[virusduck]

The main use case some of my family members use it for is sharing pictures. I'm not keen on putting my children's pictures on a pseudo-public social network, so we make very ample use of Apple Photos. It won't work for everyone, but the people in my family who care (even the >80yo members) have iPhones and are capable of operating the Photos app. The nice thing is that there is commenting functionality and the shared albums don't count against your storage quota (AFAICT).

I also tried Slack initially, with no real success.

[simonhamp]

I've done much the same. I think ultimately when there's a solution that allows you to easily set up your own reliable 'self-hosted' solution, that will be the way to go.

Not sure if anyone has done anything like that yet.

Personal-private social networks (ultimate federation) could be the start of some really interesting innovations around proof of identity and ownership of (and ultimate value-generation from) data.

I'd love to have a tool that was able to collect data that I think would be useful/that I'm prepared to collect and may choose to share, either for me directly to reuse or as a more tangible thing that I could share as I choose.

For example, imagine collecting your browsing data in on a system that you control, completely private and secure by design but that allowed/provided tools for you to sell (safely) that data to companies. They'd get the data at a fair price, and you'd take an active part in the transaction instead of being a gormless observer as Google/Facebook sell it.

A tool to give _you_ the power to extract the value out of _your_ data.

And a platform to enable the kind of companies that have been paying billions to the likes of Google and Facebook to send a portion of it directly to you.

I find this idea quite compelling.

[virusduck]

I mentioned in another comment that ages ago I used to be cool and host my own photo sharing using Gallery [0]. I went by the website, and turns out they put the project to bed in 2014. The codebase for the latest version (which I never liked quite as much as the older ones) is still around [1] if anybody wants to move it forward. Oh, the nostalgia!

[0] http://galleryproject.org/

[1] https://github.com/gallery/gallery3

[jimeh]

Personally I use Google Photos for that. It's better than Apple Photos cause there's native apps for both iOS and Android, and its web-interface is just as fully featured as the native apps, unlike Apple Photos' web interface that's kind of just a stripped down stream of recently added photos.

[virusduck]

Yeah, that is a good solution too. I have tried to avoid Google Photos for some of the same reasons I avoid FB, but I think it is still a huge improvement over FB. Although Gphotos is not too hard to set up, I was compelled when my 82 year old aunt could figure out the stock Photos app herself. No Google account required.

Also, you can view iCloud photo albums over the web too (although I don't think you can comment if you're not loggid in / on a iP([ao]d|hone)!

Back in the pre-FB era, I used the PHP Gallery app. It was so hot at the time--I was the only one with a photo sharing site at my own domain.

For a sort of intermediate approach, there is also Nextcloud Gallery for folks who want their stuff hosted on their terms but with (modern-ish) access and sharing controls. There's also iOS and Android Apps

[irongeek]

IMO, if you really are worried about Facebook you should be equally worried about Google.

[dplgk]

Email?