Why have we not done a federated Facebook replacement yet?
Why have we not done a federated Facebook replacement yet?
I'm not the most on point as far as keeping up with the internet so possibly it is actually happening, but I have not yet identified a direct challenge to Facebook from the fediverse that has been settled on by those already here.
I was on Mastodon for a while but realized I hate Twitter-style interactions, as much as I enjoyed posting about all the stuff I'm into - as the Twitter people kept coming like waves of Saxons with funny hair on Britain's fair shore, I got into some supremely silly arguments and then got out. I didn't bother to wait for them to burn my village, they're welcome to it.
I'm now giving Lemmy a go, because as far as participation in platforms, I lasted longest at Reddit, though I was gone long before the recent exodus. Hopefully my dogs, cats, plants and microcontroller projects will get some love from The Internet's Good Strangers here.
But I was, in the early days, quite an avid FB user and considered it unleaveable until 2016, at which point I realized it was not just leavable but likely to get us all killed. I still have a (good parts of) Facebook-shaped hole in my online life, which is where all my real friends and relatives used to hang out for my daily perusal, and where I could send out my various snarks and know I was amusing at least one or two people who genuinely found my antics delightful. I'm not a troll but I'm definitely a Grouch, and even Oscar needed a hug every now and then.
So given that most of us are here because we recognized the cycle of enshittification at some point and decided to make a different choice, and given that we've so quickly embraced replacements for every other big silo, and given again that most of us were probably once on FB and used it to be connected to our real people... why have we collectively shied away from even offering a viable Facebook alternative?
Whenever I ask my more "woke" friends why they're still there, it nearly always seems to be that their old relatives are all there. I can see that that would be a great challenge, to move them off of that pablum-crack. Maybe the Secret Council Of Woke Fediverse Elders is using all these lesser platforms as gamergate-like test runs to iron out the kinks in federation. Perhaps even the seeming willingness of Mastodon admins to let Meta poke their tentacles in the door is entirely a feint - perhaps Mastodon was never intended to be kept in the first place, but rather, is just a honey pot to gather important battlefield notes for the coming attack!
maybe?
Why have we not done a federated Facebook replacement yet?
Because Facebook is highly useful as a container for people you wouldn't want to interact with.
The first federated application I ever saw was Diaspora, which was basically federated Facebook. It predates Mastodon by 5+ years.
Thing is...it seems like it's harder to launch federated Facebook. With Twitter or Reddit, as long as there's enough activity on the new platform, it can act as a drop-in replacement for the original. There might be friends or favorite subscriptions who make the jump, and you might miss them, but they're not critical to the experience.
But with Facebook...the whole point is that the people you're interacting with are real-world friends and family. You need to convince them to migrate to the new platform. If they don't do it, the platform is kinda pointless. And...generally speaking, one's real-world friends and family usually aren't a bunch of enthusiastic early-adopters.
I created an instance in the early days, and convinced like 3-4 people to give it a try. None of us knew anybody on other instances. It's not designed to find new friends easily. So it just quietly died.
Of course, this was pre-2016, pre-evil-Facebook, back before large-scale skepticism about social networks, when people stared at you blankly when you talked about "federated alternatives". But I still don't think I could get my family to transition, because they'd be losing all their contacts with the specific, real-world friends they have on Facebook (not to mention, say, the Facebook Marketplace, which is apparently a big deal...)
You've basically elucidated my working hypothesis as to why there is not a prominent FB competitor already - someone already mentioned Friendica, and I had heard of that, and I think gnusocial is another one. But this absolutely is precisely why this will be the hardest to replace. Every other platform just needs users, this one needs to connect to the people you actually care about, and indeed, our grandparents and such are not gonna be enthusiastic about something that's more difficult to use.
I think friendica is the name you're looking for.
Who is “we”?
The Federation. Everyone who has made the choice to move away from silos and into a community-based paradigm. Like I said, I am pretty sure most of us over a certain age were there at one time.
https://diasporafoundation.org/
The Diaspora protocol is similar to ActivityPub, but it was designed specifically for the Diaspora platform.
Frankly, I don't want the first one. Why make another?
I feel the concept of FB can still work. Just don't have someone like Mark running it.
Friendica is an option but I don't want to keep going to social media platforms where I have to constantly server hop. Lemmy is about as far as I'll go, but anything else, is a deal breaker.
Well, I just spent about ten minutes typing out a few thoughts in response but we're also getting a momentary lesson that nothing comes without work or money - Lemmy.world is running slow right now, and my post went down the memory hole, it seems. It might resurface, I don't quite understand these servers yet.
We are in difficult, choppy waters, and will be for some time. We gave up the smooth ride when we left the safety of the corporate silo, where eveyrthing is paved and painted for us.
edit: speaking strictly for me, it's good to be home.
He had us in the first half, not gonna lie.
From a technical standpoint, I can't see media-heavy social media in the format of Facebook lasting too long in a federated environment considering the costs involved to maintain the server instance. Trying to do that while being free is absolutely unsustainable. Another shift in resource management would have to happen before platforms like that would be inexpensive and scalable.
Currently, Lemmy instances are slowly and steadily growing with each user interaction within, and between instances. Most shared content is link aggregation meaning minimal server resources. But resource usage goes up much faster when images, or even videos are uploaded to be shared. This format will only grow more expensive over time, and definitely won't last in the current format.
Duplicating the function of FB as it is, it seems to me, is entirely off the table, and bandwidth/egress costs are the primary reason, with no real solution that actually replicates their level of reach. On that, we entirely agree.
But, who says the media you're sharing needs that much reach? People definitely would need to be able to post video - good video - of their kids' recitals and whatnot, for viewing by those who want to watch a video of a child's recital. That group of people, however, consists of immediate friends, family, teammates, teachers, etc. It's an amount of bandwidth that you could handle in your own email account.
Again, what I'm proposing we ought to be doing, is identifying and speccing out the actual, constructive social benefit of Facebook's specific social infrastructure, and ideally remove all toxic elements (privacy etc), and then look at what resources are required to achieve that subset of Facebook's current range of functionalities. In the example of posting your kid's recital, the assumption that you need Facebook's servers to achieve that is not a correct one - as I said, a simple group email will get the media to everyone in your immediate circle with great efficiency. Even just a webhook script could format that payload for easy viewing.
Hell, more I think about it, duplicating the good parts of Facebook actually looks easier and easier... (edit: on a purely tech level, assuming usage to network with close real world connections only - this is the stated reason why all of my friends who are still there, are still there)