DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

https://medium.com/tootsuite/deletefacebook-fafdc4090307

by bluefreeze • 8 years ago

215 169 8 years ago

spraak• 8 years ago

How do people feel about using Facebook's technology like React in light of all this controversy? Is there any concern that there is cross over between the data harvesting and the engineering behind React etc.?

ch4s3• 8 years ago

cross over between the data harvesting and the engineering behind React

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.

beeskneecaps• 8 years ago

React does not harvest data.

matthewmacleod• 8 years ago

I'm honestly struggling to figure out what you even think might be the issue here – is it that you think React might be harvesting data from people's projects?

Retroity• 8 years ago

React is an open-source freely-licensed javascript library that you can self-host, so I don't see the problem with it just because it's maintained by Facebook.

saintPirelli• 8 years ago

The worst thing Facebook could do to React is seize support and development (or make future development proprietary).

a_humean• 8 years ago

Its a JavaScript library used for providing an abstraction over DOM manipulation, and is open source. It doesn't phone home to facebook with your mother's maiden name, and it doesn't have a single line of network code in its source code. Worse that could happen is facebook stops supporting it for some reason and a lot of engineering talent dedicated to it evaporates.

jeffreyrogers• 8 years ago

I think the idea that Facebook is putting democracy in peril is a bit farfetched.

Mortiffer2• 8 years ago

while Cambridge Analytica is clearly a horrible company the idea of gathering data and building some models to better target advertisement to them is something totally normal happening all over the place. And i don't think we can really dismantel the core of online advertising because of one shady company

pyjammas2• 8 years ago

I remember not thinking much of the whole CA story back when I read about it (few years ago?), but what makes me less certain about this is that they might have vastly more data to work with than I initially thought.

I'm not a data scientist though, so I'd really like to hear why that is/isn't a problem. Basically: assuming one has massive datasets that can be combined, how dangerous can even basic analysis be?

kerkeslager• 8 years ago

One? Have you been not been paying attention to the last decade of internet advertising?

mfringel• 8 years ago

Dynamite is only interesting because it burns very quickly, in an energetic reaction. Things burn all the time, so I don't see why dynamite is all that interesting.

Evaluating something based on its known external traits without discussing the context in which they're used is an incomplete assessment.

Tassels2• 8 years ago

It's not that CA is just gathering data and using that data to target ads. That's normal. But they've also been using fake news, spy operations, honeypots, and other tactics in order to manipulate people. They've even boasted about their ability to manufacture sex scandals by sending prostitutes to a political opponent. That goes above and beyond what is "totally normal happening all over the place".

w0utert• 8 years ago

> I think the idea that Facebook is putting democracy in peril is a bit farfetched.

Why? History has proven at least a few times that he who controls information can control people, and it never ends well. Even if Facebook is not deliberately trying to implant any ideas or spread misinformation and fake news, its platform can be (and has been, demonstrably) used for this purpose.

dictum• 8 years ago

There's some irony in the fact that the ongoing scandal is about Facebook partially relinquishing control of information to a third-party (in fact, all third parties), and that the implied remedy was for Facebook to keep total control of information to itself.

zerostar073• 8 years ago

history also shows that people shoot the messengers.

jdpigeon• 8 years ago

The fact that Donald Trump is the President of the United States should be evidence enough that democracy is in serious danger.

burner83092• 8 years ago

That is democracy working as intended. We have just realized that democracy and widespread, instant communication are incompatible.

pound2• 8 years ago

Democracy is not in danger, this is exactly what democracy is. Like it or not but he is quite a telling representative of a big part of the population. And democracy means majority rules. As simple as that. Consider it in light of 80-20 %% rule.

rvail2• 8 years ago

Completely agree. Just another example of people over reacting. The other fun part is people trying to explain how it was okay back in '12, but now it's a tragedy.

zerostar073• 8 years ago

There will probably be something else to blame after facebook, until people realize there is an inherent problem with majoritocracy that just cant be solved. As the elites are unlikely to go back to authoritarian regimes, it will probably drag things towards libertarianism.

baq2• 8 years ago

i guess that depends what do you think democracy should look like. it was plenty broken before zuck was admitted to harvard.

oldsklgdfth7• 8 years ago

I'm reposting this comment because I would like to open the discussion up beyond facebook and social media and into the reality that technology has provided marketing with some pretty ridiculous tools. :

I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market.

Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to acknowledge it's influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly.

I don't think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this means about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?

This isn't meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don't live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.

Freak_NL• 8 years ago

gypsy pear salesmen

Did you mean pearl?

oldsklgdfth7• 8 years ago

Nope, I meant pear - like the fruit. Maybe I got a little carried away and painted a silly picture.

My point is that you can ignore a salesmen and he can't possibly be THAT good that he can swindle everyone. But modern ads, IMO, are designed for high levels of success. Much more difficult to deal with that on a personal level.

nopreserveroot6• 8 years ago

I do not understand how anyone in 2018 finds the internet remotely usable without some form of ad blocker. This is how you ignore the modern salesman.

kerng2• 8 years ago

Given the sophistication that we just now start to fully realize, adblockers probably dont help that much - i mean they get the obvious stuff out of the way, which is great. But there other forms of tracking (like super cookies), and others we might not even be aware of. The entire combination of what information some companies gather and exchange behind the scene is not that well understood at scale.

Goronmon4• 8 years ago

I do not understand how anyone in 2018 finds the internet remotely usable without some form of ad blocker. This is how you ignore the modern salesman.

It's actually pretty simple. You just don't visit sites with ads that bother you.

bowlich• 8 years ago

On the occasions that I have disabled my ad blocker and visited major new sites, I found the ad experience made me greatly question the judgment of the sites editors.

How can I trust the authority of a news site, when I am also seeing clearly deceptive ads playing right next to their content?

disease• 8 years ago

How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of?

I don't know that you can. I think we live in a great period of time to be a con man.

baq2• 8 years ago

I don't know that you can. I think we live in a great period of time to be a con man.

yeah look at just about any elections in the past few years, not only the usual suspects like the post-soviet bloc...

fancyfacebook• 8 years ago

Gypsy is considered a slur by some nowadays, probably shouldn't drop that casually anymore. Sorry, I hate language police too, I'm not actually offended just letting you know in case you drop it in a meeting someday.

I'd argue it's still possible to ignore it all, but you need three browser extensions and two mobile apps, a vpn, and probably a few other measures in place to pull it off. I feel like I'm sailing out to war with a well equipped battleship every time I launch my browser.

This is dumb. How did we let technology get so bad? How did we let the web become completely subverted?

oldsklgdfth7• 8 years ago

Technology is not bad. There are bad people that use it. Generic i know, but these technologies had the potential to provide solutions to some problems we as a world we face.

Nuclear energy could have been proliferated to move to different energy source, instead it is was weaponized and used as a tool of politics. Cool for those guys i guess.

The same goes for big data. We could have collected data on everyone and mined that shit to gain more insight into all sort of things from medical to societal information that you just can't see in studies. We could have learned so much. But instead some smart guys figured out how to use it to convince you that you need a wi-fi crockpot and gerrymander districts in their favor.

Guns made killing people easier, ok. But you can't kill everyone in the world with one gun. Marketing used to be billboards, now it's in your life. The issue I have is that scale of the whole thing.

knodi• 8 years ago

When the truth is exposed we the people stop using that service. Lets face it US congress in this current form isn't going to do anything about it or pass laws to protect us (the users). So we have to hurt these corps where it hurts, their ad revenue.

I have already deleted my FB account and am encouraging others to do the same.

gooseus5• 8 years ago

People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today?

I have doubts that this happened regularly in the past, usually wealthy/powerful were allowed to be toppled by their enemies. I don't know the details of how Weinstein got toppled after so many years of being protected, but my gut says that the people who were protecting him no longer felt like it was worth it to continue. In revolutions, it's not the people that overthrow the dictator, it's the court/army which allow the people to overthrow the dictator, in order for them to install a new dictator[0].

How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of?

Become more aware of your vulnerabilities so as to be aware of when you're being exploited. I recommend mindfulness and then making note of when you're being triggered in either a positive or negative way. If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a thousand battles[1].

How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?

As these systems become more complex it requires more energy and complexity to maintain the systems, this additional complexity creates a larger attack surface and more internal fragility. Solving these problems requires more energy and complexity, exacerbating the problem and delivering diminishing returns on additional complexity. Systems should to be designed to collapse in a way that minimizes losses of knowledge (especially of why they collapsed) and with mechanisms to recover quickly using the accumulated knowledge to build more robustness into the new system, this would be an anti-fragile system. Centralized, too big to fail, institutions (Facebook, et al) are a major component of fragility in our current systems[2][3][4].

I think you can avoid the marketers and advertisers by learning how they operate, nobody gives away shit for free, so anybody that claims that is either a marketer/advertiser trying to lure you into a bait/switch or is using you as the product (TANSTAAFL). Be flexible and avoid lock-in to any single service/company, always be ready to drop a service when they start acting against your interests or the interests of society as a whole.

[0] CGP Grey, Rules for Rulers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

[1] Sun Tzu, Art of War - https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf

[2] Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies - http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf

[3] Nassim Taleb, Antifragile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

[4] JP Crutchfield, The Hidden Fragility of Complex Systems - http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/FOCS.pdf

jonbarker3• 8 years ago

I feel that Jared Diamond's book Collapse belongs on your list of references https://archive.org/stream/CollapseHowSocietiesChooseToFailO...

oldsklgdfth7• 8 years ago

I appreicate your thorough response and giving me all these resources to dig through.

I think that in the past you had to be a very intelligent machiavellian-type dude to stay in power and it was a constant struggle. You probably had to be a very good at reading people and understanding their psyche. But there are only so many such guys and they can only manipulate so many people.

I think technology has given people with power and money the ability to automate influence on a much larger scale for cheap. Not that technology is bad. Technology makes hard problems easier. It can make all those things that a smart person had to constantly work on repeatable and consistent. When i think of data mining the last thing on my mind is product ads. I think gerrymandering. I tip my hat to the evil genius that figured out how to draw districts like that. I bet you could get most of that data from people's facebook. Even without that though, using other data you could get. And even if you dont have any digital data available, you can probably be classified based on a few facts. And......your vote is null now.

What I struggle with is the fact that now influence is global and widespread and I can't for the life of me figure out how that gets reigned in. It's kinda mindblowing.

kmonsen• 8 years ago

I think the age of ai and robots will change this. Revolutions happened when the army out police swapped sides, but computers don't really do that.

Mortiffer2• 8 years ago

I really hope more people join mastodon or one of the other federated social networks. But it is hard to make the point that it could replace the utility of facebook (especially messenger, events, search)

rm_-rf_slash• 8 years ago

I think the utility of fb as you describe it is easy to replicate regardless of your social network structure. However, it is difficult to get past the enormous network effect advantage that existing social networks already have. Fb and twitter logos abound in any sports or news broadcast. That’s the hurdle for any up-and-coming social network.

cornholio2• 8 years ago

Mastodon [...] No real name policies

Lacking a very rarefied community capable of self-moderation, like this site has or some specialized reddits and forums, the no-real-name becomes a major drawback. A minority of douche-bags will generate a majority of noise and will come to shape that world in their image.

This is quite visible when browsing Mastodon instances, many of which look like a crossbreed of 4chan with Myspace. Most accounts don't have a real picture. The fact people assumed their real identities, cared about what they said and did, and that you could find real people knowing only their name was one of the key ingredients to the success of early Facebook.

Furthermore, the whole "no data collected" has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names. Otherwise, I really couldn't care less about data attached to an anonymous account.

bitumen• 8 years ago

The real name policy doesn’t seem to stop duplicate accounts, bots, and spammers on FaceBook or Twitter, it just ensures they have vaguely human names.

cornholio2• 8 years ago

That's quite a different issue, is it not? The spam bots come because the social network is successful, as they will come to any other network regardless of real name policy.

What I'm saying is that anonymous accounts will prevent that success in the first place, because of the behavior of non-spam users. At least for a mass market product most regular folk would want to use, like Facebook.

Paul-ish• 8 years ago

We don't know what the services would look like without a real name policy.

gaius3• 8 years ago

The real name policy is barely enforced by FB, as long as a name is basically plausible they don’t even bother.

pyjammas2• 8 years ago

Furthermore, the whole "no data collected" has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names.

That might be true for you, but I've more than once had to ditch an old nick because over time I'd let slip enough specifics that identifying me would be (theoretically) possible. It's all a matter of degrees, but 'no data collected' is definitely valuable.

215163831328308• 8 years ago

Yeah, that's why I switched to using just random names. Old nicknames and gamertags became even easily googleable.

burner83092• 8 years ago

You can create your own Mastodon instance that enforces a real name policy.

rainbowmverse5• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, real and legal are often conflated by people making and supporting these policies. Many of those names may in fact be real even if they don't match your expectations of what a real name looks like.

I can't use my real name on Facebook because I can't get a legal name change. So I don't use Facebook.

kolbe4• 8 years ago

LOL at the popup I get.

"You've read over 3 articles this month. Let's make it official. Log in with Facebook or Google."

elago2• 8 years ago

If only there were some sort of free non-democracy-eroding microblogging platform the author could have used instead.

Slansitartop5• 8 years ago

Comments like yours are tiring an meaningless.

Facebook and Google have their tentacles in nearly everything. If you want to get a message out, it's going to intersect with their platforms in some way, even if you're directly criticizing them. AFAIK, there are no purist corners at this time that attract enough eyeballs.

kolbe4• 8 years ago

"Tiring and meaningless" eh? As opposed to your meaningful and engaging strawman reply?

Even if it were true that an essay or article couldn't be disseminated effectively without Facebook getting involved at some point, it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.

godelski2• 8 years ago

So I question the sustainability of these platforms? How are they supported when they have sufficient mass? If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue?

Slansitartop5• 8 years ago

If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue?

Maybe they take donations, maybe you run your own instance and pay for the hosting. Not having shareholders that expect profits and growth probably takes a lot of the pressure off, too. All they have to do is not have burdensome costs or break even.

godelski2• 8 years ago

I definitely don't think the current people running it are trying to be the next Zuckerberg. But you do have to have people working full time and pay for server costs, electricity, etc. A distributed system would be interesting, but is that what they are doing? At this point is it purely developers volunteering their time and money (along with donations)? I can't see donations supporting this type of thing at a larger scale.

I'm just wondering how they are getting the capital to scale.

spdionis• 8 years ago

The main developer has a patreon.

AsyncAwait5• 8 years ago

Worth linking to it if you use Mastodon and want to support its development:

https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

Sir_Cmpwn• 8 years ago

Decentralized platforms aren't a business. The decentralized model scales remarkably well for a very small cost because there are hundreds (or thousands!) of instances that run at a small scale and communicate with the broader network. Many volunteers run small instances that cost only a few dollars a month to maintain and are often supported by donations from the users of that instance. You can even run your own instance if you want. Even if one instance fails the network as a whole doesn't even feel it. The financial model is totally different and very sustainable, much more so than the proprietary model even.

jonbarker3• 8 years ago

If I am reading fb history correctly they had a business (apple and party poker ads) even when they were distributed (one server and mysql db per school).

egypturnash5• 8 years ago

User payments. Mostly via Patreon.

Some are also small servers run purely for the hell of it; if you keep the user count low it really doesn’t cost much to keep one running. These instances are of course more vulnerable to their owner being hit by a bus or whatever and not having shared their keys with anyone. Less so once account migration lands, and everyone’s gotten off their butts and upgraded their instances to that version.

(My instance, by example, currently has about 150 accounts, closed registration, and costs about twenty bucks a month to run. It’s also a few versions behind because I’ve been busy with other things.)

rainbowmverse5• 8 years ago

mastodon.rocks is the saddest story. They had no backups, and lost the database upgrading to the version that would have let its thousands of users back up their own accounts.

rainbowmverse5• 8 years ago

Both Mastodon instances I use are run by people working in tech and have limited registration. I doubt it's a huge burden, but I'd help spread a Patreon/Liberapay if they started one.

WorldMaker2• 8 years ago

It's a relative to the RSS model [ETA: or email is maybe a better analogy]. Scaling happens naturally as both more instances show up (scaling out) and individual instances scale up.

Every instance's own business model is often somewhat unique.

My primary instance at this point is on a domain I registered ages ago that I point to a SaaS host that runs and keeps up to date a growing number of small instances. I'm their customer and I expect them to charge me fairly based on my instance usage (CPU, bandwidth, et al) appropriately subsidized by their scale versus if I was booting my own VMs/containers and running it elsewhere.

If the worst happens, I expect I can move my business elsewhere, and given I control my domain itself, I can (use a data backup to bootstrap a new instance somewhere else and just point my domain DNS to the new instance).

There are a variety in business models among instances and the people hosting them.

partycoder3• 8 years ago

Sounds good in principle but how would mastodon scale to billions of accounts and maintain data centers around the world?

prophesi• 8 years ago

The main Mastodon instance probably can't do that. But then I think you're missing the point of a distributed social network.

partycoder3• 8 years ago

Makes sense. But how can a user validate a mastodon instance is not malicious?

egypturnash5• 8 years ago

This would involve a buttload of people independently deciding they want to run a Mastodon instance and setting one up in a location convenient to themselves and the community they want to serve.

It’s like mesh networking.

riffic• 8 years ago

Anyone (or any organization) can self-host their own open source mastodon instance. The way it scales is the same way there are billions of email accounts - federation and an open protocol.

jdlyga• 8 years ago

Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg. If a fully featured app or service is free, then you are the product. Collecting and selling user information is pervasive.

naravara2• 8 years ago

If a fully featured app or service is free, then you are the product.

Depends on the business model. Wikipedia, for example, is a non-profit.

You can also theoretically have a public benefit corporation that is structured to protect data privacy, but I don't know of any.

leadingthenet• 8 years ago

Mozilla?

choward• 8 years ago

Even if you're paying for a product, you're probably still a product.

fluxsauce3• 8 years ago

I'm using an unfederated node of Madtodon running on a Raspberry pi with Let's Encrypt certs as a private family social network. Works well and family response has been massively positive.

You can disconnect while staying connected on your own terms.

artursapek• 8 years ago

That's intriguing. You're just hosting it at your house? How hard was it to convince your family members to try using it?

fluxsauce3• 8 years ago

Yup, it's just lurking next to the router.

Convincing - tried it with just my partner first and smoothed out some rough edges. I then sent a group email to extended family that included a brief justification, some screen shots of it in action, a picture of the actual server, and an offer to create an account for them. Transparency, ease of use, and privacy were all important factors.

Most live far away and have griped about various facets of Facebook but felt like it was a necessary evil. This has been a good alternative for daily communication, discussions about weather and children, and so forth. The closest to game support is sharing crossword solving times with a hashtag.

mfoy_• 8 years ago

For me and mine, a big selling point of FB is the event management piece.

Does Mastodon have anything similar?

fluxsauce3• 8 years ago

Nope. It's more similar to Twitter (chronological timeline), but without promoted messages / "you may have missed" types of features.

Event Invitations is one of the few uses of FB that I still have. I'm open to alternatives that simplify facilitate threaded discussions between those who were invited, but as with any system convenience is a factor.

Google Calendar does work, yet somehow (and ironically) seems more intrusive than Facebook in that you're communicating directly with emails; the younger the participant, the greater the lack of enthusiasm for emails.

ralph_twl• 8 years ago

well done for the DIY social network and getting your family onboard! I read the docs on how to get an instance up and running, but couldn't find details on how to "unfederate" it. Would you care to share some details?

ld00d• 8 years ago

Mastodon is cool technology. The problem is Facebook fills a hole that Mastodon does not. Facebook connects people in real life. Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family. There's a built-in desire to monitor their conversations. They're rewarded with "reactions". Facebook provides value for a very large group of people.

A relatively small group of people saw a problem with Facebook. Of course they have to have some underlying goal to make money. So they set out to create a federated system anyone can host that doesn't depend on some central company that's just out to make a buck. It's a noble goal, but it solves a problem that most users of Facebook simply don't care about. It doesn't do the thing that Facebook does, so it's a non-starter.

I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.)

If you want to replace Facebook, first figure out what people value about Facebook and expand on that. You'll need to be better than they are (at least until people determine they're that awful.) Then look at how you can federate it or achieving whatever other goal you have.

Goronmon4• 8 years ago

I noticed this as well, and it's something I've come across in the past when checking out Facebook alternatives. Most seem to only be a replacement on a superficial level.

johnnycarcin• 8 years ago

"Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family" - this is literally the only reason I have a Facebook account.

Most of my family is not very tech-savvy so asking them to use something like Mastodon to see family pictures or whatever is pointless. Even if they did try to use it, all of their other friends and family are on Facebook so asking them to use Mastodon just for me adds one more thing/app to their list that they are probably going to use maybe twice and then just stop.

I really wish there was a good alternative to this but I haven't been able to find anything (yet) :(.

personjerry2• 8 years ago

As far as I've seen, this doesn't provide new information, so it just reads to me like "Developer of startup social media platform agrees with bandwagon: please consumers, stop using the product of our biggest competitor"

AsyncAwait5• 8 years ago

Mastodon is an open-source, distributed project, there is no commercial interest to scale in it per se.

personjerry2• 8 years ago

Why do I see so much shilling for it on HN?

snvzz2• 8 years ago

Something I can't figure out from Mastodon's website is where and how it uses cryptography.

I fear it might all be plaintext, despite the insanity of doing that in the present post-Snowden world, rather than the appropriate end-to-end combined with point-per-point encryption.

deft• 8 years ago

It's not encrypted afaik at all, besides https but that would be up to the host of the instance. Where do you want the encryption to happen and how? Anyone can federate with you.

egypturnash5• 8 years ago

Followers-only toots and private toots are a good candidate for encryption.

Shoothe• 8 years ago

They are not encrypted but signed with an elaborate algorithm (I worked on ActivityPub server implementation).

Twtxt is minimalist but functional: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

misterbowfinger• 8 years ago

Mastodon can't be considered a real alternative unless you have a solution for all the child porn on some of the most popular instances.

egypturnash5• 8 years ago

“Defederate with pawoo”

There you go

rainbowmverse5• 8 years ago

I think this was what prompted the finer-grained federation controls. Most instances at least block its images now and/or mute it.

nothrabannosir2• 8 years ago

For the life of me I can't remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: "Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex." Many apps fill 1 and/or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative.

For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I've met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Uruguay, people who had barely ever heard of Europe, but they had Facebook. All of them. The only place on earth where this wasn't true was China, in my experience.

So, no, I won't #deletefacebook. I've stopped using it meaningfully a long time ago, but until something becomes a reliable, multi-decade spanning auto-updating rolodex, I'll have to stay here.

Mastodon will never, ever, not in a billion years fill that gap. And I don't need more alternatives for #1 and #2, so there dies that dream for me.

vanderZwan2• 8 years ago

Honestly, I think this is more a problem of perception than anything else. For one thing, loss aversion makes us think we'll miss things way more than we'll do (see also: FOMO). Losing contact with people mostly involves not thinking about them. If you don't think about them, you don't miss them either. Friends come and go in life, it's natural. And if you did miss them, you'd put in work to keep in touch through other means.

I know because I have a circle of close friends that I only see once or twice a year, but stay in touch with through email. Guess what: it works. And if you migrate, you just email your friends about it.

Similarly, although I don't know if this is generally possible in every country, but I have diligently carried over my first mobile phone number from carrier to carrier. When I moved abroad to Sweden for a few years, I switched to the absolute cheapest minimal carrier to essentially "invest" in keeping that phone identity. This means that people who met me as far back as the late nineties can still reach me on it. Friends that I have made later even know they can rely on this, that this is my "policy". I'm about to leave Sweden for Germany. Still keeping that Dutch phone number. In fact, I'm leaving it with all of my friends here, and use it for all the messaging apps that rely on phone numbers.

And finally, just claim your own bit of internet and get a website. Your friends can search for you.

nothrabannosir2• 8 years ago

Losing contact with people mostly involves not thinking about them. If you don't think about them, you don't miss them either.

This is so far removed from how I interact with the world around me that I have a hard time empathising. I’ll keep it scientific and factual: more than once, I’ve gone back to a place I visited over a decade ago. I went on Facebook, found the person that used to live there, got in touch, and had varying types of “fun”, as humans call it. The crucial point here is that I can’t tell in advance which places, until I decide to go.

I… your suggestion for the future is to “not think about them”? Ehh.. no thank you?

rublev• 8 years ago

Delete facebook and 5 seconds later you won't remember most of the people you keep in contact with as those connections don't matter.

petercooper• 8 years ago

For me there's a #4: shared interest groups. There is nowhere else online that people in my town are all discussing local matters together, or.. things like the New York Times podcast listeners club, various car groups, etc.

z_open• 8 years ago

It being an automatically updating rolodex is the issue. Live without this luxury so that people can maintain their freedom to privacy. Keep in mind that even if you don't care about your own freedom to privacy, you using these services removes everyone else's freedom to privacy, even when they have not consented.

Mc_Big_G• 8 years ago

For some of us, the convenience isn't worth selling your soul and selling out your country.

lucideer• 8 years ago

nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative.

For me at least, there is one app that's starting to mitigate #3 (if not specifically "fill" the gap): WhatsApp. Granted, it's also owned by Facebook, so we're almost back at square one, but it's still an interesting case simply because it doesn't fill the gap, but rather works around it. Which gives me a bit more hope that other tools could too.

WhatsApp does two things:

1. Creates a network from your (possibly completely offline) "rolodex" (phone contact list). And augments these contacts with info specific to their ecosystem.

2. Adds discovery. Through groups, I can connect with new contacts. Similar to Facebook's "suggest friend" feature.

My general point here is the an autoupdating rolodex is only required in a closed ecosystem. WhatsApp does do it's level best to close off its ecosystem, but it's a different paradigm to Facebook, and one currently dependent on existing phone numbers, so it ends up a little more open, and for me seems like a nice demo of how hooking into existing networks (people's saved contact lists) can get you pretty far.

avoidit2• 8 years ago

> For better or for worse

Its definitely the latter. Not because there is something inherently bad about staying in touch. It is because you do so despite the knowledge that you are not doing it at zero cost to others who care about their privacy. Analogy: I wish I could just throw all my garbage over into my neighbors premises rather than walk all the way down to the recycle bin. But I don't. I am actually violating their personal space. By using Facebook, you are also violating the privacy of folks who disagree with your view, and this is now open knowledge.

And things don't even out if my neighbors are also doing the same to their neighbors over on the other side (but, but, everyone is on Facebook!). Ultimately, all of us will end up living amidst a pile of stinking garbage, which is an excellent analogy to what is happening with social networks today.

mhb• 8 years ago

For better or worse, I consider myself a fairly principled person. That is, I’ve chosen to live my life in a way that reflects my convictions. ... I’ve known that Facebook, the company, doesn’t line up with my politics for a while and have written about (almost 2 years ago) how uncomfortable the site makes me feel.

On Leaving Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16640855

notahacker• 8 years ago

I've seen some pretty stupid analogies in my time, but the idea that logging onto a web service other people use to broadcast stuff they want to broadcast to the world is "violating their personal space" in a manner akin to covering their lawn in trash is going to take some beating.

SkyMarshal• 8 years ago

For #3 why not just email? There may be some marginal convenience features to FB, but email has served that purpose reliably since it was invented.

WorldMaker2• 8 years ago

I've known several people that have changed email addresses several times in the last decade, but their FB profile has been stable and always shown the most current email address.

Some of them are less technically proficient that rely on whomever their current ISP or employer is for email. Some of them are more technically proficient and use changing email addresses as an Inbox Zero technique or as a nuclear option in spam fighting.

curuinor• 8 years ago

I have actually done fine with a cronjob and emails for the last 7 years or so.

Releasing the cronjob whenever I'm finished making it a chrome extension. I suppose this business is a pretty good inducement towards getting done a bit faster.

Zelphyr• 8 years ago

I'm sorry but I just don't buy that as anything more than an excuse because Facebook is so good inducing an addictive response. People have been staying in touch without the likes of Facebook for far longer than Facebook has existed. My wife's grandmother, for example, has reconnected with people she hasn't seen in 70 years. All without Facebook. Sometimes they call. Sometimes they write. If one is going to be in town where the other lives, they plan ahead to meet up.

It is clearly possible to do without Facebook and the fact that people use the "but how will I stay connected to my friends/how will I know about events" lines so much proves just how good Facebook has gotten at keeping people addicted.

I would encourage you to disable your account and stay off of it for six weeks. I think you'll be surprised at the results.

krapp• 8 years ago

The problem is, the "automatically updating" part of that rolodex is what requires a vast, privacy breaching, centralized surveillance infrastructure.

gehwartzen• 8 years ago

Wouldn't this (Auto updating rolodex) be something trivial to add to any other platform? On almost every forum one can always click on the username and see post history and a bio. As long as the the fields of interest are included (phone/email/etc) it would serve the same purpose.

As usual its the critical mass problem but facebook has done nothing particularly technologically inovative.

flukus• 8 years ago

For the life of me I can't remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: "Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex." Many apps fill 1 and/or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative.

Have you considered that maybe there cannot be a facebook replacement that won't suffer the same problems? Deleting facebook isn't a painless thing to do, it requires some sacrifice on your part.

tunesmith2• 8 years ago

I don't care about events, but I'd like my friends and weak ties to easily be able to keep up with what's going on with me. The only alternatives I can think of is signing them up all for a mailing list, or starting a website/blog. But if I don't want my blog to be public, I'm faced with doing something like setting up a wordpress blog with membership, and asking them all to register and sign in to see my semi-private blog.

Unless there's a free / open-source blog system with a decentralized federated SSO system, where everyone can choose to friend up (probably one-way, not two-way) to follow each other's feeds? I suppose like mastodon, but for long-form or free-form writing?

Karrot_Kream• 8 years ago

Secure Scuttlebutt is this, but suffers from the same problem every non-Facebook social network does: critical mass.

tunesmith2• 8 years ago

Critical mass is just one of those things that will be a flaw until it isn't.

Facebook has this "decisive competitive edge" in that the fact that it is seen as the only alternative is what reinforces it being the only alternative. It's good that these other solutions are free and open source because most commercial competition would dry up and fail.

But for these things that bump along and grow slowly in a sustainable way, they might actually approach an inflection point where things will snowball. At least I hope so!

CharlesW• 8 years ago

If you're thinking about using Mastodon, the CounterSocial[1] instance is worth considering. It's run by "The Jester"[2][3], who has experience running secure/hardened systems, and who takes more of an active role in countering bad actors.

[1] https://counter.social/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) [3] https://keybase.io/th3j35t3r

AsyncAwait5• 8 years ago

It's an instance that promotes U.S. hegemony, imperialism and exceptionalism. It's an instance that i.e. brands Iran as hostile, but doesn't acknowledge our hostility towards them etc.

No thanks!

DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

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