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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

> The "people directory"

I think this is Facebook's biggest issue: they moved from being a very useful tool to being the app that tries to drive traffic and engagement so much that it becomes less useful. I think they should refocus back on being a useful tool to keep track of friends, and keep in touch with people you meet, and then do the other stuff they want to do separately. Facebook IS still useful, but because of all the noise now people mostly use it to be able to contact old friends OR they don't use the close social network features that use to make facebook useful.

> I think it would be hard to start something like this again, because people are afraid of data collection now in a way they weren't in 2006

I think that's projecting. Many countries don't care, and many groups of people don't care.

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The problem I see is that kind of stuff is just not profitable anymore. IMO it shouldn't be a company like FB running a people directory, it should be something mastodon.

The utopian future I would like for social media is if we had a protocol for a people directory social network. It would function in much the same way as facebook pages or your myspace page. Most users will just sign up for a service, technical users will have frameworks and API's they can reach for to build their own "custom" pages. I realize I just described the fediverse but seriously, fediverse needs to go mainstream.

I see this as a consequence of the overarching ideology of markets and capitalism standing in the way of humans exploiting the full potential of digital and internet technologies.

at this point this is a social problem to be solved politically

> IMO it shouldn't be a company like FB running a people directory, it should be something mastodon

It really is not a technological problem, it's a "how do you get everyone to sign up" problem, which FB has solved. I don't think we'll see another company solve this in a very long time, unless they hit the jackpot while really focusing on creating a USEFUL product for their users.

That said, there is a concept of friction for signups, and that's something TikTok does well with their UX. You open the app and are immediately in the app, no sign up. After using the app for a bit you can go and customize your username and such so that you're not a generic username, and you're able to find and be found by friends on the app, but that's optional.

>fediverse needs to go mainstream.

Mastodon has been around for more than five years, and the idea of decentralized social networks long before that. Email, from a user standpoint, was much like Mastodon: a protocol that you consumed with software of your choice. But it was never a great experience for the average user, then gmail made it a great experience. People switched very quickly.

The experience has to be first.

Just want to highlight that this is a very tech-focused perspective. "If we make it good enough people will use it!"

Also is there room in this utopia for people who want their privacy and secrecy? Will they be disadvantaged if they don't participate in this digital phone booth? My gut tells me yes.

Those that don't have Facebook are already disadvantaged in that way. They don't get invited to the party, they aren't told about life updates via the feed. But you soon self-select for friends that don't use Facebook and that do invite you to parties and tell you about things.

That same divide isn't going to go away, no matter the technology. (ofc replace Facebook with whatever app is popular with your group.)

Perhaps from your vantage point. My vantage point is more and more people are ditching the social sites for real connections again. A few years ago when privacy issue after privacy issue came out, and the revelations on how manipulated we all are on social media by algorithms, my circle decided to ditch social media. I was always the "pioneer" in this front, having ditched it around 2015 or so.

The craziest thing started happening when I got rid of it. I started getting these crazy old things called "phone calls." And people started sending out these really cool decorated cards called "invitations" that apparently come to my house through this really old but fascinating technology called "mail". Real life actual people started walking past me on my neighborhood road and inviting me to house parties or get-togethers again. I met so many wonderful neighbors since!

It had this amazing other side effect as well: it acted like a filter for all the events I used to "miss". Suddenly, it's as if the weight of FOMO was lifted off my shoulders.

But illustrative snark aside, I suppose its going to vary from circle to circle and group to group. My hunch tells me a lot more people simply tolerate social media because they realize much of society has hitched it's wagon to it, and they see this as an unfortunate thing, and it will take just one person in the group to break the mold.

I too see people in my circle ditching social media, but the transition seems to have been to messenger apps. People will message directly to each other, or in group chatrooms.

Yes I have definitely seen signal use increase by my very non academic estimate of 10x. I see a "so and so contact has joined Signal!" notification every few days consistently for a while now.

I don’t think they’re making an argument that it’s sufficient to attract people, but that it is necessary.

Obviously any sort of serious effort will need some sort of marketing or other social push, but you can market a pile of dog poop all you want and nobody will be interested.

Email and Mastodon have a similar issues in that they combine two different layers of functionality into a single protocol. The bottom layers (identity and social graph respectively) would be better served by not being tied to specific form of communication (the top layers).

If we could separate out these layers I think you would find that the user experience would be easier to improve and evolve more cleanly over time, with multiple formats and protocols being built upon a base abstraction layer.

I remember switching to gmail only because they offered 1Gb of storage, which at the time other email hosts were only offering for paid subscribers. In my circle this was the biggest reason to switch, not because the UX was much better than any other providers.

Storage capacity is a part of the eXperience story.

Before Gmail's groundbreaking 1GB limit, you had offerings like 15mb or 100mb from yahoo or hotmail. What that meant for your day to day experience would be that you would literally run out of space and then have to manually comb through your inbox to delete things you don't want. And if you wanted stuff, you had to harshly prioritize between treasured message threads.

These are all part of the UX

> that kind of stuff is just not profitable anymore.

It wasn't profitable back then either, alas—which is why Facebook has repeatedly pivoted to less useful, more annoying, but more monetizable offerings.

Facebook takes in giant piles of money, it just doesn't have the growth wall street has come to expect.

"if we had a protocol for a people directory social network" -- back around 2004, that's exactly what FOAF was for (Friend Of A Friend). I set up mine, a lot of people did, there was excitement around the blogosphere for this, but in the end it lost out to walled-gardens like MySpace and then Facebook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)

This might make more sense implemented as personal servers. A linux image you own and run in the cloud somewhere, that has whatever server-side software you want (a blog, your important documents, maybe a discord or minecraft server or whatever) that is easy to move around from one cloud provider to another.

I know server-side software is traditionally hard to run, but there's no law it has to be that way forever (especially if the cloud hosting providers realized the immense untapped sales potential of regular people suddenly having a use for a cloud server, and underwrote some of the open source software that would make them more useful).

But how would you make as much money as FB does off a very useful tool?

Probably the money that FB "generates" is literally insane, and doesn't make sense for a single company to generate.

Possibly a mastodon based solution where users pay a small recurring fee for server management and some R&D and offering privacy, could generate enough benefits for a company (or companies) to strive.

FB (among others) made us forget the sense of scale and the value of things, including the value of privacy and brain time. I would rather pay today from 1 to 5 USD a month for a service that works, where I can share my kid's pictures with my direct family and only them, with no ads.

Most people would not be willing to pay for this, QED

If people aren’t willing to pay for it, its either a social service or it shouldn’t exist. Facebook continued existence is subsidized by extremely lax regulation in the advertising industry.

Most people do not agree with your extreme opinion

At one point it was estimated that Facebook gets $40/month in advertising per US user - how do you then reconcile that with you only being willing to pay $1-5?

But that doesn’t mean an equivalent service cannot survive on just a dollar a month.

I think this is why youtube without ads is sooo expensive.

I make a difference between what FB customers pay for promises of brain time, and what the service FB provides actually is worth for _me_ (people are no customers of FB). $40/month/user might be what FB get from their customers. It does not mean that it is the value it is actually providing to its own end users (excluding ad afficionados if that exists).

There is also a difference with what it actually costs to provide the useful part of the service. Mastodon is open source, yes it requires hardware (virtual or actual) and operation, none of which is free, but the cost of these certainly doesn't match the cost of running+developing game changing (advertisment/recommendation) ML models and ultra high scale infrastructure. Running a mastodon server for a thousand users with acceptable availability, and no fancy ML or R&D, I think should be doable for $5.000 a month, yes.

* use the very useful tool to launch other platforms that do not take advantage of the social graph (that you can monetize)

* use the great social graph that you now have to create other useful tools that you can monetize

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