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Comment by halbritt | Hacker News Reader

I have a fairly large network of friends that existed before FB really had wide adoption. The platform they were on eventually died in favor of facebook.

At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.

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For your use case, what part of your need isn't provided by a phone/address-book? I suspect it's the receipt of broadcast messages from your friend network? If so, then yes, you need a social network with features like FB.

Personally, I'd rather not receive those kind of messages - I only want to receive messages that someone specifically thought to send to me. Doing so dramatically reduces noise. The only exception to this is broadcast messages from important networks with built-in hard trust boundaries (the email list for my kids' classroom, my neighborhood watch list, the Whatsapp group with only me, my wife, my brother, and sister in law - not even parents), and even on those, I will leave if they become more of a cost than a benefit.

Well, HN is a social network with broadcasting features, and it's what allowed halbritt to reply to you.

(This isn't intended to be a "gotcha", just to stimulate reflection on why it's different)

> Well, HN is a social network with broadcasting features

HN is pull actuated, not push. I have to register interest in topics by commenting before I get responses, and those responses are not part of the main feed. I have to go to my comments page to look for the responses. I don't get notified just because a particular user made a comment or post, because it is topic-centered, not user-centered.

And even with all that, if HN ever rises to a level of routine toxicity that the moderation via community or moderators isn't keeping in check, I'll leave.

I see your point and it's valid.

Broadcast messages from people you care about are nice. So and so had a baby, or whatever else is going on in their life. It's why FB was useful for before it became a continuous stream of reposted drivel.

I like to keep up with what's going on in people's lives at a scale greater than one to one interactions can support. In my view, there's definitely an upside to technology that supports a number of friends and acquaintances roughly 10x what one could support otherwise.

Hell, even linkedin is somewhat useful to be able to keep up with what old colleagues are up to and reconnect at times.

I feel the same. I find social networks pretty valuable but don't like or trust Facebook. I'd happily sign up (and pay for) a social network that brought the same benefits but was (1.) ad-free and (2.) didn't employ tons of people trying to maximize my engagement.

Then check out https://joinmastodon.org/ you can either host it yourself or join someone else's server where you can either pay/donate or just use it for free.

So mastondon is an open source twitter clone right? is there anything out there yet or in the works that is more in line with Facebook's product offerings with out the surveillance and tracking?

Kind of, Mastodon is the 'Twitter' part of the fediverse, PeerTube is the 'YouTube' part, Pixelfed is the 'Instagram' part, there are even people who try to use ActivityPub for things you do on GitHub normally. And you can follow and interact between all of them (theoretically and to some degree actually too).

But what you're looking for sounds mostly like Diaspora, which is quite old, it's from back in the Google+ days, and never really took off.

I started to get an instance of diaspora going, but it was too icky and so I had to give up.

Why wouldn't you go to a open alternative like Mastodon instead to yet another silo?

I was on Mastodon for more than a year and loved it: great conversation that reminded me of the hope and promise of the Internet in the late 90's. Then my instance admin went AWOL, the site crashed, and all of my data and social graph were lost. I still can't get the admin to respond to emails. I could host my own server but who really has the technical know-how and time to do that kind of work? Mastodon has got to solve the reliability and/or portability problem. If I could have recovered my social graph on another instance, I would still be on the network.

Yeah part of the problem with Mastodon is trusting that you're instance will stick around. The only ways I can think to do that are:

1. Host it yourself

2. Use one of the paid instances backed by an established company (I use Librem Social)

Perhaps over time some ad supported Mastodon instances will pop up for those willing to pay that way.

Does mastodon have a tool that can create regular back ups to email to you??? Seems relevant for a common problem like this

No, not currently.

On my instance I can (manually) request a backup every 7 days. It would be nice if this could be automated but it's all media etc. so it's quite big for email. If the admin would have announced that they would switch off the server you could have moved easily which is possible at least since v3.0

I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.

You can start somewhere and then if you see that it doesn't stick around you can easily move your account to a different server and take all your followers with you, it's build into the software. In that sense it's even nicer than email where you need to tell everyone that you moved on to a different email-address manually.

I've contemplated hosting an instance of Mastodon. It doesn't quite have the features I'd like it to have.

> some demand for a social network that isn't evil.

What are the chances that actually exists though? Like, for more than a couple years?

I'll go out on a limb and say, "small".

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