This is fantastic, and needs to become the default. It's a bit strange to me that every effort I've seen for this has been outside of the US. Is anyone aware of any effort, successful or otherwise, to do this inside the US? Are we simply too smartphone dependent to even consider such a move?
In your experience. I have deployed single tenant SaaS for years, very much not Fortune 500. It's really not hard to give each customer their own server.
I have kept my Facebook account for the primary purpose of making sure relatives don't share pictures of our kids' faces, and check it very rarely.
Recently though, the change has been incredible. People I know in real life, including my own parents, have been "Liking" very obviously AI generated posts. A HUGE amount of the "Recommended" posts I see are obvious AI images. It's gotten really, really bad, in just the past few months.
But do anyone actually post anything anymore. My account got closed in 2016/17 when I refused to accept their new terms of service. Up until that point I had pretty aggressively filtered my feed down to only things posted directly by people I knew. I think I checked in maybe once every two weeks and spend 2 - 5 minutes catching up. No one posted anything, it was all likes and shared posts.
My wife wanted to show me an article, posted via Facebook the other evening and I asked if I could scroll around a bit, out of curiosity. There was nothing but ads, post by companies, which I also count as ads and a few article about knitting. Facebook is no more personal that usenet was in the olden days, but it is at the same time an engine that just keeps pushing paid and "organic" ads for stuff for you to buy... Stuff you do not need.
There are posts by real humans - but you are correct Facebook does their best to make them hard to find and rare. I aggressively block everything but real posts, and it is still hard to find real posts.
Almost nobody is posting on Facebook anymore. Instagram has taken over that niche. Facebook is in free fall and has to fill in the feed with anything - anything! Meaning many more ads, AI slop and complete garbage from all over the world.
"relatives don't share pictures of our kids' faces" - serious question: why ? I have seen that from friends too, and I respect it - but I don't understand what bad outcome that prevents.
Because they are children who can’t and haven’t consented to have their likeness posted all over social media, to be used as training data on an ever growing corpus of privacy destroying tech.
Additionally, pedophiles and creeps do actually exist.
I love that I get this question all the time, when from where I sit, the question should be to all the other parents: "Why do you insist on posting your children and their entire lives on social media?"
As someone who's entire life from infancy to adulthood has been published and catalogued on Facebook by my parents, I think your children will certainly appreciate what you've done one day.
It's something you can't ever get back once its out there, and we all know Facebook is perfectly happy selling out user's pictures as training data for AI companies.
