[kakarot]

Ok, but what about the other 99% of the population who are too busy to completely learn ops and opsec? My mom isn't going to leave facebook to make her own website and host her own email, even if you give her all the tutorials in the world.

[andrewwharton]

No one said anything about hosting your own email or making your own website.

eg. My wife has a small business with an online store hosted on Shopify and her email provider is Gmail. But her website is www.her_domain.com and her email address is @her_domain.com.

She can easily switch out her providers and her contact addresses don't change. No real tech knowledge needed except for how to register a domain name and follow some how-to docs from Shopify and Gmail.

[nitemice]

I think this is the right attitude to take. It strikes the perfect balance between offloading your problems to the big guys, and keeping control if they decide to screw you over, or run off into the wild yonder.

That doesn't mean they couldn't still mess you up pretty bad. You'd want a pretty solid backup scheme, and you'll still have to accept the loss of some levels of privacy etc. but that might be worth it to you to subsidise cheap services, while still having an escape plan.

[fivestar]

They're already screwing us over--they took sides in the election and modified/molded content and search results in an attempt to push their agenda. That was evil.

[sumeno]

Registering a domain name may as well be magic to a large portion of the population.

[piaste]

Is it more complicated than buying and owning a car? A house? More complicated than filing your taxes, managing retirement savings, having a wedding, choosing insurance?

Learning the basics of something new, enough to get by, is part of being an adult, even if you won't ever be and have no interest in being an expert.

[sumeno]

Given the number of bad financial decisions people make because they don't really understand those things I'm not sure that those comparisons are helping your case, but even so, for a lot of people it IS more complicated than those things because they are afraid of technology in a way that they aren't afraid of tangible things.

Solving 99% of technical problems requires nothing more than Google and following instructions in the first result, but people still can't handle it. Most people haven't given running a website enough thought that they would even know what to look for. A good portion don't even really understand URLs enough to type facebook.com into the address bar instead of Googling Facebook and clicking the first result.

[thatwebdude]

I'm not sure those people are so willing to brand themselves online. If they are, they already have the capital to have someone else do it for them.

[Spivak]

The process of registering the domain behind the scenes might be a bit magic but buying one and pointing it at a hosting provider certainly isn't.

[mcbits]

You're ignoring (or overestimating) the enormous segment of the population who wouldn't even have an Internet presence if it didn't come with the phone, and getting the phone was already the one of the most mentally challenging things they've done in years.

[ajb]

Not really. I know people with zero tech knowledge who have done it. Anyone able to register a trademark. Art director, actors etc.

[mixmastamyk]

Right, and it's not like you couldn't ask a technical friend to get it done.

[sumeno]

I'm not an advocate for anything that results in even more people bugging me to do "computer stuff" for them

[kakarot]

I've read all of your comments in my subthread and I agree with everything you've said. Especially this! It was immediately what came to mind but I hit my post count.

This problem of getting people to care about alternatives to Facebook seems to be something you've given a lot of thought as well. Mind if I ask what field you work in?

[eeZah7Ux]

The are being paid to do so. Also they see it as part of the job.

[mondoshawan]

So what can we do to make this simpler? Make the technology easier to understand?

[sumeno]

You could provide a one stop shop for sharing information with the people you care about that is easy enough to use that even people who are afraid of technology can handle it... also everyone they know needs to already be on it... but then you just created Facebook.

The ease of use is only one part of the problem, the other part is that you are trying to solve a problem that a lot of people who use Facebook just don't care about. Facebook fills their need and they really don't care about walled gardens or open internet or whatever else the HN crowd views as a dire issue.

[MiddleEndian]

I do this as well for my personal email. It's good to decouple your front end from your back end.

The main concern I still have is that I'd lose gchat if I swapped out my email host from Google apps.

[sjg007]

Website in a box (docker), put it wherever. This might be a good idea.

[JustSomeNobody]

Yes. But by website in a box, it would have to be as dirt simple as signing up for FB.

So, gramma goes to a web page, clicks the signup, the website deploys a docker image on a webhost and spins up a UI that is not unlike what she is already used to.

Next, comment and "likes". You have to have a comment system that runs on there also. Gramma would invite others to her site by clicking invite. This would generate a specific invite signature for that person and would email it out (gramma would need to know Uncle Fred's email; sorry gramma). Uncle Fred would click the link and be taken to gramma's sight and can comment. All comments stay on gramma's sight. All gramma's content, period, stay's on gramma's sight.

How does one monetize, however?

[piaste]

There are some docker images on DockerHub which are very polished along those lines. OwnCloud for storage, Ghost for blogging. You run them with default settings and they open to a nice welcome page with a tutorial and a fully-functional setup.

With a docker UI like Kitematic, it's remarkably similar to an app store experience.

[gagege]

To monetize you could make referral deals with web hosts. I assume this setup means that gramma is paying the web host a fee.

[sumeno]

Why would my mother do that instead of just using Facebook which is already there and already had all of her friends and family on it?

[a1exyz]

She wouldn't. But there are many people who don't like Facebook for privacy reasons or other reasons mentioned in this sub-thread. They might opt for such a service. And then it would grow organically if the experience/total package really was more in line what people want out of a web presence. Its not like the whole world would switch overnight

[mirimir]

Because maybe Facebook nukes her account, for whatever reason.

[nextlevelwizard]

When has this actually happened? And by this I mean that out of nowhere Facebook suddenly has deleted someone's page and then not restored it?

I get what you are suggesting, but I can't help but to think you are making this way bigger issue than it actually is.

Also all of you are missing the most obvious point: if it hasn't happened to a lot (and I mean literally more than 10-20% of user base) it is not a significant risk and thus spending extra effort for literally no gain (and actually probably more of a loss in views/users/buyers/whatever) is not worth paying someone to design you a website and paying for updates and then A) paying for (yet another) 3rd party company to host your website B) learning how to setup, host, update, and maintain your own website.

I'm sure most of people on this site could easily setup their own website and run it wherever, but the reason why people are paying you to do such things for living means that most people can't be bothered to learn all the necessary skills.

[angus-prune]

Facebook's real name policy affects some people lots more than others - particularly lgbt people, and sex workers.

I'd guess that amongst my friendship group around 5-10% of people have been affected by this. This is disproportionately high - a suburban soccer mom is far more likely to never see anyone have problems with their fb account. But amongst certain populations this is a real problem and can put people at risk.

Fb has decided that the increase in value from 99% of users is worth the pain for 1%, and that the network effect will keep the 1% in line. They're probably right. On the other hand, fb got a foothold in the market through 1% of the population who are college students, an alternative social network could get a foothold through the queer or other communities that fb is ignoring.

[interfixus]

Good luck posting some controversial point of view on Facebook or similar platforms. They'll axe you in the blink of an eye.

It's real. It happens all the time. I have seen it again and again.

[dajt]

I may have a business one day that sells bits for model steam locos. Many people who are likely to be my customers belong to a facebook group, and probably don't use their PCs much except for facebook and e-mail.

And if I needed to post a controversial point of view on my model steam loco business page, I've got bigger problems than facebook.

I can't stand facebook, but for my purposes it is probably the cheapest, most direct, and low effort way for those people to get to me. It's also probably pretty low effort on my part.

The business would never be more than a cottage industry and I certainly wouldn't want to spend ANY money on IT that I could avoid.

Anyone here offering to donate their time to keep all my IT in order for the same cost I can do it with facebook, and give me the exposure it will to my potential customers?

If so I'll give you my gmail address to get in contact ;)

[s73ver]

You're going to need to show examples for people being banned for JUST posting a controversial point of view. Most of the time I hear this, it wasn't for the point of view, but because the person was actually breaking the ToS, and they knew it.

[kakarot]

What happened for me was that people stopped seeing my controversial posts to the point where the only reason I still had facebook, which was to discuss tech, philosophy, and politics with the masses, became void.

That was an awakening moment for me. Promptly deleted the damned thing and every other social media account I had. Technological echo chambers are going to do so much harm to society.

[qrbLPHiKpiux]

It happened here http://www.optimizationtoday.com/social-media/what-i-learned...

[mirimir]

I was thinking of this recent post: http://www.optimizationtoday.com/social-media/what-i-learned...

Searching "facebook blocked" suggests that it's a common problem.

[NoGravitas]

> When has this actually happened?

It happened to a lot of Facebook meme pages.[0]

[0]: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/the-zuckening-mark-zuckerbe...

[_pmf_]

> When has this actually happened?

Germany and France do this regularly for what they consider "hate speech" (for example retweeting newspaper articles about attacks by migrants). Germany has just installed a law that allows imposing multi million EUR fines on companies for repeatedly violating requests to delete user content that violates these fuzzy criteria.

There's a huge influx of German users to gab.ai because of this.

[nextlevelwizard]

How would this be any different on self hosted platform

[StephenConnell]

I am an advocate of having your own domain and having control. But most people don't care as much as the hacker news crowd does. "Phone broke, here is my new number..." really? For business it's critical to maintain any form of communication you have ever offered. But for personal, a lot of people don't care if they change their [email] and inconvenience their friends and family.

The internet is not crucial to everyones daily life. And honestly, it probably shouldn't be as crucial to ours.

[kakarot]

I like the idea, but the goal would be to make configuration, deployment, maintenance, and good security as easy as possible. So easy that you don't have to touch a command line. Mind expanding on the idea a bit?

[zakki]

I think It is time to reinstate geocities.

[livingparadox]

You might be interested in its spiritual successor neocities, then

https://neocities.org/

[kyledrake]

And the founder of Neocities thinks it's time to instate a distributed web https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2015/09/08/its-time-for-the-...

[it_learnses]

ok how will neocities or anybody hosting a node be compensated? How will the artists whose works are being distributed in this manner be compensated?

[synicalx]

So, Wordpress basically?

[thoaionline]

That's a fine business idea.