[denimalpaca]

The author makes a decent point about what drove membership to Facebook in the first place - the "cool" aspect via exclusivity and cool kids leading the charge to make the switch. But he completely misses why having a personal webpage is completely different from Facebook or Myspace or even Tumblr and Reddit - the aspect of community. It's not just about sharing, it's about the "strong connections" vs "weak connections" of finding content within a community; this is simply not something that would exist if everyone had their own page. Almost by definition it wouldn't be a community - in a weird way it's as if the internet alone is too big to allow all these individuals to have a balance of strong and weak connections. What's needed are these pages that establish community rules, and not just "in group" and "out group" dynamics. Myspace had the bulletin board and a Top 8 which gave it some sort of culture; Facebook has the standardized news feed and Apple-esque one-size-fits-all profile structure. A rag-tag libertarian group of individual websites, no matter how many there are (and there are already plenty), are not going to establish the same sense of community because they won't foster a community culture.

Yes, I agree we should move away from Facebook, but the answer has to be a better culture. So far from my prowling of alternatives, my only conclusion is that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution because that's exactly what Facebook is trying to do by catering to lowest-common-denominator of culture in the most powerful (psychologically) way: allowing content that gets the most clicks. It's tautological. What we need isn't to break up Facebook or wait for a disruptive alternative, what we need is a better sense of the internet as groups of communities, of which you should be a member of several.