Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

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We need a social network experience where users own their data, and are presented with a simple and user friendly interface that connects this data with their chosen friends. Currently we have user data mined en masse at great privacy risk and for endless profit, ad infinitum.

Facebook has not decayed because of an influx of new users beginning with this "eternal september", but because of the pointed decisions by its leadership to choose greed over respect for its users. The paramount decision is the decision to go public, necessitating indefinite growth at any cost in order to satisfy investors. It must have been obvious to Facebook's early employees that a Facebook at the behest of investors would increasingly dilute the user experience, and yet only now do they lament what they created.

Are you running your own Masterdon server yet? I'm working on migrating my blocks to a new docker structure and hope to have mine up this month.

It starts with people like us, in tech, running our own services and connecting with friends or even strangers in our field and growing out from there.

I don't think any one big thing can (or should) replace Facebook. The future of the Internet needs to be diverse and distributed. People need to learn about RSS feeds again and posting their content to a variety of services or hosting it themselves (if they know how).

Sounds like you're describing Diaspora:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

I have a feeling Diaspora isn't going anywhere anytime soon until they clean up their UX. Here's the initial experience:

1) Go to the site, click Join Us.

2) Get shuttled down the page to a wall of text. Click Sign Up since I don't want to read the text, and I see a green button.

3) See a list of "pods" - looks like a chatroom? I click the "Confused" button which auto-sends you to a pod.

4) See a bunch of text in German.

5) Press back.

6) Click the pod at the top of the list that says "US".

7) Get a 500 error.

8) Close tab.

I love the idea here, but I hate to say that it is poorly executed so far.

Snapchat was fine for choosing who to send what to, though their UX is garbage especially with their new experience. Something like that with its separation of concerns, particularly advertising, but not photo-based, would be wonderful.

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