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Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

All this rage around Facebook makes me wonder if it would be a good time to start an open source social media.

It seems to me that Facebook is the new Microsoft and we need a "GNU/Linux" to oppose it.

The best would be a decentralized system for sure, but it is hard to be as good as Facebook/other social network with full decentralization.

Food for thoughts...

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Facebook (and most social media) have a fatal flaw - they have not built products that people are willing to pay for. So they grow to the point where they need resources to keep running, and have to monetize in unfriendly ways. Open source or not, to successfully scale, there must be a funding model that isn't evil. Whether that is fees, donations, or something else... it has to be there.

I do agree that now is a good time to start something. I've got my design put together to stay simple, lean, and keeps costs down while still handling the basic needs people go to social media for. I'm sure most of us could whip out their own flavors of that. And many of us could code it, too. Which is the reason that I am hesitant to start building -- too many competing projects will steal each other's thunder.

This "fatal flaw" works strongly in their favor.

Good luck building a version of Facebook that billions of people would pay for.

Diaspora was meant to be it - launched in 2010 it had one million users by 2014 (according to the wikipedia page). I can't find numbers for current active user counts, but it didn't win much mindshare, by any measure.

FreedomBox was being pushed heavily by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee (I saw them doing a FOSDEM presentation on this back in 2011) but it was more about the hardware platform (to support a free software social network suite) but it's also not really very popular, unfortunately.

Mastodon, as freehunter notes, is well known, but only in niche circles - and seems to be positioning itself as a twitter-alike only.

Searches for 'free software social network' will return a huge list of projects, but even for the most popular <sic>, federated, relatively painless to setup & maintain (or with paid hosted options available) systems ... the network effect combined with most people's inertia / apathy / ignorance means we're not going to be ridding the world of FB any time soon.

But there are alternatives, and they're thriving...alternatives include the very popular mastodon of course, but also gnu social, hubzilla, friendica, movim, pleroma, postactiv, etc. Mastodon alone has about 800,000 users across all of the servers, and the other platforms have many user communities as well.

The approach is usually a federated system using an open-source platform. Less people using these services, however, in general the content quality is way higher and less political.

Current For-Users-By-Users platforms I use are:

GNU Social, D*, peertube ( in alpha stages ... )

I dream of an open source linkedin. A system where recruiters can reach you only if they provide the info you specify, thereby reducing information asymmetry.

Recruiter wants to reach job-hunters with vague info: can reach 1000 dev; Recruiter wants to reach job-hunters with salary info: can reach 2000 dev ... more information more reach

It'll take a lot of doing, they have the jobs and have built up a power dynamic that the employer has the power it's a bad Nash equilibrium.

So... Mastodon?

I didn't know about it, but to me it seems more like a twitter than a facebook with friends, groups, feed from your friends, etc.

Actually, Mastodon can be set up on your own hardware, with only people you know IRL and be exactly a feed from your friends. You can disable the federation if you want as well.

If one wants to start a new social network, open source or not, or any other product dependent on network effects, they have to market it appropriately. You have to segment the market, and work your way out. The open competitors up until now haven't realized that.

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