> Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!
How so? What makes Facebook so appealing is the fact that pretty much everybody is on there, just like a telephone book.
As such an alternative, with a huge positive effect, has to deliver at least this "centralization" to fulfill the same needs Facebook has been serving until now.
This is a pretty common theme around IT savvy communities: People complain about Facebook and how there are so much better alternatives and how you supposedly don't even need Facebook. But the reality for over 2 billion people (among them many friends and family members of said tech-savvy folk) out there looks quite different, they use Facebook because it's what everybody uses, it wouldn't even work without that, which is what most Facebook competition comes to realize sooner or later.
I just don't see any good solution to any of this that doesn't involve some paradigm shift how we handle private information as societies and as businesses.
Scuttlebutt is designed deliberately so that you don't see the whole network, only the bits you care about.
Partly this is view-filtering, but also your user agent only requests and stores data if it might be relevant to you, i.e. friends of friends and replies to their messages.
It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.
> It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.
That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience.
If you are from the US and looking to befriend somebody from France, then you don't have to join "Facebook.fr" to make that connection, it all works through Facebook.com.
Not too long ago the same process looked pretty much like this:
"Are you on AIM?"
"No, are you on ICQ?"
"Nah, but I'm on MSM!"
"Sorry I'm not on MSM, but I'm on Linkedin!"
"No good for me I don't like Linkedin!"
"Guess I'm gonna make an MSM account -_-"
For that very same reason I ended up creating my first Facebook account on Facebook.de, which was a scam site back then. But decades of compartmentalization of users into "regions" convinced me that if I want to get any use out of Facebook I better sign up with their German version of the site, as most of my friends/family are German, that's how alien this whole "aggregate all your social contacts in one place" idea was back then.
> > It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.
> That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience.
Talking about Scuttlebutt here, it's actually the other way round. It's one protocol and any two people on it could connect, but in practice you won't see everyone, because you only have a social connection to certain people.
>Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!
No, the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about. Why would my 60-odd year old mother who uses Facebook to talk to her COPD support group even care about Diaspora? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance.
> the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about.
That's exactly my point! A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch.
> I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance.
Scuttlebutt is neither anonymous nor censorship-resistant. It's free of adverts and sponsored content experiences. It's a friendly, co-operative culture (hence the software is open source, but your mom only has to care about those details if she wants to help build the software).
> A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch.
Here's the problem though - it's not really nicer to use than Facebook for someone who is already familiar with Facebook and who doesn't mind using it. The UX of these platforms tends to be rough in ways that would annoy many non-technical users, which is understandable given their newness, and the fact that technical users are early adopters, but still makes mainstream adoption difficult.
The Scuttlebutt client I downloaded has a search form at the top that will not behave as mainstream users will expect - they will wonder where their "newsfeed" is, try to search for a topic of interest and it will fail out of the box. Making an intellectual or emotional argument for why an alternative to existing social media clients is preferable won't work as long as the physical experience of using the alternatives is more complicated.
>but your mom only has to care about those details if she wants to help build the software.
But those are the details that dominate the frontpages of these platforms. She either has to care or else care enough to wade through it to find what she needs. That's a real problem.
Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!
This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...