example, you (or any powerful-enough third party,as you don't even have HTTPS), could anytime throw in any malicious JS code to get whatever data he wants.

And, given that PIN is limited to 4 digits, it's not a protection at all, just a snake oil.

I'm quite interested in the concept, but it looks like your site has been "hackernewsed".

Eh? Not sure I understand :(

In the USA, Facebook does indeed have the largest number of active users.

Outside the USA, there are serious competitors to Facebook, with larger user numbers than Facebook. Examples: Vkontakte.ru in Russia and Renren in China.

Therefore it's possible, because it has been done already.

I think Facebook is highly used 1) in countries with the latin alphabet and 2) by people who have friends/contacts in countries with latin alphabets.

That's the market Alty seems to be after and that's a lot more difficult to conquer than making a facebook alternative for China or Russia.

I'm building an alternative to Facebook called Kwolla. You can install it on your own machine or use our API. I'm bootstrapping the entire thing. You can download my 1.x version of software for free or pay for a 2.0 pre-sale.

I wish I could get coverage like this. :)

And yet you don't have a link to it in your profile, or link to it from your comment. This doesn't inspire confidence.

Need to update my profile, didn't want to totally take over the thread with my warez.

Your warez? What is this network, some sort of pirated software from 1997?

warez is pronounced "wares" and means your product or merchandise - http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wares

But no, I assure you I wrote every line of it :)

You misspelled your word in the link. Using a z instead of s indicates the software is cracked or pirated. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/warez

You want coverage you've got to secure money, TC will write and or badmouth about you if you get backing from serious folks.

Altly? I hope that's not the final name.

For those who's native language is not English, this would be a REALLY hard name to say.

P.S. The Altly.com home page has a Facebook Like Us button. Eh?

I worked with Dmitry while he was at Myspace, he definitely is very passionate about competing with Facebook -- he was many times at odds with Myspace leadership on the issue of whether to compete with them or carve our own niche and embrace their platform (you can see who won that debate). I'm glad he's finally fulfilling his vision.

I wouldn't use an alternative simply because all my "friends" are on Facebook. I don't want to run two social network accounts.

What you need in order to allow "competition" is to have some form of interoperability. E.g. Twitter API allows lots of companies to write Twitter apps. (Of course, now Twitter is trying to take control of all that.) E.g. how in Apple's iChat you can use AOL Instant Messanger, Jabber, etc. and talk to users of iChat or those other services. (I use Adium to put all my IMing in one place, and that includes Facebook connectivity.)

So, if Altly can scrape Facebook so that by being an Altly user I can have both Altly and Facebook friends in one interface, then I might consider using it. (Still has to have a better interface and execution.)

The world does not seem to be getting over the "Facebook alternative" syndrome soon. Or in other words I should say that Facebook is being seriously underestimated.

While it's absolutely right to try and build a better social network; calling it a Facebook alternative is wrong. It's like calling Greplin and DuckDuckGo an alternative to Google. Facebook has done way more than any other social network till date. Don't we know about the Warner Bros. deal and didn't we read the article about spotify+facebook on HN yesterday!! And what an amazing achievement it has called as Facebook comments. No one has been able to find a spot in as many major blogs and websites as Facebook comments has (and Disqus). Not to deride anyone's effort, but it takes time to build a Facebook, and replacing it ain't easy. I believe Internet is big enough to accommodate more than one Facebook and its types.

EDIT: A little story. I live in India and it's known to everyone that most of the marriages here are still arranged. One of my friends was getting arranged recently and her mother wanted to see the picture of groom; and out of nowhere she said "why don't we check it on Facebook". I am pretty sure she has never used Internet before and probably never going to use it, but she knows what purpose Facebook can solve. I say that is a huge impact for any website.

After reading about Altly this morning, I thought carefully about Mr. Shaprio's argument for a competing social / network site. And while I am inclined to give Mr. Shapiro the benefit of my doubts, believing that he likely has several cards secretly tucked up his sleeves, the argument that every great brand needs an alternative brand has never really been a great way to grow a product or service. In fact I often use the Coke/Pepsi argument as exactly the opposite argument. Relying only on brand differentiation as Pepsi has tried, will always result in massive marketing / advertising costs, and little product or service differentiation. Instead of being a Pepsi to Coke, I believe that new products or services need to create a new consumer opportunity instead of simply a new package. So instead of thinking about Coke v. Pepsi, Mr. Shapiro would do well to aspire to be either Red Bull, or Snapple, or Odwalla, or any number of successful market changing adventures. Either way, even persistent incremental improvements over a competitor is better than simply ceding the space. Here's wishing him good luck.

I love how the comments are powered by Facebook.

Anyone can build a Facebook alternative. There is no magic list of ingredients that you'll be able to throw into a Facebook alternative that will compete with Facebook. Just becuase you are focusing on what Facebook does not do well won't give you something to be competitive with. From a high level perspective, IMO, Facebook had very similar features as Friendster, MySpace and a whole other slew of social networks.

You can't just build something for the sake of competition. It has to be grown organically. People won't flock to your social network because it's better. People are like sheep, and they need to be herded like so.

That has to be the dumbest name I've ever heard. Is this even supposed to be serious?

What about frid.ge? It seems to solve all the problems Altly has with Facebook. And the execution seems fine aside from leaning heavily on the refrigerator theme.

http://frid.ge

Might as well reserve your username in case this takes off. Hilarious that the first thing you get after reserving your username is a Facebook like button.

It doesn't seem to be open source, so I'm not sure about the point of the comparison.

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