We need a nationalised alternative to Facebook

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-cambridge-analytica-bbc-nationalised-alternative-a8269066.html

by vincvinc • 8 years ago

44 85 8 years ago

independent.co.uk

linedash2• 8 years ago

So the govt has my data instead of Facebook? No thank you - that's vastly worse.

ams6110• 8 years ago

Being cynical, the goverment has it anyway. Why not avoid the middleman?

awptimus• 8 years ago

middle man increases uncertainty, which is your friend

tonyedgecombe• 8 years ago

Too easy to access, there is a world of difference between the police taking a warrant to Facebook and some jobsworth in the local council browsing through data to look for potential victims to harass.

ReverseCold2• 8 years ago

I indirectly have control over what the government does with the data (as a citizen). If enough citizens don't like what they're doing, it can be stopped. Also, they have no incentive to make money by harming people.

On the other hand, I'm not a board member or shareholder of Facebook, and they have a legal obligation to make money.

As such, I would absolutely use a US Government social media service over Facebook. (Bonus if it were federated with other countries.)

(In reality I'd use neither because Facebook is boring anyway.)

ReverseCold2• 8 years ago

Oh, and there's a good chance the NSA would want to encrypt communications too.

Their job should be to protect data, not collect it.

mezzode• 8 years ago

Honestly, in a perfect world it might make sense. The fact that often there is more trust in private, profit-driven corporations over governments which are meant to represent the public and their interests is definitely something that needs to be considered.

tjwds• 8 years ago

Worth noting that The Independent is a UK news service, not the US.

sgt1013• 8 years ago

Also worth noting that it is a shell of the old Independent that went bust and then got auctioned off.

mshenfield• 8 years ago

The utility of Facebook is it's raw messaging and information sharing capacity. These exist in a thousand ways in different apps from Twitter to Diaspora to Signal. People use Facebook not because of the raw utility - it is winning a competition for people's attention that is going to be an endless battle.

Setting some ground rules for what can and can't be collected and shared from people is way more effective than having the government enter that rat race.

anderber3• 8 years ago

I feel like that when it comes to social media, decentralized is really the answer. I'm not sure I could trust many big corps (maybe Wikimedia). Mastodon and Diaspora fill these needs, perhaps what they need is better marketing and improved UX (specially for Diaspora).

Joeboy3• 8 years ago

Does Diaspora actually provide better privacy than Facebook? It removes the need to trust a centralized entity, but it seems to me that it largely replaces it with the need to trust a multitude of distributed entities. At least if we're talking about stuff like clandestinely sharing data about people's friends with third parties.

anderber3• 8 years ago

It's tricky to deal with privacy and social networks. After all, even if you control your own Diaspora server, someone can still follow you and get your content. Unless you block them, I suppose. In the aspect of social media, privacy means owning your data, and both of those platforms offer the option to do that by running your own instance. If you run your own Diaspora instance, you can delete all your data and walk away from it. Also, you technically don't need to allow for federation, if you don't want to.

Here's some more info on it: https://diasporafoundation.org/about#privacy

hashkb• 8 years ago

We don't need an alternative to FB at all. Social Networking isn't a first principle of society.

beauzero2• 8 years ago

No just no. How about we just do without Facebook period.

ohf• 8 years ago

Why, no government-funded institutions have ever violated our privacy. What a wonderful idea.

Propaganda, trite.

mjburgess2• 8 years ago

So if bad things happen, we may as well opt for the worse solution?

This all-or-nothing thinking is pathological. Democratic systems are better than non-democratic systems in monopolistic cases.

beauzero2• 8 years ago

It wouldn't be able to compete.

sp332• 8 years ago

It doesn't have to compete. It just has to provide an alternative for people who want to use it.

gramstrong• 8 years ago

Are we really at the point of "needing" Facebook?

edit: BBC taking the "Social" part of "Social Networking" too literally.

hacknat• 8 years ago

Can we get some health care first?

hamstercat• 8 years ago

I fail to see how anyone "needs" an alternative to Facebook, or Facebook itself. This is not a judgement on those that use it, if it's giving people value then they should continue using it, and judging from their user's numbers it is valuable to at least a portion of the population. That being said, it wasn't around 15 years ago and who knows how long it'll stay around. I'm sure people will handle a world without Facebook just fine once it's out.

frgtpsswrdlame3• 8 years ago

The point is that marketplace will never provide the kind of solution society wants. What people want is an easy-to-use way to stay in touch, keep up with and communicate with their friends via the web. What people don't want is to be targeted by advertisers/political campaigns or have their data saved and sold. The market can only take us to the local max of 'you can keep in touch but your data is saved/sold/used', to move to the global max of 'you can keep in touch and your data is safe' we need a solution which isn't tied to profit motive.

mathgeek• 8 years ago

What people want is an easy-to-use way to stay in touch, keep up with and communicate with their friends via the web.

Some would say that email and text messaging already cover this. It feels like your description is missing a clause such as "without having to actually take the time to otherwise nourish those relationships individually."

jerf4• 8 years ago

Why can't this need be met by a corporation that gets paid for what they are doing?

The size of the problem here is bounded by the amount of money the companies are making invading your privacy. Simple math [1] places it at about $20/year/user for Facebook, who are probably on the upper end of what they can make by doing this. So to incentivize a company not to stay in business via selling your data, that's the bar you have to leap.

That hardly seems a big enough problem that the only solution is to turn over your social network to be run by Donald Trump, who, I feel I must remind many of you, whenever you say "The $GOVERNMENT should...", you really ought to remember that "Donald Trump" is a valid expansion of the term $GOVERNMENT. Or whoever else it is you don't like, it doesn't matter to my argument, I'm just reading the room here.

As a sidebar, if you want to get a sense of the scope of the damage that Facebook is doing to our civilization, consider all the ways in which they manipulate you, the things your friends posted that you wanted to see but didn't, the torrent of ads they have PhDs working overtime to figure out how to hit you with, enrolling you in psychological studies without your consent, embroiling you in family or friend drama that you'd rather not be embroiled in and potentially cutting off contact with people over it, and who knows what fingers on what scales when it comes to what you do and do not see in the news... for TWENTY DOLLARS. Of revenue, not even profit! Talk about your new twist on the banality of evil.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16688400

hux_• 8 years ago

Well ever since social media converted the US into the United States of Meme Generators & Consumers, it is not really possible to go back without mass lobotomies.

bouncing2• 8 years ago

Of course no one "needs" Facebook. Or a cell phone. Or computers. Or coffee. But they're still of value.

The values of Facebook are varied. I'm a full-time traveler and it's easy to find an English-speaking Facebook group for any country I visit, which is of real value and note something I would otherwise find. Facebook is also useful for sharing photos with friends and family without necessarily sharing them with the world like you used to with Flickr or Smugmug.

Granted, there are other ways of having forums, or photo sharing, or anything else. But that misses the point. For whatever reason, Facebook became the de facto way to do certain things. And if you want to delete facebook, it's nice to have an alternative with some feasibility in reaching a critical mass.

curun1r• 8 years ago

Ahh, but the article didn't say that people need Facebook. They said that we need an alternative to Facebook. That's two different things. If people are going to use Facebook (and it's been shown that people will) and Facebook use is going to cause systematic problems (as it's apparent that it does), we may need an alternative to Facebook that is less problematic. That's a very different statement than the one you're responding to.

golergka2• 8 years ago

So, all the problems we have because of Facebook's de facto monopoly status will be solved by a government-backed monopoly. Because a faceless government beurocracy is so much better than a corporate beurocracy.

mjburgess2• 8 years ago

Governments have democratic accountability and "company policy" requires a public vote in parliament/congress.

A private company is a dictatorship of secrecy. Monopolistic systems are best handled by democratic governments for this reason.

golergka2• 8 years ago

In theory.

In practice, democracy is driven by populism and histerical news cycles, while beurocracy doesn't feel any pressure from the public whatsoever and is usually occupied with entrenching into occupied political territory. Companies are much more accountable to their shareholders than governments are to their citizens.

notafxn• 8 years ago

Isn't Facebook already biased enough? Exactly what we need is the BBC looking at our communications, removing what they can.

anuraj• 8 years ago

So that the big brother watches you over instead of a corporation. Great Idea!!!

baq• 8 years ago

Are you saying that he doesn't do it now anyway?

gmmarks• 8 years ago

Haven't the ideologues learned anything from the 20th century?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

knuththetruth• 8 years ago

No, we need a user-owned, democratically-controlled version of Facebook, with correspondingly enshrined “rights.”

The problem is authoritarian control. Swapping out corporate authoritarianism with government authoritarianism solves zero problems, especially given that they already constantly collude to entrench each other’s power.

josephby• 8 years ago

Fexit

Tloewald• 8 years ago

There’s this thing most countries have called the post office. I suggest it look into providing secure email.

acct1771• 8 years ago

We need an educated populous that takes interest/supports the development and use of decentralized alternative(s, remember competition?!) to Facebook.

If it's federated, that helps completion even further.

thyselius• 8 years ago

Could it be built so that the user data was encrypted / hidden / not usable for the developers?

(And open source so we could all know for sure this was the case)

d1ffuz0r• 8 years ago

Try https://vk.com, a lot of people in London using it

throwaway847423• 8 years ago

It’s owned by a Kremlin-affiliated oligarch.

adventured2• 8 years ago

Based out of Russia - the nation that just attacked the British with a nerve agent.

If you're going to make the mistake of giving that kind of information to some entity, at least either pick your own companies or government, or an ally.

dopamean• 8 years ago

is this a joke?

christophclarke• 8 years ago

Your Data: Direct to Russia

brightball2• 8 years ago

I’ve always wondered about creating an equivalent to Facebook as a desktop and mobile app, that connected to your email account. Adding a friend would just be inputting their email address and connecting would involve a PGP exchange in the background.

Your email would become the decrentralized, encrypted medium for exchange and broadcast. You could use IMAP to leverage it as your datastore on multiple devices.

You could more easily schedule message delivery and times too. The most complicated thing about it would be setting up a simple enough onboarding process.

It wouldn’t be efficient, but it doesn’t really need to be.

ravenstine• 8 years ago

I've been dreaming about this a lot lately, but there's definitely some roadblocks for the average person. They don't want to clutter up their existing email, and they will drag their feet to getting a new email address just for social networking. People also like the idea that they can actually delete their posts, even if it's illusory, which they can't do to any meaningful extent with email. With ActivityPub, I think a lot of potential developers don't want to bother with email because it's not the future. It is still a great idea in general, though. I would totally build it or sign up for it if enough people I knew were willing to do it. The problem is I wouldn't want that form of social networking just to connect with people who are smart enough to use it.

brightball2• 8 years ago

True, but at the same time deleting a post only matters because new people can see it that may not have initially. With this, only people who the message was sent to would see it anyway.

If as part of the on boarding process you could provide instructions to move those messages out of the main view and into a folder so they didn't clutter up the rest of the email too.

It probably makes more sense as an open source project. There's not much of a profit model for decentralized social networking where you can't inject ads that people didn't want to see.

taborj• 8 years ago

Just make it easy for everyone to create their own mailing list. Then you could subscribe to friends, and get updates from them, plus participate in discussions with their other friends. "Muting" a friend would be up to the controls in your desired email client. "Unfriending" is simply unsubscribing.

adventured2• 8 years ago

Why wait for the corporate platforms to get around to aggressively restricting your speech on their services, when you can go right to being limited by the head censor.

Britain already has a rapidly growing problem with censorship and restricted speech. This would just be a more direct way for the government to control what you can express and see online.

The authoritarians continue their march.

Within 20 years, it'll be the rare nation that doesn't have something equivalent to the Chinese firewall heavily controlling what their people do online. Nations with freedom online equivalent to what existed from ~1995-2015 across most of the developed world, will be the exception.

throwaway847423• 8 years ago

Just when you thought the UK couldn’t get any closer to 1984, they wheel out a doozy like this. This is coming from the country where you can literally end up in jail for shitposting on Twitter.

SamColes• 8 years ago

It's an opinion piece by a single journalist.

throwaway847423• 8 years ago

Some people in the comments are enthusiastically agreeing with the journalist.

weddpros• 8 years ago

a journalist whose salary is paid for by advertisers, a journalist working for a concurrent of Facebook (in terms of ad revenue), a journalist who's probably complaining how internet 2.0 has killed his profession, how Social Media has killed Traditional Media, etc...

Plus how could a journalist suggest a nationalised alternative that would stop at UK's border, instead of a global one connecting people from all countries? It's extremely short sighted and closed minded.

Tehchops• 8 years ago

Because when I think responsible, competent custodians of personal data, I think federal government /s.

Secondly, the mere premise that we "need" a Facebook, or alternative, is inherently flawed.

Probably echoing the rest of the comments in here at this point, but my 2 cents fwiw.

Brendinooo• 8 years ago

Maybe I didn't read the article closely, but...what feature of Facebook makes nationalization necessary? Do we need a FB-like platform "of, by, and for the people" for...ads? News distribution? Sharing news? Connecting people? Classifieds?

To me, the biggest utility of FB that would make such a project worthwhile is the pure network aspect of it; there are very few people in my life who aren't on Facebook.

If that's what we're looking to nationalize, does this just become a national ID card debate for the Internet era?

bouncing2• 8 years ago

Rather than think of it as a feature that makes nationalization necessary, think of it like the center-left of the UK would:

Facebook's current shitshow is a market failure. Market failures can be addressed through nationalization. Ergo, Facebook should be nationalized.

It's not something I agree with, but that's the thought process distilled.

kelvin02• 8 years ago

Nationalised? Yeah, why not just cut out the middleman (FB) and hand everything directly to the 'government'?

Jaruzel• 8 years ago

In my view, the problem isn't the platform, it's the people using it. Until people are widely educated to give a damn about their own personal information, they will continue to flock to the next free Social Platform over and over again until some scandal, that they don't really care about or understand, now makes that platform 'uncool', and then they will all register for the next 'cool' platform.

Over, and over, again.

kelvin02• 8 years ago

FB is not a problem. Handing over information blindly to an entity which centralizes and consolidates it's 'power' over you is. FB can only do as much as we 'feed' it.

Stop feeding it. FB is simply doing what inevitably happens when power and knowledge is concentrated into one place.

waytogo• 8 years ago

Three years ago I forced myself to reduce my FB usage.

- At the beginning I remember it was super hard not to check FB

- So I just stopped posting first

- Then I realized that it significantly helped to avoid FB in the morning

- Later, I installed the Chrome Extension Eradicator which lets the FB feed disappear; I never used a FB mobile app

- More and more I could stay away from FB the entire day just checking it in the evening

- Still for 1 or 2 years it was kind of tempting to check FB even if it was in the evening

Now, I rarely use FB anymore, maybe once a week or even less and if I see all the same people posting non-stop self-adulations and all the likers liking every little thing because xy posted it, I command-w FB faster than I opened it. I pity those posting people, too lonely, too little attention, on a desperate hunt for some friends on a addictive Skinner Box network.

TBH it was a bit like quitting smoking: initially super, super hard and when looking back FB's feed feels just useless.

Why do we need an alternative or FB at all?

combatentropy• 8 years ago

The future isn't national. It's distributed.

What is Facebook but a fancy web host and RSS feed in one? First, it is a web host. It lets everyone make a free website (their Wall). Second, it gives everyone an RSS reader (their News Feed).

My point is, I think we already have the protocols. What the ordinary user lacks is the software. Actually what they also lack is the hardware. Everyone, technical or not, wants their own website. They always have. But most people are at the mercy of some company providing a server. After all, to run a website, you need a computer that's always on, always connected. I propose we use the user's phone. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of that.

So what we need is an easy-to-use webserver that users install on their phones. They don't have to build their website on their phone. It's just hosted there. They could build it on their laptop and push it to their phone.

Then you also make a nice RSS reader that users also install, and they subscribe to each other's websites.

Profit! I mean, not profit, happiness!

klez• 8 years ago

While I like the idea, the problem is that bandwidth on mobile is limited and certainly not free.

Also, this would be a battery killer.

mistpup• 8 years ago

If it was a public open network then maybe, I wouldn't use it to share things between friends though or messaging. Could be based around posting of public events like a billboard/invitation feature (the tool i use most on fb), and maybe a twitter like status feature too. I wouldn't share images unless random gifs and memes or anything too personal/controversial. It wouldn't be a full network more like a public information service. There was talk of bbc doing something like that.

brockers• 8 years ago

Yes, because the government has such a spectacular record for protecting privacy and NOT spying on its citizens. Of course, Facebook cannot come into your home with guns if they think something your doing is wrong, so governments have that to their advantage...

We need a nationalised alternative to Facebook

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