Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/09/good-news-facebooks-web-tra.html
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This is good news and I hope the trend toward Facebook becoming the next MySpace continues. That said, FB’s grand strategy now seems to be to buy the next up-and-coming competing social media network (e.g Instagram) and then carry over their intrusive and exploitative and toxic-for-society business model to their new acquisition, drawing the user into the core Facebook database. The only way this cycle will end is if a critical mass of people start using open-source federated alternatives.
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What are some “open-source federated” or other alternatives? FB is annoying but (seemingly, at least) useful for some things.
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Mastodon seems to come up frequently here.
So much ink has been spilled over Facebook’s influence in the last election. What will happen in its absence? Perhaps politics will go back to being something most people only think about once every four years? Mmmm.
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Yes, like over throwing our Democracy, and there’s that whole Donny Two Burger thingy too…
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Mastodon is the most popular but is mainly a Twitter replacement. Diaspora is more of an attempt to replicate Facebook’s functionality. Both need more high-traffic media sites like this one and schools hosting instances and pods to start building a critical mass of early adopters who can help their less tech-adept relatives escape the clutches of FB and Twitter.
The things it’s most useful for are the things that are most easily replicated by these other projects.
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I donated to that crowd funder, but then the poor gent that ran it died [suicide], I lost track of it after that.
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I would have liked to see the app numbers they alluded to (I’m sure I could RTFA, but what am I, made of time?) It seems like an apples and oranges kinda math to compare the two. Also calling Google “the most trafficked website” seems strange. “website” is a very undescriptive descriptor…
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According to the project blog they released a new version on 27 June so people are still working on it.
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MeWe.com is an actual Facebook competitor in terms of functionality, and it is very conscious of security issues. Tim Berners-Lee is one of the backers. If you want something like Facebook but that actually has your privacy desires baked-in, you should check it out. Of course you will face the problem of getting family and friends to use it.
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And what happens when it has enough users to be worth buying out and changing the ToS overnight? Not saying Tim would roll over but he and the other principled founders won’t live forever. So, thanks, but no thanks, decentralized is the only way to go.
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I also think it’s going to be much easier to get people to move from Facebook or Twitter to an instance of a decentralised social network than it will be to get them to move from FB or Twitter to another centralised one. A new centralised service, even one as well thought out as MeWe, is still going to be an unknown quantity and selling it will require a broad-based marketing effort aimed at individual users.
In contrast, if an already trusted on-line brand (e.g. the New York Times) or institution (e.g. MIT) with regular visitors sets up an official instance of Mastadon and announces it to the user base it’s going to immediately sweep thousands of users into the larger federated network. The marketing effort in this case would thus be aimed at a much smaller group of organisations, urging them to increase the goodwill and loyalty of their users and visitors by providing them with access to a better alternative to Twitter.
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I signed up a few years ago when FB went after my burlesque friends that used stage names. They all went to Diaspora. I get a weekly highlights email from Diaspora showing people I follow are busy being social there on regular basis.
Edit: fixed typo
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o_O
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Thank you. 
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Glad to find out that Diaspora is alive and kicking. Had thought that it just shriveled up or something.
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“trafficked” also seems pretty ambiguous for that matter.
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Most visited, maybe, but not trafficked - nobody’s clandestinely carrying Googles across state or national borders to avoid tax/immigration checks/etc.
ETA: D’oh! @spatley made the point before me.
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I chortled. Keeping that one in the back pocket.
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