[Alex3917]

> Building a better product isn't the issue, it's convincing people to use it.

Calacanis should just fund one of the 100+ alternatives that already exist, but don't yet have a critical mass of users. Funding someone to write new software for something that not only could, but should be bootstrapped is unlikely to produce anything viable.

[dane-pgp]

Or fund lobbying of (probably EU) politicians to write a law forcing Facebook to interoperate with the 100+ alternatives that already exist, using OAuth / OpenID Connect and W3C social networking standards.

Once people can have all the benefit of Facebook (i.e. mutual visibility with Facebook users) without having their data stored on Facebook's servers, or their experience controlled by Facebook's UI, then Facebook will quickly diminish in relevance.

[mvid]

Won’t this work the opposite way as well? Facebook will be free to ingest all of the data from the smaller social networks

[dane-pgp]

They're already free to do this in theory with social network sites that don't require logins to see people's data (i.e. Twitter clones), but hopefully the EU's GDPR would make it easy to bring a case against Facebook if they were using the ingested data for any purpose other than supporting their own users.

The competing social network would probably need to have a privacy policy saying that other sites can ingest their data only if the remote user's "friend request" is accepted by the local user, and the data can only be ingested for a set of prescribed purposes.