The one thing missing from the fediverse (or why Facebook is not going anywhere anytime soon).
The one thing missing from the fediverse (or why Facebook is not going anywhere anytime soon).
I know this has been a regular topic of discussion lately, as Facebook users are looking for alternatives, but there is a harsh reality I think netizens of the fediverse need to acknowledge that will keep the majority of Facebook users locked in. That is the personal social graph that Facebook has built up for users over the years. No other site on the web has a way to find nearly anyone you have ever known, from high school friends to long lost family members. The reason for this is because of the format of Facebook being "you" on the web. Your profile is your name, your personal info, and it is even linked to your phone number and contacts, making social networking incredibly easy.
The closest that exists for this on the fediverse is Friendica, but it is more of a reddit/twitter hybrid imo, and while you can make your profile page personal, the posts you make will go to the entire fediverse. This lack of privacy and tailoring of your messages to a particular audience is what is going to make Facebook unbeatable for the foreseeable future. People want alternatives, but these alternatives simply do not exist.
I would be very curious to hear about efforts to make sites on the fediverse more personalized and enabling of people to control their audience, because this (along with improving user experience) is the biggest thing I think is keeping people from making the switch.
On the other hand I've seen a few people delete their profile regardless. Some of them very recently after the latest announcements.
Plus there is an exodus from X/Twitter currently taking place. Bluesky can do it, so it's possible. And it has happened before. I still remember the times before Facebook and other platforms. They're all big and inevitable. Until they're not...
But with that said. Sure. This kind of lock-in and high switching costs are a big problem for (new) platforms. It's called the "network effect".
How can we help the network effect along though? Right now, we're paddling upstream, because there is really no system in place for making a private circle that you can post updates to. Yea there's private group chats, but I'm not going to set up a private group chat with this dude I went to high school with 20 years ago, just to show him my kid. We need a way to just add people we know, and show those people we know (and only those people we know) our life updates. That is, in simplest terms, the value facebook provides, which does not exist on the fediverse right now.
Hmmh, the network effect is the opposite side. It's the effect that binds people to platforms. Platforms are just as useful as the network of people they connect you to. We need to overcome the network effect here.
And that's really, really hard. I mean look at how Bluesky does it. They invest a lot of money to make it possible. They waited for the right moment and sort of caught their competition with their pants down. Furthermore, they did some marketing stunts like the invite-only period to hype their own product. And have journalists and influencers talk about it.
The product needs to be excellent. And even that's not enough. If you're as good as the competition, or just slightly better... There isn't really an incentive for people to switch. Companies like Google fail at inventing a product that competes with Facebook.
Ultimately, I don't see a good way of competing with social media platforms. People just don't care about their privacy, so that's not something you can win them over with. And even if their platform is operated by a bad person like Elon Musk, and has a really toxic atmosphere for better part of the last decade... The majority still doesn't really care. It took him (Musk) to deliberately run X into a brick wall to get things going. Something like Reddit taking away user freedom, clamping down on all kinds of things, selling user data etc doesn't do much in that context.
I'm a bit disheartened as you can tell. I'm always advocating for Free Software, more ethical alternatives and for people to care about their freedom. But in my experience that's a niche thing. I don't really get through to regular people. I kind of make the best of it. I have a profile on the Fediverse. If people want to talk to me, they can come here and talk to me. But yeah, that does away with my high school friends.
Edit: And by the way, are you sure Friendica posts go to the whole Fediverse all the times? They have groups and privacy features. If these features are implemented well, they shoud stop your posts from propagating to arbitrary places.
I remember the steady turnover of social media networks leading up to Facebook—the joke was that kids would migrate to a new platform every time their parents joined their current one. I think there’s a kernel of truth there that’s still a potential weak point on Facebook: people want to have distinct, non-overlapping online personas for different social groups (family, work, friends, etc) without the overhead of maintaining multiple accounts. That seems like an avenue a potential fediverse Facebook alternative might exploit.
Kids aren't on Facebook nowadays. It's definitely an "old person thing" for them
That's somewhat of a myth. 43% of Facebook users are under 34, and nearly 20% of them are under 24.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187549/facebook-distribution-of-users-age-group-usa/
The generational divide is just one instance of a broader phenomenon—similar divisions exist in adults between our constructed personas for family, work, friends, interest groups, etc.
I think an option on login for "personal account" vs "anonymous account" would be great. Personal accounts could require a phone number and allow import of contacts to help find personal accounts you know. There is a so much untapped potential here, we just need to make it a thing.
Or maybe a server that lets you create multiple, “connected” accounts at the same time, together with a client that combines the accounts into one view.
I suspect the large majority of people who use the Fediverse don't want to be publicly trackable in this way. It would be fine for me if the people who did stayed on Facebook. To me, it's not a goal that 100% (or any %) of Facebook users move to the Fediverse. What is important is just that the Fediverse has a critical mass of activity that it doesn't completely die.
Also, maybe it's just me (I'd be interested to hear what others think) but I think trying to track down old school or college friends is really something people only want to do for a few years. By the time I hit my mid 20s I didn't really care anymore. There are people from school I sometimes think about and wonder where they are now, but ultimately, if I never tracked them down and they never tracked me down in the years since, the connection was clearly not that important.
It may be true that a large number of current users do not want to be publicly trackable. To be clear, I am not saying that all of the fediverse should be public personal profiles. However, the people on Facebook who want alternatives are going to be sorely disappointed. It's not so much of meeting a goal as it is fulfilling a need. People want this, and it would be good for society if they had it. The infrastructure is here, it's just a matter of building it.
On the second point, I'm in my late 30's and have found a great deal of value with connecting with my friends and family. I was disconnected for a lot of years and it was extremely socially isolating. Reconnecting has been therapeutic for me, and it is one of the big reasons I will probably not be deleting my Facebook any time soon.
Recently i’ve been wondering if that is even a thing anyone wants. Being connected to everyone I’ve ever known — for me Facebook stopped being a place I posted on around when my graph exploded to everyone.
I mean, that's good if you don't want that, but I think a lot of people do. I abandoned facebook in 2017, but returned in 2022, and realized how out of touch I had become with everyone. I have friends, aunts, uncles, siblings, etc all added, and it is always nice to see what they're up to. If you don't want to keep in touch with people, then I guess I can see why you would not value that functionality and be fine with Friendica as is, but I think it is something a lot of people are looking for, and I would argue one of the primary values that social media provides to society.
Yeah we know. But it's not really anything we can directly control, it just has to organically go viral. Marketing would help, but isn't guaranteed.
I'm saying the reason it is not going viral is for the exact reasons I mentioned. The reason facebook went viral in the first place. We need either a potential modification of sites like friendica to make it more linked to your social graph (i.e., import contacts to find users, require proper names so people can find you, etc), or we need a new fediverse platform to come along that does that. So I would argue we can directly control it, by implementing these features that would make these networks valuable to most people.
Leave Facebook for a month. Tell people how to reach you on there before you go. You'll forget why you ever went to that site.
I just lost my cat. I made a post about it. Dozens of people who would have never heard about it otherwise reached out to me to comfort me. Sorry, but I don't think I'm going to forget about how helpful that level of connection is.
I recently adopted a pet, and I keep wondering which new social media can replace what facebook offers to animal shelters and other charity orgs. Like, so long as they get that stream of donations, adoptions, and volunteers directly from facebook, they aren't leaving without hurting their #1 priority.
but there is a harsh reality I think netizens of the fediverse need to acknowledge that will keep the majority of Facebook users locked in.
Would that be a bad thing?
Considering one of the biggest values that social media provides to society is being able to connect with friends and family....yes?
The exact reason I've never had a facebook account.
If you're worth knowing, people naturally keep in touch.
This is a very ten years ago argument, with facebook being you on the internet.
At any rate, facebook specifically, along with google, taught us that you should never be yourself on the internet, or at least only be some piece of you. Anything else is amateur shit.
What does look interesting is FUTO ID, a way to allegedly verify your identity securely. Might be a nice keypass for other fully or quasi anonymous things online. We'll need to imagine something good going forward, not copy something bad.
I'm gonna have to disagree. Today, I am able to keep up with the goings on of my friends and family on Facebook. This is not a ten years ago thing. Nowhere else on the web can I log in and see my friend from high school posting a funny meme, a colleague post a picture of his family, or my mom wishing my brother and his wife happy anniversary. You may not use it for that, but many people do, and I don't know how you could call that a bad thing. Isn't social connection what social media is all about? Why would we want to not accommodate that as much as possible?
Maybe it's just me, but that always struck me as a theater of connection, not actual connection. I know all my friends kids, even those who live abroad. Not because of an internet social network, but because we actually talk to each other on the regular, and share pictures and video calls, directly, personally. Not informally and creepily through a capricious algorithm. My good wishes to my friends and family on special occasions go directly to them, we don't need a middle man to choose when and where they are going to see those things, and I don't need to perform connection for people I barely talk to. Remember that the flip side of the coin is that social networks cause isolation by making all interactions feel impersonal and distant. Facebook literally caused a loneliness crisis amongst young people, who felt compelled to compete for attention and approval, distorting their expectations, altering their sense of self-worth, exposing them to abuse. Internet social networks have a very dark side.
Imagine being able to post only to Alice, Bob and Carol and nobody else ever laying their eyes on the post. Not in the Fediverse, not outside the Fediverse.
Imagine only Alice, Bob and Carol being able to reply to your posts, but all three being able to see and reply to each other's replies.
Imagine being able to define groups of connections with which you can do the above.
Sounds like utopian science-fiction. Is reality.
Hubzilla (official website), a Friendica fork by Friendica's own creator, offers literally what I've described above. It has since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has been around.
If you want something more lightweight with not quite such a steep learning curve, there's also (streams) (code repository from 2021 from the same creator, the result of a whole series of forks. Similar advanced and fine-grained permissions system, but somewhat easier to use.
Very interesting. I have heard of hubzilla, but never really checked it out. I will be looking into it now, thanks!