What would it look like? Non profit? Small yearly subscription? Pay for storage?
I think the distributed answers have failed, sadly, mostly due to barrier to entry. Is it worth building something that isn't advertising driven to fill this niche? Is it possible for such a best to gain traction in the current environment?
Of course the problem with the existing distributed social networks, like Diaspora, Friendica and all those others, is that there's not a lot of money behind them, so they're mostly amateur projects. And there's certainly a lot that can still be improved about them in terms of features.
What I personally don't like, is how you currently need different centralised sites and apps to follow various things an people. Just Facebook isn't enough; you also need Twitter. And Instagram. And Reddit. And then there's every possible blog.
I'd like a system that acts as my own portal to all those systems, and allows me to follow people on the Fediverse, Facebook, Instagram, RSS feeds, you name it; and is easy to expand to support new things, but also gives me more control over my feed; all of those social networks have a tendency to include all sorts of nonsense in my feed that I'm not interested in. More powerful filters would be nice.
And I wouldn't mind paying for that either, as long as it really has the capability to support nearly everything. The internet has grown to only support free, and therefore ad-monetised, possibly selling your data. But I somehow still pay EUR 22 per month for TV that I rarely watch. Something that helps me manage my feed well and puts me in control, should be worth something, shouldn't it?
It seems to me that no one can define exactly how Facebook is evil or agree which is the thing they want to get rid of in Facebook. Without that it might be hard to change Facebook to the best or create an alternative.
At the end of the day every tech platform that’s free needs to make money somehow and I don’t see how we escape a race to the bottom unless users pay some fee to avoid it. Unfortunately.
And we’ve now gone way beyond just “pay a fee and everything will be fine” because FB et al are now huge data brokers, they have lobbyists, they have morphed so much that changing the model wouldn’t fix it (imo). Maybe a new set of less evil startups can gain traction in a paid model but I don’t know how..
A little interface for creating little "posts" of pictures and text.
A list of friends to sync new post id's with.
A little interface to browse new posts of friends, add likes and comments.
Additional equally trivial features for creating shared scrapbooks for for events, clubs, topics, businesses, etc.
Each person's list of friend/group ids and posts would be held in the cloud with end-to-end encryption. The encryption would mean complete privacy for individuals, with only permissioned sharing to others.
Given the needs of a series of small posts, this is a trivial amount of data.
The app could be free with a small hosting fee of $1/month or something.
There would be no ads. No surveillance. No massive corporation doing groundbreaking work in AI in order to surveil and serve ads, promote engagement, manipulate users, then making a show of screwing up half hearted attempts to censor bad stuff that it had actively promoted due to its engagement properties.
The app's authors and cloud providers would simply have the incentive to make sharing scrap book posts fun for its users.
Let's call it "The Scrapbook". Wait ... drop the "the". It's just "Scrapbook". It's clean.
1. End-to-end encryption, like Signal. Without this, there's nothing to prevent the new platform from turning into another Facebook. (Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.) But with E2E, the platform can't analyze the posts that you write or read, so they can't build a creepy tracking profile for you like some East German secret policeman. And because modern E2E protocols also include integrity protection (eg HMAC), the platform also cannot inject new posts into your feed.
2. This one is going to be unpopular, at least at first. But users need to pay. Because the platform needs to work for the users. Not the advertisers. Not the government. Not anybody else. On the bright side, they wouldn't have to pay very much. Even Facebook makes only maybe $100 per user/year, and they spend a ton on "R&D", and they still make a healthy profit. Their cost of goods sold is a lot lower.
3. Ideally the service should be run by a public benefit corporation, with the public benefit for its users clearly defined in its charter. That way, the company doesn't get to maximize revenue at the expense of users.
4. Some sort of decentralization or federation would be good. So if users are unhappy with one provider, they can easily switch to another one. Like with email. Tired of Gmail? No problem, just switch to Fastmail or Microsoft or whatever.
> Is it worth building something that isn't advertising driven to fill this niche? Is it possible for such a best to gain traction in the current environment?
I sure hope so. I've spent the past year or so building a prototype. Link is in my profile if you're interested.
Unfortunately Facebook is so dominant that it's not in their financial interest to allow that, so the only way I can see it happening is if the government steps in and forces them to.
Free leads to advertising. Advertising lead to algorithms tuned for engagement. Engagement leads to the garbage we have.
- Add-free Business model: Big question in how do you monetize the system, making it viable. Maybe the people contribute in storage, storing the data of people they interact with to enable availability, and contribute depending of their possibility.
- Data ownership (a lot of concern for some tech people, but for the majority, I think they don't really care / understand the problem)
Focus on users photos and text posts.
Make it hard to share news and articles. Perhaps a critical thinking “captcha”. Maybe you have to write >50 words on why you’re sharing posted with the link? Maybe limit to two articles a week.
Perhaps your friends could have an anonymous way to indicate that the stuff you’re posting is politically offensive or just obnoxious.
And obviously no filtering. Everything is chronological. (User directed filtering of what they’re shown would be encouraged though.)
E-mail, with a better interface?
Seriously, this all can be done with E-mail and some locally stored data?
It is just a matter of implementing a UI (Web/Phone/Native whatever) and a messaging protocol, on top of existing Email infrastructure.
You are fighting against the very core of human nature. Some of us like to keep it nice and good, some of us just want to watch the world burn. No software is going to fix this.
Any new non-distributed social network would face an even higher barrier to entry. Without support for the ActivityPub protocol, the social network would not be interoperable with existing fediverse accounts, including Mastodon's nearly 1 million active users. Instead, you would start from zero.
Mastodon stats: https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon
If you want to create a new social network, supporting ActivityPub would be the strongest boost you could give it from day one.
The platform needs to have zero motivation to keep the user on it: in my opinion it is the profit-motivated encouragement of addictive UX that is the root of Facebook’s evil.
User accounts are owned and controlled by the users by means of a private key. (And thus the same identity or multiple linked identities can work across different "facebooks")
Entire social graph, data store, and all relationships and actions are public-ledgered, fully transparent, and available for download, archiving, and re-homing.
Moderation is also fully transparent, performed by volunteers who are part of the community on a rotating basis, and heavily aided by bayesian filtering.
Hardware and software maintenance costs are covered by voluntary payments and effort investment.
Is there anything I missed?
Technically, the only major cost of Facebook is storage space, so they could just function as Dropbox. Free plan up to a point, then charge for storage.
They could run some ads too, you know. Not targeted and not blended with content.
There are plenty of ways, so long as you don’t look for maximum profit.
Making it free maximises the number of users, and then AI-ing the shit out of user’s data and selling the results to gullible advertisers is definitely the ultimate money making machine...
Unfortunately, I don't believe it's possible in the current environment. I already have a web hosting, would only paid if the hypothetical service would integrate with mainstream ones like FB/twitter. Otherwise it's nothing to pay for, social networks are useless without being able to communicate with other people.
I particularly like "I'd like a system that acts as my own portal to all those systems, and allows me to follow people on the Fediverse, Facebook, Instagram, RSS feeds, you name it; and is easy to expand to support new things, but also gives me more control over my feed" by mcv here.
You can drop comments here or respond to me at sridhar AT toonclip DOT com
IMO, the big problem with Facebook is the message-board style feed. I want my events in a separate app; and I don't want to get sucked into some online chat every time I need to open the app.
Same goes for groups.
Another problem is moderation. HN is awesome because the moderation is so good. Facebook lets hapespeach go all over the place.
If you try to tackle this, start small and grow organically.
Alternatively, a platform where non-commercial usage is free but businesses or those who promote commercial products have to pay which subsidizes the free tier.
*You could also have some tax scheme akin to a TV license to get public funding without public influence.
I don't understand this? I've been using Mastodon for a few years now, and the Mastodon network itself has been continually growing since it's founding with over 1 million monthly active users at present.
It's already the #1 social platform for teens.
Any other way you end up with the same outcome. If one party has full control, it will eventually abuse it's position.