Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook? | Hacker News Reader

Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?

12challenges.substack.com

147 pointslouisbarclay182 comments

"Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel

The success of the old Facebook was very much rooted in a particular time and place. The leading edge of the Millennial generation (which was raised to be both more social and more trusting than previous generations) was in college. The Internet was new, and people were figuring out what it was for. The economy was humming along, and recovering from the dot-com bust, and people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and food would be taken care of. A website where the point was to throw sheep at each other was a nice idle diversion for that time surplus.

It also helped that Facebook was started in one of the highest social-status dorms, in the highest social-status college, among the highest social-status demographic (college students), in a generation that was tightly socially connected. I'd remarked to a coworker, when Google was just starting Google+, that we were replicating all the technology in Facebook (and many good ideas not in Facebook that had been pioneered by LiveJournal), but we were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg capitalized on.

In short, yes, consumer preferences have changed. Consumer preferences are always changing. The new Facebook is messaging, or hanging out in person, or maybe TikTok. Replicating the old Facebook won't give back the moment in time that lead to its ascendance.

Also it was before many parents were on the internet.

Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them. And so they instead prefer messaging apps for these relationships.

And then for communicating within their age group it's much more about trends and what is new and different as every young generation is enticed by.

> Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them

the amount of young people who realize this and actually take action, if a very very small part, majority is just spoon-fed the new normal of these "social" apps

Probably time to bring back dodgeball. What is Dennis Crowley up to?

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!

Google + killed itself by being invite-only at the time when there was buzz. Once the invite-only period ended, the buzz was gone.

I can anecdotally confirm this to be the case. I was in college when G+ came out, and there was a lot of interest in my friend groups; except that nobody could get in.

There was a moment when a lot of people wanted to make G+ accounts, and if they had been able to do so, the network effect of them making accounts would have spurred a number of others to do the same. But they couldn't, and by the time they could, interest had died. G+ had one really good shot, and missed.

No, G+ was annoying. You had to classify people in circles. Then nothing happened.

The reason why the hype died was that it was a bad product. That’s why Youtube made it mandatory to transform your name into a G+ account. Talk about pathetic.

Again it's an example of what working before not working in the future, though. Invite-only had worked great for GMail; it actually intensified the buzz. It failed miserably with Wave and Plus, showing that the same tactics sometimes work and sometimes flop.

While the invite-only period may have been necessary for scaling reasons, I have my doubts that it was necessary for buzz-building reasons.

Gmail was invite-only to join and get an @gmail.com account, but once you had it you could interact with any email account user, and they could interact with you. GMail isn't a walled garden. Facebook, Wave, G+, etc are. That's why they depend on rapid user growth very early on when the hype is fresh.

> people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and food would be taken care of.

Interesting, as the US housing market crash came two years after Facebook's launch, the same year it opened to the public, and the food commodities boom followed a year later. Farm gate food prices were higher back then than they are now, even in nominal dollars!

I pretty strongly disagree with this. I don't think that user preferences have changed so much, in that I think a lot of people would respond well to an "old-school"-style Facebook, even if released right now. The issue is simply that that version of Facebook probably has people only using it 15-30 mins a day max, but you really need to get the continual mindless scrolling to maximize ad rates. Facebook is just suffering "the tyranny of the marginal user", the topic which was so well-discussed on HN a couple months back.

You're welcome to try it. "Old school Facebook" took a couple days to implement, and it'd probably be even quicker with modern web frameworks.

I was on FB in 2005, and it was definitely not 15-30 mins/day. People were on there for hours, or rather they'd go on, scroll for 15 mins, then come back next hour for another 15 mins, and so on. But again, that sort of behavior was a product of the times, and I really doubt you would get that sort of engagement if you put the same product in front of users today.

But try it! If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get any traction.

The really old school Facebook didn’t even have feeds. You spent time on there because you had to check out everyone’s walls.

> If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get any traction.

The issue is not whether it can technologically be built easily. While I always chuckle a little bit whenever developers say "It can be built in a weekend!" (in classic fashion...), my issue is not that it's technologically challenging. Of course the hard part with any app like this is getting the network critical mass, which is a very hard problem.

But my point is really to argue against this being a consumer led difference in preferences. This is really an issue where, economically, the tech powers that be have found that hijacking our dopamine pathways via TikTok/etc. algorithms is more profitable than a "come in and check on your friends"-app.

I expect the consumer would much prefer to keep up with friends than some random performer. But friends don't want to create content anymore. It's a production problem. People don't want you, a casual onlooker, to know what is going on in their life. When they do, they will invite you into a private space. This is why Facebook moved to allow most activity to happen in private (chat, groups, etc.).

But that's exactly the issue. You need to hijack those dopamine pathways to get adoption. That's what adoption means - somebody found an activity appealing enough that they alter their behavior and give you some attention. If your product doesn't generate enough of an emotion to get people to alter their behavior, you won't get adoption.

That's why other successful products like Twitter, crypto, vaping, clickbait, greenwashing, political rage-bait, gaming, gambling, arguing on the Internet, pyramid schemes, etc. have been successful too. The one thing they all have in common is they hijack your dopamine pathways. Lots of other things like exercising, eating your vegetables, saving a small portion of your paycheck each month, becoming a homeowner, maintaining your home, investing in your relationships are all good for us, but people don't do them because they don't give us enough of a high to be worth doing daily.

You're metaphorically saying "If you build a product that helps people eat their vitamins, they will come." Spoiler alert: they won't.

> You need to hijack those dopamine pathways to get adoption.

That is absolutely untrue, and in fact has it backwards. Lots of tech products (even social media) got tons of adoption by appealing to a smaller set of users and fulfilling their needs extremely well. It's only when products, pushed by the demands of "infinite growth", decide the drug dealer path is the only way to go, that we're all just lobotomized versions of ourselves with "one working thumb" (seriously, this HN discussion of the tyranny of the marginal user is one of my all time faves, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507)

And my argument isn't that, as you seem to say, that checking in with your friends is somehow equivalent to eating your spinach. I'm just arguing that apps only need to go down this "lowest common denominator" version of ourselves when they're not satisfied being great products for a lot of people - all that matters to them is more people than last year, which requires an enshittification of the app eventually.

You’re right about the time spent. The novelty of finding people you know on a site like that was still pretty exciting. People would spend a lot of time poking around new people.

Facebook didn’t invent it but they were the winners of that generation.

Modern social networks don’t operate that way. It is no longer exciting to find out that person you went to 3rd grade with is online. Of course they are online, everyone is

Yeah this is super confusing revisionist history.

Even The Social Network had a scene where a young Dakota Johnson was telling to Sean Parker about how addicted she was to Facebook.

Facebook was absolutely as addictive to young tech-savvy consumers at the time, as TikTok is today.

The only difference is this was pre-mobile. So they were doing it from their laptops, not from their phones wherever they were.

source: i was there, i was one of them.

Don't bother coding, there's already Friendica that does everything old Facebook does and even more.

What matters is not the code. Never has been.

There are multiple “white label” Facebook knockoffs available right now. One of them even advertises near pixel-perfect replication of the original Facebook UI.

But nobody uses them.

I think we’ve learned the lesson of what happens when you give all your data to some third party. Nobody is super happy about it. But if you’re going to do that, then it’s better to stick with the Zuck you know than to risk it with the Zuck you don’t.

yes! also the op (comment) is basing themselves as Facebook being a business... which may escape the great scope what a social-media is. Facebook isn't 50 years old, social-media ins't 100 years old & we are wired to be social and we got computers!

i'm all to concise and non-exploitative networks... some people still chat on Habbo daily

> "Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel

Sounds smart, but doesn't mean anything.

It sounds like what it's intending to get across is that there are market conditions that lead to a product taking off, and market conditions by nature change, which means a product taking off today doesn't necessarily mean that the same product would take off tomorrow.

So I'm curious about your opinion. How does it mean nothing to you?

It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of people expect to gain lessons about what'll work in the future by studying the past. They'll point to successful product X, and then build product Y that tries to replicate all the good parts of product X, and not realize that there are a lot of subtle interactions between a product and the social & environmental conditions of its audience that lead to it taking off. If you build the same product but the environment is different, you get different results.

Similarly, it's a lesson to pay very careful attention to what's going on in the environment today, and index more on that than what has worked with the environment of the past. That's why good VC presentations always have a slide for "What has changed? Why is this a good idea now when it wasn't in the past?"

A less grandiose version of this aphorism: timing the market matters just as much as what product you ship.

People tend to focus on product attributes and pricing because compared to timing, it is more in your control.

An example of this that I think about a lot is Zoom. Zoom nailed video/audio quality more than most of other competing products, but otherwise they didn't offer anything that new compared to legions of other enterprise A/V platforms. They just happened to offer unlimited free meetings for <= 100 participants right as the pandemic happened. This was all pretty much lucky timing and some good choices around freemium growth mechanics. This window of opportunity closed quickly for competing products as behavior changed and network effects took hold. The only new competitor that emerged mid-pandemic was Teams, because MSFT could literally force install it on every Windows machine.

Do you mean the consumer version?

The enterprise version has been around and available for subscription with the other office products before the pandemic.

If I recall correctly, they didn't start bundling it with Office via force installations with no uninstall until mid 2019?

zoom was successful before the pandemic. They grew, as did a lot of online services, but they were already established as a major player in that field by that time.

Zoom was a successful enterprise business pre-pandemic, but it was unequivocally the lockdowns that accelerated their growth and valuation. In one year they went from 10 million monthly meeting participants to over 350 million (https://www.vox.com/recode/21726260/zoom-microsoft-teams-vid...).

which is what I said, the issue is claiming they wouldn't be a successful company without the pandemic.

They would not have had a market cap of more than $100 billion dollars without it

yeah, and MS wasn't successful before Azure, when their market cap ballooned.

Stop rationalizing bologna.

They grew during the pandemic, as did a lot of online services. They were a perfectly viable company before said pandemic.

“Peter Thiel, thought leader”

You may find this statement obvious and as such uninteresting but it does have a clear, simple meaning. And while it is simple, I see people who think that they can "build the next X" by replicating X's features all the time.

["X" is used as a placeholder and not to refer to the ridiculously named social network]

"but we were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg capitalized on."

That feels like a narrative that is designed to avoid taking responsibility for messing up. IMO it was 100% possible for Google at the time Google+ was made to completely win social, and they didn't because... what they built wasn't good, or apt, or visionary. Just picture Steve Jobs' Apple trying instead, except hypothetically imagine that their talent is in community design instead of hardware/UI design. They would've done it. Google can't, because... you know... Google is arrogant? and doesn't really do "visionary".

Don’t forget the Facebook started as an exclusive club, you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. In the beginning you even had to be in specific colleges for sign up.

Yes, the Harvard dorms were a big reason it gained traction.

Facebook started at Harvard, not Stanford.

Edited.

The difference being that everyone in your social circle could get in at the same time. Most college students want to socialize with students at their college.

Artificially segmenting the market by a waitlist chronologically doesn’t have the same affects. That’s why a lot of social platforms give “invite codes” to existing members - invite your friends to bootstrap connections so your members aren’t on a desert island.

Good callout with Google+

Google+ was in every measurable way better than Facebook. It was cleaner, faster, and had features that people claimed they wanted (to be able to have full control over which CIRCLES they share different info with)

And it completely busted because adoption of a social network is impossible without critical mass.

At the time it was because people didn't have a strong enough reason to leave Facebook.

Today it's because they wouldn't have a strong enough reason to leave TikTok/Instagram/Whatsapp/etc.

I remember being interested in Google+ but I got an access code through a friend of a friend on the other side of the continent, and by the time I started to see people I actually knew using it the moment had passed.

Totally agree with this. I remember when I first got on Facebook (it was when they just started opening it up to non-college students), and I was so excited about an easy way to keep up with old friends I cared about but had lost touch with.

I remember the very first update that I hated, when Facebook moved to much more of a "Twitter-like" interface, and the feed felt like much more disjointed, "stream of consciousness" stuff. Now it's all that on steroids - none of the social media platforms actually care about keeping you connected with your friends and family. My current FB feed is a joke, 95% of my friends rarely/never post anymore, it just got too exhausting.

I make it a point to hit "block all from" everytime a friend shares something from someone else. Then after two hit blocks from I'd done and log off. It had made my feed better, but not by much. It makes my life better though because it stops me from endlessly scrolling in hopes that maybe the next post will be what my friends are doing.

I encourage everyone to do the same - if enough do maybe facebook will notice and hopefully get back to what makes them valueable: what my real life friends are doing.

I don’t check the Facebook feed at all. I have to use it to post and read updates in a community group, and nothing else. Never had Instagram or Threads. I use WhatsApp as little as possible.

I mostly rely on email and SMS.

I used to do the same. And I got it to a point where my feed was great, I could check it every few days and get updates from people I know and community organizations.

But the issue is, it seems Facebook is now injecting algorithmic content into the feed, so suddenly my feed was full of random internet drama (that the algorithm obviously pushed because it was maximally controversial, leading to more engagement).

I deactivated my account not long after, and don't miss it.

That just tells FB that you aren’t there for your friends, so they should fill your feed with their own crap.

It's sisyphean though - if your friends aren't sharing random crap you'll still have "sponsored content" injected to your feed once every... three items? Sometimes more often?

Facebook refuses to give you content without an equal serving of advertising and it makes their value proposition so worthless. I want to read updates from my friends - I don't care about other things... if you want to throw in some banner ads then whatever - but in-feed pollution is at an insane level.

Twitter does the same damn thing now too, though I continue using just because they allow community notes on the placed ad posts, which is hilarious. Nothing like dickheads trying to sell alibaba trash for $25 getting shouted at by community notes and everyone in the replies laughing at them.

I don't know why but for the past couple of years Facebook will show be exactly one post from my friends followed by endless scroll ads.

If I refresh I get a different recent post followed by endless scroll of ads. Many of the people on my friends list are frequent posters but there's no way to see their posts without getting lucky with my one slot or going to their page.

I've tried turning off plug-ins/extensions and various browsers and nothing has fixed it.

Facebook lately has gone through phases where my feed was full of downright creepy sexualized content, and I’m no prude. There are a few communities on Facebook that don’t exist anywhere else that I would rather not leave, but the next time I get put on the feed for every third picture being either a “sexy sport girl” or an entirely nude breastfeeding woman I might delete my account for good.

This time after “show fewer posts like this” and several blocks my feed stopped being like that after a few days… but still. Yuck.

the way to fix facebook is to stop using facebook!

I shed my facebook 8 years ago now (around the Cambridge Analytica fiasco). There was a giant relief not unlike drawing a fresh breath from almost drowning underwater after having done so. You can do it too!

I do use discord, as that's significantly more efficient at doing what facebook has been trying do to (keep current with non-local friends), while at the same time not relying on ad's to do so. I get no targeted advertising on discord.

I encourage everyone to delete their facebook, (move any data they want off first), and explore the open internet again.

The "value" you get from facebook is often just a thin veneer over content designed (and timed) to stimulate your cortisol levels.

So just don't use it: that is the answer; this is the way.

The problem is - as the article says, there is value in the social stuff that nothing else provides.

discord. 100% of what facebook provided. 0% (so far) of any of the enshittification.

comparing the two: facebook offers literally nothing (other than a viewable dropbox like profile for your pictures, which is redundant to me)...

Facebook still has all the event invitations.

Discord does not offer updates from my local city government, nor from the local library, nor does it have the equivalent of local "buy nothing" groups.

Discord is more synchronous than Facebook, and without notifications hygiene, will feel overwhelming to people who are used to shouting into Facebook's void and checking it every once in awhile.

I also dislike Facebook, but it's disingenuous to pretend that Discord is a slot-in replacement.

lot of businesses only operate through insta or FB

picture albums

FB marketplace is the new Craigslist / Gumtree / Kijiji

Lol, "explore the open Internet" after talking about Discord, that's rich !

Currently I am a bit depressed because of realizing how much the open web communities seem to be withering right now because a lot of people seem to want to use Discord instead and exclusively. The recent threads feature especially seems to often be an excuse to abandon forums ? Despite being a way worse experience than phpBB.

EDIT : Related : Discord, or the Death of Lore [2023]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35050858

I left Facebook in 2018 and it was very nice. I worried about missing those friends, but I realized that the real world friends I see and text with regularly are more real than old schoolmates having a baby.

You can't block everything... facebook now shows me posts from groups I'm not even in and features comments from people I'm not connected with. They're not going to run out of groups

Honestly, it's just easier to block/drop Facebook entirely and actually talk to the people I want to talk to directly.

Sure I miss out on some things, but I still have friends and family and I still talk to them. I won't make any broad moralistic/judgemental statements here, but for me at least I've found this to be a return to a healthier relationship with a number of people.

100%. The original "facebook" was just that. State what classes you have, have an easy way to connect with others in those classes.

The feed is horrible. Probably good for monetization. But I just choose to remove myself from that product.

News feed is when it broke. It was described as “stalker mode”. Before to see your friends you had to purposefully visit their page and see what had happened. you had to go to another friends page to see their comments on that friend. There was some implicit privacy in all of this.

At the same time it’s probably the greatest business success of facebook.

People forget how much of an outpouring of anger from users there was over News Feed when it came out.

The public reaction to the original News Feed in 2006 would be a good topic for some 20-something to research and go viral posting about.

Graph search was the actual stalker mode.

"Find all single women near me who are interested in programming" was something else

As a closeted gay teen at the time, this stuff was very next level

When I log in now I don’t even know what to look at ha

The user hostile notification behaviour is was what broke the camels back for me.

Fake red notification indicators and email notifications for activity that didn’t involve me, with seemingly no way to opt out without disabling useful notifications.

> That would explain why messaging, which is mostly based on phone contacts and therefore more in the user’s control, would be the place people now trust for their social graph.

This is the reason the I wouldn't be interested in an new old Facebook. I'd add that Messaging Apps have significantly improved since the time old Facebook was relevant. They allow Group Chats that function like a "feed" and include images, videos, memes. You can even search your chat history.

Group chats are basically old Facebook feeds with a select part of the social graph. I never thought about it this way, but they totally are. This is actually where Messaging Apps improve upon the old model. A Facebook feed was your entire social graph and your "posts" went out to that entire graph. I don't want this. I never did, really. I like the scoped social graph my "posts" reach in a Group Chat.

I think you're right. I recently came to the realization that Discord has functionally replaced Facebook for me and most of my peers. We use it to chat, coordinate events, share pictures, etc. And it gives us all the tools we need to organize this stuff how we want, with no algorithmically curated feed.

Discord is essentially group chat on steroids. And because it's a chat app first, it is fundamentally incompatible with the various "features" that ultimately enshittified Facebook.

Yeah, Discord is it.

One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).

Everybody has taken a few loops around the merry-go-round at this point, we don’t need to do the whole thing where we try to make it look grown-up and serious. The solution is somewhere in the ballpark of MySpace, AIM, and IRC.

I'm really curious about Discord for social, because literally _no one_ I know uses it here in the UK for anything social. is it a US thing? Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?

> Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?

This one, mostly. Discord has the "cringe" (or at least, silly/quaint/unprofessional, take your pick) "uwu Gamer" feel because that was its target demographic when it launched and is probably still its "home base". It's broken into more social uses by a wide variety of social groups (especially younger generations who like the silly Discord is for Gamers theming in a weird post-ironic way, because it is just memes all the way down; social groups built around group chats of memes can laugh about the silly gamer memes, too).

> One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we’re going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple years out I think).

Yeah, Discord weirdly seems more trustworthy by seeming so unprofessional and silly. Part of that is "yeah, it will be easy to toss if it gets worse", but part of that is how much on the internet "unprofessional" and "silly" is frowned upon. ("You'll sell less ads." "You'll have fewer corporate users." "Complaints" like that.) That also seems as much a feature as a bug: Discord's branding sells less ads, good. Ads seem to be killing the "professional" web.

I also appreciate Discord's weird monetization tools today. Nitro memberships are personal in a weird way that most social media isn't. They mostly just give you more emoji and other memes tools. You don't have to get your whole social network to buy in to the membership, you can just do it for fun for yourself. Same with selling the silly animated name plates and profile cover picks, it's mostly harmless fun that doesn't make the experience worse for everyone and encourages Discord to focus on individual interests on the platform to keep them having fun and buying silly things, rather than the interests of other big corporations or ad buyers or "professional users".

Discord's monetization also makes them come off more trustworthy than other social media companies. Any transaction where I, the user, am also the customer, automatically feels more trustworthy than one where the user is the product.

Hopefully this helps then fend off enshittifying a little longer than most.

Yeah, it's like you can create different circles of friends to target your messages to

Since there are probably people on this forum that are young enough to not actually remember Google+'s launch (or just not be paying attention), this was one of its headlining features (limiting post visibility to specific "circles" you chose). It was a great idea, and would have been super useful if it was ever used by anyone but Google fanboys.

Google decided that the way to launch a new social network was to piss off the nucleus of it, namely, the users of its existing social apps. By canceling Reader, and going on a long, obnoxious push to unify gmail and YouTube accounts, two things literally no one wanted.

If they'd been clever enough to make Google+ an extension of those things, it might have gone somewhere.

They additionally alienated many potential early adopters with the "real names" policy...

That "real names" policy is the reason I have always been careful to never open YouTube while logged into any Google account: the understanding I gathered from the noise back then was that, if you ever logged into YouTube or Google+, and then Google for some reason decided that your name was not your real name, you could permanently lose access to more important things like Google Talk or Gmail.

Ah that fiasco! I'd memory-holed it. That was the final mistake, killing Reader was the first. I haven't forgiven them for it and I never will.

The sad thing is that Reader was already a successful social network on top of a RSS reader. But not successful enough for Google I guess...

I'll never forgive Google for killing Reader. I truly believe the internet would be very different today if Reader had stuck around.

I joined Google+ when it first came out and the idea of circles was good.

The problem is Google+ is that it was trying to be a new Facebook without anybody on it.

Those types of social media sites are only as good as the number of your friends, peers, family that are using them

The sad thing is that Facebook had the exact same functionality with lists. You could scope posts and everything. Someone made a clone of the Google+ Circles UI using the Facebook SDK to sort your friends into lists that I used and I still use those lists to scope posts to family only etc.

Creating a new version of old Facebook is easy. Getting people on it is hard.

I think these days, the attention limit is the biggest problem, not just in what people see, but in being seen. A true "old Facebook" is going to be considered boring to today's audience. They don't want to post a silly video to their friends, they want to post it to the world and hope it gets millions of views because they think that will lead to monetization.

It sucks, tbh. I really wish there was a good social network site that truly existed for the sole purpose of keeping up with friends. NO public posts. NO groups or business pages. Every post is available only to friends, or optionally, extended to friends of friends to one level.

Discord is not the answer I'm looking for. Group chats aren't it, either. If I have something I want to share with all my friends, I don't want to have to post it in 5 different places, especially when 3 of them have overlaps in friends.

I just want to see what all my friends are up to in a single feed.

Just do what the German Facebook clone StudiVZ did back in the day. Find a couple of people in every college town and make them multiplicators, who invite other people and spam every place with flyers. Spend a few hundred thousand $ if neccessary and hire a couple of them or pay venues for putting their events on your site.

I think there is still a big hole in the social landscape left by old Facebook. One thing is it is not just about keeping up with close friends. That's easy, you can just message them or call them. It's for connecting with not-quite-friends, people in your extended social circle. If your class mates are going to that party and you don't know if you are welcome, it might be scary to ask directly what they're up to and face rejection, but it's easy to connect over some website. It's a form of social lubricant. I think all the chat apps haven't replicated that effect.

Yeah, it's an interesting question. 15 years ago every party and community meeting was a facebook event. Now we just do it via a messaging service or email or whatever. I didn't notice it happening, and I'm not really sure why it happened. Presumably it's a critical mass sort of thing, plenty of people don't use facebook anymore and so it's not as good of a way to get things set up.

Oh yes and I remember a time where people who were not on facebook kind of stopped existing in your mind. Where "I don't have facebook" was feeling like an insult on the community.

Times have changed now my facebook feed is only ads (from facebook or people in my list promoting their own thing) and news articles where people are writing things to each other that they would be ashamed for if read to their parents

> Where "I don't have facebook" was feeling like an insult on the community

Now LinkedIn is like that.

The network crumbling effect

Depends entirely on the group. I still have some activities that organize primarily via Facebook.

And honestly, it’s fine. HN talks about Facebook with out of control hyperbole, but I have no problem logging in and finding what I need. I could see how it would be a problem for people without impulse control or with social media addictions, but then again HN is a well known time waster website with social features as well.

HN is a time waster all right, but I guess one reason why I still keep using it despite it technically being a Silicon Valley platform is the lack of social features.

>15 years ago every party and community meeting was a facebook event.

It's still like this in Europe. Comedians, bands, bars, cafes, basically any kind of venue and enternatiner, organize and announce their events mainly on Facebook. There isn't another alternative that's as seamless and all encompassing as Facebook for this.

With one facebook account I can follow all the bands, bars and cafes in my city without them having to build their own website(they don't even bother) and me having to subscribe with an account to each of them separately.

Also, the marketplace is great for selling old crap and for finding plumbers, electricians and various handymen as Facebooks is their main free advertising avenue.

SO IMHO, it's far from dead, its just not the cool new thing anymore that gets you hooked, like TikTok, but unlike TikTok it's actually more valuable.

It seems to me that Mastodon, tumblr, Wordpress, Threads, and any future platform's support of ActivityPub could theoretically make the entire internet "old Facebook".

Facebook is/was two things:

1) a microblog (your personal page)

2) an interface for following other's microblog posts

This sounds an awful lot like a following, say, a bunch of WordPress blogs in your Mastodon feed. We just need the interface over it all.

Heck, if Threads does what they say it will, Threads very well may become that interface for many folks.

I certainly hope Threads has no future in the internet of tomorrow. We need to move away from centralized systems.

ActivityPub is dangerous too! The protocol suffers from federated cabal censorship. Entire Mastodon instances will ban over the prettiest rationales, just like Reddit moderators and their little fiefdoms. It's quite fascist.

I'm hoping BlueSky's protocol of distributed opt-in filtering and extensions wins. I don't want anyone deciding things on my behalf. You're free to filter me out, you're free to subscribe to someone who filters me out, but I get angry when the means of communication and those chosen to rule over it do it without recourse. The reasoning, despite being mostly petty, shouldn't even matter - it's authoritarian and awful.

Who moderates the moderators has always been an issue.

Still, there is no way around it. If that community has toxic mods, you probably don't want to stick around there anyway : go to a different one or make a new one yourself ! This is still better than being in a situation where there are only giant platforms like Facebook/Reddit/Discord/Xitter and no hope of starting a community outside their walls.

A facebook ActivityPub alternative already exists with Friendica.

https://friendi.ca/

Don't forget FreezeCrowd!

https://www.freezecrowd.com/

Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQx_pJyyyxc

I don't think a 'new version of old Facebook' can succeed in the medium term, for a few reasons:

1) I don't think a platform can get enough critical mass like Facebook did. It's much easier to get a smallish circle of people (5-20 people) to align on one platform and use a group chat than it is to get everyone you know to align on the same platform.

2) The rise of mobile. Things like having an individual profile made more sense when sitting at a laptop/desktop PC and actively browsing someone else's content. With mobile, there's more friction to viewing profiles, so the feed model tends to win out.

3) I think many people are more apprehensive about posting content to a wide audience than they were in Facebook's prime.

Hasn't LinkedIn kind of maintained 2 & 3, but in a work specific context? Which maybe feels safer, armed by the suit of a corporate identity...

Yes, I was thinking how LinkedIn may be the one exception. "Profiles" though only stick around because they're effectively resumes, and users hope that keeping their profile up to date improves their chances of landing a job. I'd also suspect LinkedIn has a lower percent of its traffic on mobile than many other social network sites do currently.

I've personally considered doing something along these lines but one thing simply stopped me on my tracks: moderation.

I feel like twenty odd years ago you can just open the gates to a web community and get by with little moderation; you can still cultivate a community from which participants derive some value. Nowadays, moderation would have to be no less than someone's full-time job. And I believe this has been the case for a good few years #before# generative AI came into the scene. Maybe for a good while you can hold down the fort with technical moderation solutions like fail2ban or Captcha but I bet you will run into problems within your first half a million users or so.

Maybe projects like Mastodon have more robust solutions to this but, still, moderation will be a problem if and when you make it big, just like your server costs.

Finally, don't even get me started about CP, which is a whole other level of low and rotten. Maybe if you restrict your community to niche topics it would (a) deter malicious outsiders and (b) be self-moderating to a degree. The thing is, a niche discussion forum old Facebook ain't.

They did already. It's called VK. The last time I logged in it looked exactly like original Facebook.

VK is much better but still has a lot of recommendation in the feed going on.

This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(service)

Yep. Russian facebook clone.

Privacy preferences have shifted pretty dramatically. People now understand that sharing their personal information and personal opinions in an open platform is high risk low reward.

So we now scratch our social itch with group chats and private groups.

I disagree, maybe in tech circles. From my experience normal people don't care like at all.

Young people care and are very aware of what they share and don't share. That's why Facebook is only popular with boomers now.

Young people are in private chat groups, using alts on Instagram, and then only sharing the most anodyne content publicly under their real name.

There's a chrome extension called Fluff Busting Purity [0] that seems to still be alive, but evidently struggles to respond quickly to the ever-increasingly user-hostile coin-chasing changes coming out of the mothership.

It doesn't get you the 'old Facebook' (of which there are many variants) but does help with suppressing the 'recommended for you' en masse along with what feels like several hundred other things it can tweak or suppress in the UI.

Ultimately 'the feed' as generated by Facebook's algorithms remains monumentally janky, and it's hard to believe it matches any user's actual preference.

[0] https://www.fbpurity.com/

Like a lot of other comments here, I agree that it's been moved to private chats, but I would add that what's missing is:

- everyone having a "Profile" that can be passively looked at at any time. Having an old classmate or a friend from your friend group (kind of solved in group chats) that's not a direct friend, but you still want to be part of that community - or have a sense of their life without having to the whole social interaction part.

- events

- the ability to "look up" someone before actually interacting with them

- the ability to "post on someone else's wall". This is something that many Facebook clones got wrong. I don't want to tag someone, I want to put something on their page that their friends can see that I put there.

Nobody on the other side of the fence wants those things, though. In the beginning the implications of allowing others to take a look into your life weren't well understood, but it soon became creepy knowing that others are taking a look into your life, hence why Facebook had to change gears and focus on more private spaces and lean on 'professional' content creators who are happy to let others watch them fill the void.

For one thing this is the mother of all two-sided markets.

I made my own content-based recommender which only needs 2000 judgements from me to work really well. If I wanted to make a social network of some kind I am going to need thousands if not millions of users, with the exception that there is some room for products like discord where somebody makes a private instance which will not need to get that big. In the past, people who started social networks and communication apps of various kinds would use spammy tactics to get enough users to have a scene. Today I think it’s a lot harder to do that and when companies try to jumpstart the process, like TikTok or Temu, they spend hundreds of millions or more on advertising.

"Network effects" is pretty much the default answer to the question in the headline.

Which begs the question, is there a way to dethrone something like Facebook? Because those network effects are increasingly strong.

Perhaps if the AVP reaches the masses, Apple will layer a social layer there and that will become our new social network.

Instagram and WhatsApp could have remained independent, but they were acquired by Facebook.

This suggests that anti-monopoly laws may not be effective.

It's funny.

There have been narrow time and place windows where investors have been willing to bet on social media, roughly the 2005-2010 era in Silicon Valley and the 2017-current period in China.

It's conjectured that one factor is the size of the cultural zone, it is easy for a site to get established in a big country like India and then move to a small country like Belgium, but to go to the other way is thought to be impossible.

There was a time when it seemed the route for a social media startup was to go public, after Facebook went public that window seemed to close and the next business plan became "get bought by Facebook". On one hand, events like this

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whats...

seem like an orderly way for Facebook to keep ahead of the next big thing, bit I think if they had to do it every year for some new startup they'd start to feel that it is like extortion so I imagine Facebook has used whatever pull they have with VCs to suppress investment in this sort of company in SV. (I wish I had some evidence and/or specifics!) And of course Facebook can't keep buying competitors forever because eventually the antitrust cops will wise up.

I found this article

https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-twitter-faceboo...

but it strikes me as pretty silly. Since Twitter has shown some weakness the competitors we've seen move in are not scrappy commercial startups but instead Facebook with Threads, Bluesky by the founder of Twitter and Mastodon which is whatever it is but it sure isn't commercial.

Going from small -> large zone WORKS, and is what Facebook did. (Harvard -> more colleges -> general availability). The thing that makes it work is a sense of exclusivity. Small (can) == cool. And you can capitalize on that a bit.

It's not easy, but it's doable.

They do, or rather not old Facebook, but old VK: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

As a bonus it's an ActivityPub enabled application, so any specific instance of it requires less work to get a network effect going. :)

If you allow people to freely post messages, it will just devolve into the same sort of facebook/twitter/tiktok/instagram toxicity. Big companies will still overwhelm you with ads on the platform.

Facebook was great for a few things when it started and was exclusive to college students, like:

1) connecting with new friends at college - it's still pretty good for this as far as I know, as long as you share exactly the same sociopolitical beliefs as the people you befriend (no longer on it).

2) organizing events (usually parties, but also dorm events or others for school) - it stopped being great after the first 2 years, when police across the country started using it to shut down parties. The culture around parties also changed. Now it's not great because a lot of people no longer use fb, and because they made changes to make it harder to actually use this feature effectively.

3) documenting how you met someone - they removed this feature around 2006 or so, there's no replacement for it on any platform that I'm aware of.

4) sharing photos with friends - Instagram is better for this. Nobody wants to look through a whole album of poorly taken photos anymore. Also normal people learned that having a ton of photos of you online could be a bad thing.

I hesitate to post this here because I probably can't handle a rush of traffic if it gets attention, but I've been working on this at prezince.com.

Just launched an MVP on February 1st and it is very much alpha software.

It's a social network generator, essentially Wix or Squarespace for social networking.

You go through a simple wizard to choose what type of feed your network is based around (like Facebook/Twitter/Insta, YouTube-like streaming, TikTok-like vertical videos, or classic chat), how connections work (follow/follow back, request friend/confirm friend, or automatic for teams), what it looks like (fonts and colours), what features it has (right now, like button, comments on posts, and trending topics), and who can access it (public or invite only).

I very much learnt PHP and MySQL back in 2007 because of how cool I thought Facebook was, and I miss the early way the site operated.

I also just see how it can be a solution to a lot of different problems. My family is using one as a replacement for group chat on Signal— we can keep discussion centred around posts in the feed which only we have access to.

Sometimes I ask myself "why don't we have Windows File Manager or Norton Commander anymore" but then when I find an old version and try it out it's always "ah, right, time has moved on and nostalgia is tricking my brain".

I think it's a mixture of three things:

1) nostalgia, it wasn't actually that great

2) someone eventually had to pay for the initially free infrastructure

3) many other options

The commanders are still good, I use one.

> but then when I find an old version and try it out it's always "ah, right, time has moved on and nostalgia is tricking my brain".

Easy to forget that the software and sites we enjoyed were a product of their times. The novelty and excitement of something new can sometimes be remembered, but it can’t be recreated because we’ve all moved on.

Interestingly, the closest I’ve come to rekindling the feeling is having kids. Introducing them to fun things, including retro things, and watching the spark of excitement and novelty is far more fun for all of us than I ever would have guessed in my pre-kid years. Underrated part of parenting.

Reality is that facebook hit the jackpot of era of digitisation of social groups. Which means groups are online now, but also extremely radicalised (politically). Tiktok algo knows what stuff to show you and what stuff you will never ever see, because you are from a different social group (but cat videos would be shown to anyone).

IG was showing you stuff from people you follow, but it does not work anymore, once people start posting controversial opinions (which they do, once they use TikTok long enough, because the algo pushes radical opinions to the top, they catch attention).

Offline groups would have to be less radical for its members, because of fear of rejection from a group. So, the answer is "there is nothing to digitise, the only way to go: A. build offline groups - nobody wants it. B. Do the same as Facebook/Twitter/Reddit - but good luck competing).

If the old way of Facebook worked, FB would use the old way.

> If the old way of Facebook worked, FB would use the old way.

Not necessarily. If the old way of Facebook worked (i.e. was profitable) but it wasn't as profitable as the new way, FB still wouldn't use it. But some other company might be able to get away with it.

Not necessarily, but most likely. If there is a way to make more profit, any company would try to do it.

The moment service stops growing, aggressive monetisation kicks in.

Otherwise, investors/shareholders would blame CEO for incompetence.

I'll say that groups on facebook for various interests still seem quite active, but these are more targeted for a shared interest, like espresso machines, rather than a group of people that know each other and are interacting in a group, like XYZ High School Class of 2024.

I have a bunch of the latter group types too.

"Every empire carries the seeds of its own destruction"

FB let you connect with friends -- but that's also its fatal flaw -- friendships are trending towards zero. TikTok enters the scene and now friendless people can have parasocial relationships with their tiktok subs.

About 10 percent of the people I follow post regularly via stories or less often through posts, the rest just view or post once or twice a year. Most people don't even use a desktop any more for personal computing. The online culture has shifted to highly specific group chats and consumption since most are afraid of putting themselves out there as they previously did when they were younger.

I use Facebook nowadays only to post life events once or twice a year for my parents and in laws and cringe at the memory posts from 10+ years ago. I consume most of my friends lives through Instagram. For entertainment, I have TikTok and YouTube.

My attempt to speculate on potential obstacles which exist today over the (I believe, 2009) version shown:

- Eroded public trust in (all) social media

- Increased regulatory scrutiny today vs 2009

- More competition today (i.e. TikTok)

- Changing demands from advertisers

- Huge cold start disadvantage vs conglomerates like Meta

For starters, there are like 100k platforms for "sharing" stuff. Where I live, facebook and to some degree instagram completely dominate the social media market: think 95% and above. People are creatures of habit and they get used to the platforms they use as they evolve. In addition, most users use a smartphone most of the time. And by extension, most of the time they spend on their smartphone is distributed among a certain number of apps(low, single digits). If anything new comes along, you first need to gain some market share by squeezing yourself into that time slot, which is nearly impossible. I spent most of my career at a company that solely developed games for smartphones and I did countless studies on the matter. The South Park episode about freemium games couldn't possibly be more accurate.

So much like no one on HN wants any updates from the board itself, people get what they want and so long as it works, they will complain but keep using it unironically. I got a chance to speak to reddit admins a few months ago and they admitted that till this day, they all, till this day use old reddit, even though new reddit has been around for more than half a decade and now there's new-new reddit.

Same reason no one has made a new myspace - it was great back in the day. By today's standards, it would have been a security black hole but it did it's job back in the day and if not else, it taught a large number of people some basic html and css skills. Today, no one cares about shiny profile pages with sparkles and music.

That's kinda the first rule in monopoly: you are either first or you are last, along with everyone else. It doesn't matter if you have 100, 1000 or 10000 users - you are still at the back of the pack, not even getting scraps for dinner.

I am (sort of), but it's decentralized and AGPL-licensed, and has more chat-oriented features that old Facebook didn't. Chronological sorting, no likes, a heavy focus on events. I hope to get some local businesses and/or municipal governments deploying it in the next year or so.

Last time I posted it to HN (earlier in development) it got hugged to death pretty quickly. But this is only a comment rather than a full post, and I've made Jonline a bit more resilient (and stuck its HTML and media behind a CDN), so let's see how this goes :)

https://github.com/jonlatane/jonline https://jonline.io https://bullcity.social https://oakcity.social

We all learned that people actually don't care for using Facebook the way it was intended.

It's just easier to share the few images you care for through Whatsapp (or whatever else people use, at least for my family chat it's what app for years now).

It's effort to curate through holiday pictures and people don't want to go through 10 or more. They are happy with 1 or 4 or so.

I spent some time last year exploring similar ideas. I assumed that an application that bridged the divide between public feed-first models and private group messaging apps by allowing control of post visibility across your network, was bound to be an attractive proposition. I put something together but was surprised at just how few people signed up, even if just to take advantage of it as a private social network between small friend groups.

Interestingly, the few users that did join, tend to never bother to use the more public social aspects of it, and exclusively post privately. I think this is likely representative of the big shift of the more genuine social media interactions we first enjoyed in old Facebook, all now having migrated to private messaging apps and that the original experience we all remember fondly, may simply not be repeatable in today's social media landscape.

Here's your free Facebook-like open source social network server:

https://github.com/FreeFeed/freefeed-server

Works in production at https://freefeed.net/.

Am I the only one here who remembers when a "facebook" was made of paper and glue? they used to be a tool used by professors in at least new England and probably many other areas at the time. That's where the name came from.

To me, the issues stemmed not from the platform itself, but from its users. Facebook was enjoyable until I encountered individuals compelled to comment on every post I made, regardless of its significance. The situation worsened during the 2016 election season, when Facebook became a battleground showcasing the worst of humanity. This turmoil prompted me to take an extended break from the platform. Although I've recently returned, I'm now much quicker to use the "block" button to safeguard my peace of mind.

Because it's literally not needed. If I want to see endless photos of your baby, I'll ask to follow your private Instagram. If I want to message you, I'll either text you or IG message you. Hell, if I want to group message I'll text or IG group message. If I want to share photos I have iCloud shared albums.

Besides that I live my life out in the real world. I don't need some weird monolithic Jurassic era social network to maintain relationships with people.

So yeah, tastes change. The basic functionality of an old Facebook has been atomized and woven into the fabric of my regular phone usage.

Because the network effect that Facebook has isn't present and even if it were, it'd be like visiting your university after graduating: you remember it but you can never go back.

Facebook's now a dead mall for the original userbase, people born between 1980 and 1995. It was a great place to hang out when you were young but now it's just kiosks of shitposting groups and old people walking around saying insane things. Most of the Millennials I know are on a combo of other social media, usually a mix of IG, Meetup and Discord.

I guess there's no market interest for an old FB.

> it'd be like visiting your university after graduating: you remember it but you can never go back

You are quite literally back there though. And you could probably do another master if you wanted. Your friends are gone but the university is still there.

You can't go back to old Facebook even if you wanted.

Cohost is pretty close to that, minus the use of real names and photos. It's pretty much a dumb feed of people you've chosen to follow.

I find it hard to find users. I just built an app to share memes with my friends. It's invitation based. I invited the first users and they each got 3 invites when registering. I got 7 of my friends to join (similar sense of humor) but that's it. They don't seem to be using it all the much also, and also haven't invited any of their friends.

A more successful model is to launder a DoD project into a private company (Lifelog to Facebook, for example) and then a leviathan of media flaks can promote the product as the Next Big Thing.

> Either: billions of people who used to find old Facebook useful have changed their preferences in the last few years, and no longer need something like that

Yes. To elaborate, these people have gotten used to Facebook’s new UI, are now relying on its new features, and are accessing it in different ways.

Elgg is pretty close...

https://elgg.org

It's called vk.com if you don't mind FSB reading your private messages :)

im confused by this because its basically open information now that social media websites have very close relationships with the federal government, is this not already done?

AIUI the NSA has had direct warrantless access to unencrypted domestic social media correspondence since perhaps 2008 or so.

I'm not sure what you are confused about. NSA is American, FSB is Russian. Which government has more power over you?

gotcha, i mistook it for being an american bureau

Asking this question misses the point.

What needs to be asked is: how would one attract users to a revamped version of the original Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg, despite being a nerd, excelled in the distribution strategy of “The Facebook”.

He strategically expanded it campus by campus, effectively mapping local social networks into a digital version.

It's pretty uncertain whether this approach would succeed today or if anyone would invest the same effort as Zuckerberg did.

MySpace attracted users without zuck.

And Tom is a genius. Made his money and now he just travels the world doing photography, living life.

FB is a result of slowly AB-tested mutated app. By the way, FB is dead. The people I care about I want to keep away from FB. Oh, we have IG, which is an absolute mess right now.

But really, the answer is pretty simple, just compare what people post now and 8 years ago... Now we need "perfect" stuff to post, because we got auto-curated by the algorithm.

TikTok is even worse, it basically gives you a demo version of attention for some random post and from now on you have to work on each post, because there is no followers on the app (just random people who could maybe see your post again, if algo will like it).

So, TLDR: very low expectations for social networks to be useful in any kind of form for most of people, so there is zero interest to invest anything into it (i.e. post coffee/cat/travel image? maaybe to instagram stories - these are still alive).

I logged into Facebook for the first time in a very long time. Most of my feed is of plain clothed porn actors I guess, Simulating sex.

Posted by people I don’t know.

What is going on?

Here is the fallacy that so-called "tech" company-dependent commenters will propagate: If no one is making it, then no one would use it if someone made it.

It's fine for "developers" to hypothesise about other "developers", but making conclusions about computer users who are not "developers" is nonsense. Yet some HN commenters will do this ad nauseum.

Unless and until someone makes "a new version of old Facebook" and forces it upon computer users to the same extent as "new Facebook", then no one knows which option computer users would choose.

Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-competitive tactic.

> Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-competitive tactic.

Other people's points about network effect and the Goldilocks Moment are valid and surely play a part.

In reality it's more likely laws and enforcement have changed to skew the game in Facebook's favor. There is no "free market." Never has been, never will be. Markets function according to the environment they operate in, including but limited to law.

Because if they made a new version of old facebook, it would be subject to the same growth/enshittification forces they turned old facebook into new facebook, so better to just cut to the chase.

It is weird how different facebook is now compared to when it started. In a few of the small towns I have lived in, there are very active Facebook groups with basically the whole town in, all the businesses, tradespeople, etc elected representatives, and the Facebook group takes the place of a local newspaper/classified ads or personal/business dedicated webpages. It's quite practical, but unfortunately how much ad and other drivel content gets mixed in.

Meanwhile, the actual person-person "friend" stuff is almost completely hidden/unusable behind dark patterns.

> In a few of the small towns I have lived in, there are very active Facebook groups

This is so annoying. If I wanna know if the local library has a child story hour or whatever I need Facebook.

But believe it or not, I managed to make them add a Facebook group feed to their homesite so I don't need Facebook!

But many smaller less ambitious events from other actors are just announced on Facebook. And the only way I get to know is via my wife.