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0 pointsclusterfish5y ago0 comments

A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational.

Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There isn't one.

Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?

Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure out an alternative solution, but all we have are experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't have to be useful.

Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of beating them at our own game.

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9 comments · 5 top-level

pbowyer5y ago· 2 in thread

> A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational.

I like trains, and I started a website back in 2001 for people to share their photos. It was reasonably popular. One of my drivers was taxonomy and archiving of images for future enthusiasts.

Today, it's dead. People post their photos on Facebook groups. They get attention, likes - all the stuff that matters to a human. A week later the photos are lost in the group, hard for anyone to find, no indexing, no exposure. The comments - from people who worked on the railways, knew people involved - useful to historians of the future, are fantastic. But if you can't find them, what point?

I get why Facebooks succeeded. For my site, I was a total geek: why would I dirty the site with anything social? Well, look who's laughing now.

DebtDeflation5y ago

>People post their photos on Facebook groups. They get attention, likes - all the stuff that matters to a human. A week later the photos are lost in the group, hard for anyone to find, no indexing, no exposure.

Not even a week if you consider the target audience for what's posted as opposed to the poster. Algorithmic sorting and infinity scrolling have pretty much eliminated the ability to go back and look at something you saw a few days ago (unless the algorithm decides to boost it back into your feed).

gorgoiler5y ago

I haven’t seen your train site, but the kind of content I imagine you produce would be, in my mind, akin to a reference book.

By contrast, Facebook is at best like a magazine, at worst a radio phone-in about trains.

Reference works in the form of websites have amazing value in and of themselves. I don’t think they need to be measured by social eyeballs when they attain an outright high level of quality.

I happen to be particularly fond of a reference website that is a taxonomy and history of British traffic lights:

https://beno.uk/trafficlight/

zrm5y ago· 2 in thread

> Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?

Newsfeed is RSS/Atom.

Identity / friends / followers are really one package, and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own, because people want the ability to do password resets etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the opposite of this anyway -- people don't want to use the same "identity" for their parents and their friends and their boss.

The best way to do this is for sites to use email as identity, because it's common and gives you password resets, but people can create more than one and separate them as they like.

Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent takes several hours to get running. Which we could fix, but haven't (yet).

clusterfishOP5y ago

Sure RSS exists, and I use it, but it's not even built-in to (most) browsers anymore. You open an RSS link in the browser and it spits out XML garbage. Wat.

RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article to your friends, etc.

JetSpiegel5y ago

That's because Google Reader existed, then they killed Google Reader.

ActivityPub solves most RSS limitations.

dredmorbius5y ago

Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?

Because these compete with the interests of browser vendors, interests which finance a degree of development that dominates and ultimately stifles independent efforts.

Remember that Google pitched Google+ as an "identity service". They're now accomplishing this through Android, Doubleclick, GA, Gmail, and ReCaptcha, far more effectively. And sell ads on it.

Facebook isn't going to pay for social integration development by Mozilla: Zuck wants that pie to himself.

Channel monopolies would prefer RSS died and browsers (or apps) served their specific feed directly and exclusively.

Avicebron5y ago

More often than not, the "game" trends toward market capture and acquire + kill or absorb business strategies. At a certain size that's hard for anyone to beat.

petre5y ago

That's part of the problem: readers became followers. Don't forget to like and subscribe.

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