12 Challenges readers Thandeka Xaba and Toby Mather raised some great points in the comments for yesterday’s Typology piece (thanks so much!). I want to pick up on something Toby said in particular, because I’m also puzzled by it: If Facebook, along with all social networks, is
Was thinking about the exact same topic, and now you've gotten there before me :)
Old Facebook was useful -- all my friends, events, photos, and messages in one place? Amazing! It was like the high-powered Personal CRM that people always ask for on Twitter nowadays. Super useful, wish we still had it.
I deleted all of my social media and just use Signal to chat with friends and family. Nobody tries to sell me anything on there, and nobody is able to hurl anonymous abuse, including me. I'll never go back to social media.
I thought about this question a lot, and it seems that there are a lot of practical hurdles:
- Financing & monetization: it takes a lot of time and resource to build a scalable social network, and somehow that needs to be financed and become financially viable. People are used to social networks being free, so it's hard to convince them to pay. If you introduce ads, you introduce a conflict of interest.
- Competition & risk: It needs a really good USP to stand out in the crowd and convince people to sign up. You have the chicken-and-egg problem with users vs. a feature-rich platform. Lastly, anything you build that gets successful and is compatible with prevalent networks could be copied by big tech.
- Market entry barriers & network effects: with so many platforms, apps and service consuming our attention it needs some very good reasons to convince users to sign up to a new platform. I did take a look at a lot of promising alternative social networks but many of them seem to die before they reach critical mass because they couldn't build atomic networks and utilize network effects to their advantage.
If you want to see some (rather unknown) different takes on social platforms, you can check out:
I do think there would be a high demand for this, but people's distrust of social media is so high. I only think it would work if it were open source and run by Linus Torvarlds, or someone of similar stature.
Actually, I would prefer if it were attached to Steam, and Steam required real names. Steam with only authorized accounts would be nice. Get on that Gabe!
Old facebook was a pseudo-standard. It was THE place to share about your life online. Google+ tried to rip off what facebook had done to become successful as directly as possible, but immediately it was a mess because were you supposed to post all your content to both platforms? Read both feeds to their endless bottom daily?
The real next facebook is a protocol, because it's the only way to build something that can work or everyone. Progress on those protocols is being made, but it's necessarily slow to build up a set of rules and algorithms that everyone in the world will effectively agree on.
I think I was the only guy who preferred Google+ outside of Brazil. I loved it. Since then I have learned to never use a Google product until it is at least two years old (saved me on Stadia, as I really wanted that).
there is https://off---line.com
Was thinking about the exact same topic, and now you've gotten there before me :)
Old Facebook was useful -- all my friends, events, photos, and messages in one place? Amazing! It was like the high-powered Personal CRM that people always ask for on Twitter nowadays. Super useful, wish we still had it.
I deleted all of my social media and just use Signal to chat with friends and family. Nobody tries to sell me anything on there, and nobody is able to hurl anonymous abuse, including me. I'll never go back to social media.
I made good, real life, connections on the old Facebook.
I thought about this question a lot, and it seems that there are a lot of practical hurdles:
- Financing & monetization: it takes a lot of time and resource to build a scalable social network, and somehow that needs to be financed and become financially viable. People are used to social networks being free, so it's hard to convince them to pay. If you introduce ads, you introduce a conflict of interest.
- Competition & risk: It needs a really good USP to stand out in the crowd and convince people to sign up. You have the chicken-and-egg problem with users vs. a feature-rich platform. Lastly, anything you build that gets successful and is compatible with prevalent networks could be copied by big tech.
- Market entry barriers & network effects: with so many platforms, apps and service consuming our attention it needs some very good reasons to convince users to sign up to a new platform. I did take a look at a lot of promising alternative social networks but many of them seem to die before they reach critical mass because they couldn't build atomic networks and utilize network effects to their advantage.
If you want to see some (rather unknown) different takes on social platforms, you can check out:
vero.co, bsky.social, diaspora.social, cohost.org, mewe.com, marcopolo.me, counter.social
I do think there would be a high demand for this, but people's distrust of social media is so high. I only think it would work if it were open source and run by Linus Torvarlds, or someone of similar stature.
Actually, I would prefer if it were attached to Steam, and Steam required real names. Steam with only authorized accounts would be nice. Get on that Gabe!
Old facebook was a pseudo-standard. It was THE place to share about your life online. Google+ tried to rip off what facebook had done to become successful as directly as possible, but immediately it was a mess because were you supposed to post all your content to both platforms? Read both feeds to their endless bottom daily?
The real next facebook is a protocol, because it's the only way to build something that can work or everyone. Progress on those protocols is being made, but it's necessarily slow to build up a set of rules and algorithms that everyone in the world will effectively agree on.
I think I was the only guy who preferred Google+ outside of Brazil. I loved it. Since then I have learned to never use a Google product until it is at least two years old (saved me on Stadia, as I really wanted that).
I think HumHub may be something like what you are looking for...or at least it used to be.