OK, #DeleteFacebook. What is the alternative? Mastodon is the Twitter alternative, but we don't really have a good Facebook alt.
Somebody go write a distributed version of Facebook.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/03/26/the-social-media-dilemma/
@pzmyers We are working on a Facebook-like federated social media platform called #Aardwolf. You can read about it at https://aardwolf.social/, but it is not anywhere near done.
There are a couple that exist already, #hubzilla and #diaspora, but neither of them really seems to have the special sauce that make Mastodon as successful as it is.
@pzmyers It's a good question, and one I don't know the answer to.
I don't think it will be possible to kill Facebook entirely unless they are found so guilty of criminal activity that shutting it down is part of the sentence.
There's too many people on it, locked-in to them as a vendor. The userbase will probably shrink and skew older with time, but nuking it from orbit seems unlikely.
Maybe replacing everyone that works at Facebook with people that are more ethical would be a start.
@pzmyers just to be clear - after the #CamAnal story broke, I downloaded my archive and clicked the #DeleteFacebook button. I'd love to hear about a viable alternative that isn't actively subverting democracy as much as the next person.
@pzmyers There's HubZilla, which is functionally equivalent but aesthetically still kind of clunky. (I have an instance set up at https://hub.iseeamess.com -- feel free to give it a try if you're interested, or to post that link to others to try out; registrations are open.)
The only other active project I know about is #aardwolf -- https://github.com/BanjoFox/aardwolf
Somebody already did, but it's kinda underground. https://diasporafoundation.org/
@pzmyers Why do we need one? We already have "distributed Facebook". Email, blogs + a broadcast microblog like Mastodon. Do we need them aggregated for the purposes of shoving advertising at us?
@pzmyers The problem isn't the lack of Facebook alternatives, the problem is the innumerable fragmented Facebook alternatives. Among other things. But the fragmentation problem is critical.
GNUSocial/OStatus were more or less dormant until Mastodon provided a good UI, and so far that's only drawn in enough traffic for punditry to compare it unfavorably to Twitter. The Facebook alternative will have an even larger hurdle to cross because of FB's scale and breadth.
@pzmyers The project's name is, or at least was, Diaspora. It predates Nastodon by multiple years and has kind of s tragic history, but it exists
@pzmyers I think distribution may be useful insofar as keeping one actor or operator from becoming too big or attractive for marketers, but if an operator can just suck up data from other instances then there is still room for tracking and analytics. End-to-end encryption might be beneficial since it prevents operators from reading user data, but it would add significant complexity. Not sure if there's a simple solution for this problem.
@pzmyers For "distributed Facebook", Diaspora has been around for a while. I heard that Hubzilla is the new kids on the block for that.