Services that deliver the same functions as Facebook, for after you #DeleteFacebook

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YOU DON’T WANT TO CHOOSE NEXTDOOR

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

Trust me on this. They want you to do the data entry to compile a list of everyone everywhere for them. You are the product obviously, but aside from “partnerships” with cities and law enforcement everywhere, it isn’t clear who the customer is. Someone who wants highly-accurate lists of people and where they live, compiled by their own friends and neighbors. Lists of people who seem to wield the most influence in a particular community.

It gets worse. Aside from endless complaints about how badly individual neighborhood groups are run (sometimes by volunteers, sometimes admins are picked randomly!), a bigger problem lies with the Nextdoor staff. They are meddlers, micro-managers and king-makers. Whether they treat you politely, or treat you like scum depends on the private “influencer” score they have on you.

This scenario I know very well involves a group of neighbors launching a new, uncensored group to replace the Yahoo group run by the neighborhood association, where a small group treated it like their private country club. Nextdoor gets lots of these, from people who want to have public discussions out of the control of their HOA, rental management company, etc. There are several accounts of Nextdoor telling these groups that they understood the situation and would protect them. Then, after their period of healthy, booming growth ends, they kick the admins off and appoint volunteers from those HOAs, mgt, NA, etc.

You’re probably thinking “well, that sucks, yeah”, but think about it. What if you had a website, facebook group, or some other forum. You worked hard to get 400+ of your neighbors to join up and make it their daily place to stop by and chat. Then, someone seizes your site and continues running it IN YOUR PLACE, but they delete everything they don’t like, and they have center ring for all those eyes. And, sigh most of the neighbors won’t really care.

Open up your browser to your favorite search engine; almost any one will do. Search for “dawson seized” and pick the top response.

Does it match this link? Yes, it does!

These creatures will fcuk with you at their pleasure. They’ll muzzle you so you can’t tell the rest of the community what they’re doing to you. They’ll baffle you with their ambiguous “guidelines” the way teen-agers argue with their parents. Most of all, don’t ever let them catch you “questioning intentions”. I mean, yeah they can do it all they want. But, you can’t. And if they don’t like you, they can ignore when someone does this to you, and you object. On the same grounds. Ahem.

The website was literally founded by a bunch of guys pulled together by an “angel investor” group. They took on, but then cancelled the project with the original guys who built the early software. All of a sudden, an identical one, with the seized domain name, took it’s place!
Nextdoor Sued by Original Founders for Theft of Trade Secrets

AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID

Like Facebook, they have a hard-to-find “deactivate” link which simply locks you out while leaving your data visible. And, they have an impossible-to-find “delete” link which maybe hides your shti too.

SiteJabber – Nextdoor Reviews – another group handed over to HOA by Nextdoor, too.
Ex-Employe Reviews of Nextdoor on Glassdoor
BBB Business Review – NOT accredited
Facebook – BoycottNextdoor
InsideNextdoor – Forum for Ex-Leads
Take the Nextdoor Users Experience Survey
Vallejo Inependent Bulletin
Streetfight Mag “Where Privacy is a Double-Edged Sword” (esp see comments)
Nextdoor.com Inc. Corporate Neighborhoods

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So now I’ll need Signal for messaging some people, GroupMe for others, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, IRC for others (how many did I forget?). If only there were some unified consistent protocol so that all that jabber could be dealt with by the app of your choice, in one consistent interface.

And for news, do we really need another app for that? If only there were some really simple syndication method…

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I could delete my Facebook account and not miss it.
But how long until a bot profile appears with my name? And possibly using images sourced from my past FB profile?
(I am from a culture where most people, including myself, have unique names so this is a real concern.)

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https://www.facebook.com/welcome.vk/

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Unfortunately, after we #deletefacebook, we also need to #stopusinggoogle. Even though they presumably didn’t hand over 50 million people to CA, their privacy practices are, far as I can tell, worse than Facebook’s, and they collect far more data. For a large fraction of the population, all their emails + all their searches + all their work documents + all their movements.

So - ditching Facebook is only the first step, after that everybody needs to drop Google.

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Wikipedia:

In June 2014 Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor.com, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor, after being charged with felony hit-and-run, and was sentenced to 30 days in county jail and a fine of $239 for fleeing a crash that left a woman injured on U.S. Route 101 in Brisbane, California.[25][26][27] “It’s ironic that the CEO of a company that is holding itself out as trying to promote neighborliness, crime watch and things like that flees the scene of an accident that he caused and doesn’t bother to call 911 or stay around to exchange information or see if he caused any injuries,” said the woman’s attorney, Joseph Brent.[26] Tolia said, “I am relieved that after further examination of the facts, the DA reduced the charge to a misdemeanor and that Thursday’s hearing brought the matter to a close.”[28]

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Like/follow/tweet, subscribe, etc me on Titter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, google+, Youtube, Tumblr, Snapchat…

Yep, aint never gonna happen.

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Actually, open source alone is not an effective solution. As long as there are centralized servers, it will suffer from many of the same defects (this is where mastodon and some of the other similar replacements fail).

It needs to be:

  • Open source
  • Peer to Peer
  • Encrypted

With these three things, you can escape-- possibly-- the fundamental flaws inherent in anything like facebook. This also avoids the server liability issue, and the expense issue, since everyone runs their own server.

This does make “Find your FRIENDS!” harder, and can be attacked by those with bad intent. But the former is overstated (and impossible without grotesquely violating privacy), and the latter we already have; it wouldn’t be any worse in an open P2P network. It might even get better, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

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I got kicked off Nextdoor for not using my real name shortly after I complained about a nuclear research company moving into the neighborhood.

They said my “neighbors” reported me. If you want neighbors reporting on neighbor, this app is for you.

For the time I was on nextdoor, I saw more law enforcement “rat on your neighbor” type posts than anything. Also lots of posts about installing neighborhood spy camera’s to help the police.

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It would be pretty awesome if somebody wrote an app that tied them all together with a nice seamless interface. Easy access, with balkanization of data on the back end FTW!

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I tried the links suggested as facebook alternatives and all seem to be financed in the same manner as facebook, so they are all equally dubious to me. Nexdoor is the one that raised the higher alarm signal to me, as they give absolutely no information about what to expect AND insisted on verifying my name and address for registration. Even facebook does not do that. They would even send me snail mail at their cost to check my address. Why would I trust a company that is so eager to know my name an address that they are ready to spend the price of postage for the vague promise that I could be interested?

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Mastodon isn’t centralized, it’s federated. It’s essentially a fork of GNU social. There are definitely a boat-load of people on the flagship mastodon.social instance, but it’s far from the only server out there, and they all talk to each other using the open ActivityPub standard.

Speaking realistically, every single person on the planet operating their own web infrastructure just to get an invite to their cousin’s pool party next week is never going to happen. There will always be some degree of centralization and middle-men involved, whether it’s at the platform level (administering a public instance) or the service level (running the infrastructure, e.g. https://masto.host/ or https://maastodon.net/). Not everyone is going to want to - or even be capable of - learning Ruby on Rails, React.js, and the finer points of modern (overly-complicated) web application deployment. Hell, I am a web developer, and even I don’t want to deal with screwing around with that crap just to look at other people’s cat photos. Nor is everyone going to be able to afford to shell out money for hosting their own personal services.

I think Mastodon serves as a “good-enough” replacement for Twitter by striking the sweet spot between ease-of-use and Open Source Orthodoxy. Diaspora wanted so badly to be the free and open-source alt-Facebook, but I think it fell apart for the same reason other long-time open-source social media projects like GNU social never broke into the mainstream: they never made it simple enough for not-tech-enthusiasts to use or understand. (It also still does nowhere near as much as Facebook does, from what I can tell, making it even less of an attractive alternative. It just looks like a long-form, threaded Twitter with a bunch of needless jargon - they’re called “seeds”, not “accounts”! We’re different!)

Incidentally, trying to emphasize to the Mastodon devs just how intimidating/confusing/unclear/unfamiliar the mechanics of distributed social networking are for most people has been a long slog for me and others over there. As recently as last month, the Joe Public-oriented joinmastodon.org just had a wall of jargon and a massive, unsorted list of instances as the “get started” point. It’s certainly better now, though I still vocally disagree with that site’s assertion that you can “easily deploy your own”. Most people using Facebook/Twitter couldn’t even install WordPress, and it’s famously simple to do so. You’d lose most of them at “FTP”. Mastodon’s installation instructions have you diving into SSH as literally the first step. There’s still something of a fundamental disconnect between how tech-heads perceive software and how everyday people perceive it. Expecting everyone to be able to understand the code and run their own infrastructure as a prerequisite to eliminating massive corporate control over the social web is failing before you even get started.

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It’s really frustrating. That’s why I think the best course would be for some of the services mentioned to make their own easy way for non-tech people to sign up for the open-source alternatives to FB or Twitter. Run a Diaspora “pod” on Nuzzel and invite users to join it; drop a Mastadon instance into GroupMe and invite users to join it. Explain what they are in simple terms, make the sign-up simple (if not integrated into the company’s main service), explain that the accounts can be used on other services and connect to other users once created, and tell users they won’t have to worry about SSH or FTP or the like.

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I’d be in favor of a social media alternative which sticks it’s tentacles into the other ones bidirectionally, so that it bridges the gap between the variety your friends & family use. I know Diaspora plug-ins do this, but I believe it’s just one-way?

It could add a layer of privacy & control while being your one place to interact with all the rest. It would masquerade as a human user so the other social media platforms are none-the-wiser. There are some partial examples of this in the form of marketing management software such as Hootsuite, but of course, not be so baffling and ugly as those.

It might exist in the form of a browser plugin or stand alone app to support a federated network, but you’d have to leave your PC on 24/7 - if you even own one these days. Cloud hosts could give power users a two-click solution to launching their own droplet, and then you could admin it via web interface from then on.

Your social network would remain intact in the event one or more of the external networks (FB, Twitter, etc.) shuts down. :star_struck:

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So everyone has to be a full-stack web developer, skilled in multiple programming languages, linux system administration, devops, all of the frameworks of the week, compiling source, deploying to different environments, maintenance and security, database administration, scalability and performance, resolving dependency conflicts, etc.? And they’re going to do that in their spare time rather than use a free service that requires none of that?

I second that!

And if some company does come out with a nice simple solution in a black box (something as simple as a router - plug it in, push the power switch, and you’re ready to go. If you want more control you can learn to configure it.), then that one company that controls all those boxes will control everything. And that puts us right back where we started.

Even if it could be as simple as running a BBS was back in the day, that’s not simple enough that most people would do it, and it’s not likely to ever be that simple again.

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That’s a straw-man argument. That’s like saying you need to know C++ to run MS Word. I’ve got Wordpress running in my hosting space, and it’s a one-click install. Something similar could be done with a distributed social-networking package.

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That idea has a certain appeal to me, but wouldn’t it end up with not just Facebook having all your information, but all the other networks your third-party doohickey interfaces with?

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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/27/open_source_takes_on_facebook/

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39

A more accurate analogy would be that you’re advocating for people to switch from Windows and Word to Linux and OpenOffice. Sure, you can do that, but there are underlying, ongoing opportunity costs to doing so that keep the overwhelming majority of people from making that leap. Is it The Year of The Linux Desktop yet?

Social media software is also much more complex than WordPress’s “one-click” install, which, as I’ve already mentioned, millions if not billions of people simply do not have the aptitude, time, or money to install and maintain themselves (the “maintain” bit is super important… people were already so bad at updating their own personal machines that Microsoft pushed invasive forced updates onto everyone in Win10 to “fix” the problem. What makes you think all of these layfolk are going to be any more invested in installing WordPress security patches or Debian updates every few weeks?). To spin up a Mastodon instance, you need to be comfortable with the command line, Docker deployments, setting up AWS or some other cached storage service for media storage, redis, SQL, and on and on and on. This is why I continue to take serious issue with the “easily deploy your own” promise on joinmastodon.org. You can’t easily deploy your own unless you’re already comfortable with being a devops sysadmin. And even if Mastodon were to become a one-click deployment at low-cost shared hosting providers like DreamHost (which I think is unlikely, given the system requirements), that doesn’t mean everyone will jump on the “run your own server!” bandwagon. We already have that opportunity with WordPress, but it’s far from mainstream to run your own blog, even using wordpress.com’s “we’ll host it for you” model. Everyone just uses Tumblr or Facebook.

You will never get hundreds of millions of people to run their own infrastructure. Hell, I’d venture a guess that most people won’t even refill their own windshield wiper fluid. Asking them to spend time and money doing something that could just as easily be provided to them for free is a non-starter. Email remains the best example to emulate: lots of innovation and choice at the client level, built on top of an open protocol that both corporations and individuals can run themselves, depending on their comfort level. The best social media future you can probably hope for is to have a relatively small collection of large, general-purpose servers with a clear and transparent funding model providing services for everyday people, using a software platform that is capable of interfacing with everything from smaller interest- or business-specific servers to personal servers run by tech-heads who have the time and money to invest in running the full stack themselves.

“Open” is not a compelling argument for why you should use something like Mastodon over Twitter. It also has to provide at a bare minimum the same feature set as the thing you’re trying to get people to stop using, while also being dead simple to use and understand - especially when you’re building to critical mass. This is something that a crapton of open-source projects utterly fail at, because pretty much across the board, nobody in open source seems to give two shits about UX. To use one of the biggest open-source success stories out there: Firefox took off because it was better than IE in pretty much every way, not because the source code was available for you to compile yourself. It offered brand new features like tabbed browsing and an easy way of migrating from its then-dominant competitor, while also remaining fast, lightweight, and easy to use. Mozilla got lost up its own ass for a while by chasing the gearhead tech geeks who wanted complete control over every aspect of the application at the expense of bloat and complexity, and Chrome ate their lunch by delivering on the same things that Firefox had promised in the early 2000s: speed and ease-of-use. Mozilla seem to be turning the ship around a bit by focusing on those things again themselves, even if it makes the XUL nerds angry in the process. With good UX as a foundation, they’re ready to welcome people who might be getting disillusioned with Google’s panopticon, but you don’t make friends and influence people by sitting in a half-finished shell of an apartment building and shouting that all the normies living in their shiny gated penthouse suites should really come live with you because the manager doesn’t monitor your cable usage in exchange for lower rent.

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Hell supporting infrastructure ( or a very specific part of it ) was my day job for a long time and I have no interest in wrangling that stuff in my off hours too. So even those of us that know how are not necessarily wanting to roll our own.

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