The entire appeal behind Facebook is the huge user base. Everyone I know is on Facebook, and so is everyone they know. If you're going to get people to switch, you'll need both some killer feature that sets it apart from Facebook and some means to mitigate the loss of that user base - perhaps some compatibility layer where information that wouldn't reach your friends that switched with you to Platform X gets posted to your linked Facebook account.
I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks or set up an account with a family member or small business, seemlessly transfer their data between servers whenever someone wants to switch providers, built-in SSL for everything, PGP with automatic key sharing between friends, encrypted file storage, etc. - everything that tech community advocates for in an easy-to-host-yourself distro.
So much good could come out of having a standardized platform for social media; you just have to be able to overcome Facebook's inertia.
GNU social is web software you can use to run your own social network, either privately or publicly.
The software supports both single-user and community modes and can be used in an intranet environment or as part of the wider GNU social federated social network.
The software has been used in production environments for over five years and is very stable. GNU social also easily communicates with other GNU social servers, and traditional social networks such as Twitter.
Because GNU social is written in the de-facto web standards of PHP and MySQL, it runs virtually anywhere you can run a common piece of web software, such as WordPress or Drupal.
And because GNU social is part of the GNU project, it's 100% free software, with no malicious features, spyware or advertising.
> I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks or set up an account with a family member or small business, seemlessly transfer their data between servers whenever someone wants to switch providers
To be fair, the concept behind diaspora. I was closely following the development at the time diaspore was "hot" and, honestly, the setup was too complicated for people who are used to setting up wordpress or something.
I still think the concept is amazing, but unfortunately, they kind of failed to deliver.
My roommate likes to say the following, which I strongly agree with:
"Several years ago, when Diaspora hit the big news channels, we hackers should have picked up the slack, joined en masse, building a decent early adopter user base while helping with the code.
What we did instead was bickering about technical aspects of the implementation, pointing at the crudeness, and pretending that 'getting off all social media is the best'. And then we all joined Facebook."
Every time I looked into Diaspora over the past several years it seemed dead. I took another look, and it seems to have progressed quite a bit - I just signed up for account!
People move from platforms all the time. Before FB there was MySpace, before Google there was AltaVista, before GApps you'd probably use MS Exchange etc etc. There are many examples.
What's needed is software infrastructure to make it easy to build decentralised systems -- everyone should have their own piece of the cloud. On top of that is the need for a compelling use-case (beyond privacy) that will spur word-of-mouth and user adoption. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
The sad thing is all of the technology essentially already exists in some form or another - it's just that no one put it all together in an easy-to-configure box with a web interface. RSS for updates, chat over XMPP, messaging with SMTP+TLS+PGP. At this point it seems like most of the tools for the backend are done and the rest is would just involving plugging them together, putting a nice interface on top and acquiring the user base (I know - understatement of the year).
There is movement in this area - see sandstorm, owncloud, disapora, etc. Slap it all in an Odroid and you have control of your data again. But people won't pay for it.
I tend to agree, but really nobody will respect your privacy but yourself, which is why this should be on your own hardware (or at least on a VPS). A small box under my couch hosts my site, cloud storage (owncloud), and if I could get away from it the RSS feed that basically is facebook, and it's quite nice. It was too hard to set up, though, which is why sandstorm looks great.
The people most likely to be early adopters of such a platform would distrust a solution hosted by a 3rd party. Why? Because if you don't control the system, it can still be used to spy on you. Even a decentralized system with Wordpress-like companies that are federated are not immune.
I hear this a lot, that people move platforms "all the time", but it's not really true as it relates to Facebook. Before Facebook, the vast majority of users on social media (MySpace), were teenagers and young adults. Social media only exploded to your parents and grand parents and everyone else with Facebook. It's much harder getting those folks to switch, and the network effect is that much stronger with the ~30x larger user base. Switching off something like Alta Vista to Google isn't even comparable - there are basically no switching costs in that case.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but the stickiness and network effects of Facebook are pretty much unprecedented.
You need to factor in time. As an example Microsoft isn't treated the same way it was years ago and IBM isn't the same as before Microsoft.
I'm not suggesting FB will become obsolete but people will use other services if they see value elsewhere. If that weren't the case then WhatsApp/Instagram wouldn't have grown so fast. Network-effects does not mean something is immune from disruption.
I have three questions regarding self-hosted social networks: (1) Isn't it a huge advantage of social networks like Facebook that it's a central instance which can remove accidentally leaked data from the network and which prevents data scraping on a large scale? (2) Isn't it also a disadvantage of peer-to-peer networks that when your key leaks, all your data that is stored in the distributed network will be irreversibly accessible to everyone? (3) To which degree is it feasible to burden the average user with crypto key management without a locksmith?
Agreed. This will happen again, as it has happened before. I pretty much had the same thought process as you on how to implement it, technology wise. It might be instructive to look at how AOL lost out to the larger web in order to envision how it might play out. Maybe there needs to be a web technology similar to the browser that displaced AOL, a standalone app acting as a front-end to the stack you described. Who knows, maybe snapchat or a similar highly-adopted app could evolve into this.
I wonder though if Facebook will be able to leverage it's massive database of psychological profiling to stay ahead of the curve. Over time companies have lost their spot at the top but this is the first time technology has been powerful enough to reward the company on top with incredibly powerful information reserves. I think Facebook is going through an awkward growing phase but will smarten up and begin using it's role as facilitator of social influence much more effectively.
These psychological factors are much more powerful in this field then an engineer's solution.
> It might be instructive to look at how AOL lost out to the larger web
FB just hit 1.23 billion monthly actives.
AOL peaked at ~26 million [US] subscribers.
FB's network effect is much stronger than AOL ever had.
Also, AOL was heavily dialup-based. Independent ISPs offered broadband at better prices, just as the open web was becoming rich with content. That lured away a lot of AOL customers.
> I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks...
If we had "bandwidth equality" from our homes the paradigm would be quicker to shift, i.e. upload/download speeds the same. That way we could easily host/transfer/share to and from our home located devices/servers.
What you actually need is the 13 years old demographics onboard and the other teens. The user base migrates to the next website really fast as it happened before with the several other websites that existed before fb.
> If you're going to get people to switch, you'll need
> both some killer feature that sets it apart from Facebook
> and some means to mitigate the loss of that user base
Something which integrated your facebook feed in a nice way (nice for the user, hostile from FB's perspective of course) could work well.
I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks or set up an account with a family member or small business, seemlessly transfer their data between servers whenever someone wants to switch providers, built-in SSL for everything, PGP with automatic key sharing between friends, encrypted file storage, etc. - everything that tech community advocates for in an easy-to-host-yourself distro.
So much good could come out of having a standardized platform for social media; you just have to be able to overcome Facebook's inertia.