This list could use substantially better editing. "Google Allo" should not be one of the alternatives for messaging, given that Google has announced its shutdown. eBay should be on the list of Marketplaces. And how are Digg and Tumblr alternatives to Facebook?
Ultimately, I don't think it's helpful to most users to throw a smorgasbord of possible vaguely-related alternatives at them. A more useful resource would be to take up the strategy of Wirecutter, in which the best and second-best options are highlighted, with actual explanations and thoughts. I think if you had to sit down and try to explain how Digg is a good alternative to Facebook to the average user, you'd realize how annoyed those users would be when they find that Digg is no such thing.
Almost every post about facebook has been marginally informative or complete nonsense. And yet, I see them here everyday. I keep wondering why?
"deletefacebook" is just so blinded by agenda that they can't see the list they provide actually makes facebook look good in comparison to everything they listed. Rather than getting facebook users to leave, it'll make them value facebook even more since there aren't any better alternatives - according to "deletefacebook".
They might as well create "QuitYourProgrammingJob.wiki" and then offer the following alternatives - coal miner, septic tank cleaner, bedpan replacer.
My wife makes all of her income through Facebook products. She's tried other platforms, and none of them were sustainable over Facebook and Instagram, partly because of the difficulty of building a following like the one she has on Instagram, partly because they market isn't using other products. For her, people walking away from Facebook or Instagram means losing her livelihood and giving up her dream job.
Facebook is also the place where we keep in touch with relatives living thousands of miles away from us, who are just technologically literate enough to get on Facebook and post, but not much else. We also met on Facebook, so we owe our entire relationship to the platform.
So for us, Facebook has done a lot of good, we rely on it for the nice life we have together, and it provides something that can't currently be replaced by other platforms.
It's great that you've been able to carve out a successful niche, but it's also an extremely tenuous one: at any time, minor policy changes by Facebook (even without malice) could destroy your livelihood. What's your plan for when that happens?
We appreciate the fact that influencers are susceptible to the tumultuous nature of social media, but most jobs come with the risk of your company suddenly tanking or letting you go. In a way, she works for the companies she's using to sell her products and generate revenue from, and I think that's ok.
Such an inaccurate description of the situation that you’re doing damage to this position. Facebook didn’t have adequate privacy disclosure when users logged into apps like Spotify which could then pull conversations to display in their UI.
She actually started on Etsy, but it basically paid nothing. Perhaps, the markets are just extremely fickle, but he following is primarily on Instagram and Facebook. She's trying to break into Youtube just to increase exposure, which I think is going reasonably well.
Email is a very solid way of maintaining contact with the people who are interested in your products, so I would encourage her to put strong emphasis on building a list if she hasn't already.
This could be helpful in the event that another channel fails.
Yeah unless your product is super unique, you still need to market outside of Etsy is the vibe I get. That's good, yeah YouTube and IG are pretty good for those kinda things, not sure of some of the other ones out there that are common for influencers. Might be worth looking at where people are getting paid to be influencers on and that might be a trail worth following.
I think that list really shows how strong Facebook is.
Twitter? That's even less private than fb. Reddit? Seriously, you want me to post my wedding pictures on Reddit?
And for events, who is going to invite friends and family to their birthday via Eventbrite? Doodle? It's not like we need to settle on a date for my birthday.
I haven't had a facebook account in many years and I don't miss it, but holy shit does this list just show how badly facebook needs an actual competitor.
Isn't there a happy medium somewhere? Where someone could use a facebook like model with ads to let users in for "free," but also accept payment for absolute privacy and content control.
Part of me thinks even if you made the best, most amazing platform it'd still be a gamble if you'd get the user adoption momentum necessary to be a serious competitor. Google couldn't do it.
I also wonder, if you got any traction whatsoever building a Facebook competitor, would they sue you for some kind of patent infringement? They'd definitely try to acquire you, and likely make it difficult to be successful if you didn't sell.
I guess Snap is an interesting case study here, but we can all read the writing on the wall.
Mastodon is doing very well in getting adoption - mostly from tech folks, but maybe/probably they'll pull people with them.
Facebook users in general seem a lot less tech oriented, so the initial push could be less.
Diaspora seems like a very well built-out alternative to Facebook in terms of features and speed (speed&cleanliness are much better).
However the network effect is of course a thing.
Maybe when Diaspora gets connected to the Fediverse via ActivityPub the Fediverse enthusiasts will tell their parents and grandparents to move over.
What problem are these "alternatives" addressing? If I'm concerned about privacy and data sharing, Twitter, Snapchat, and Tumblr don't seem like good candidates.
Diaspora and Mastodon are good alternatives (but are ironically not on this list). Both are federated solutions that let you set up your own instances, or use public ones.
It’s hard to see if any of these self-hosted or decentralized solution would ever take off. For a social app, you need to get your friends and also public figures to use the same thing for it to be worth using at all. If it is more complicated to use than Facebook or similar, it will probably never be adopted by general public. And if the general public actually got into the same app, it would then become a new target for attacks.
they're not decentralised in the sense that you seem to be implying. They're all federated, meaning that your data is situated on your own or a server of your choice, while the posts and users are still visible globally. You are not limited to only interact with people on your own instance, this is very much the point.
Diaspora allows for quite easy interaction with the mainstream social media apps as well. Also I haven't used diaspora much so I can't speak from experience there, but creating a mastodon account is no more complicated than signing up for twitter.
Yeah, I should definitely trust your broken website that can be made in 30 minutes with 24 blocked ad and tracking scripts and promoted on the fakest online community aka ProductHunt. Sounds very legit to me. This is exactly the type of bullshit that shouldn't be promoted on SHOW HN
You can always list alternatives for Facebook, but the problem comes in actually replacing it. Facebook isn't popular for being a well designed website, if you think about it, Facebook is a very bloated and clunky experience. Facebook is popular because that's what everyone uses.
I think the issue isn't about finding alternatives to it, it's convincing the people completely entangled in the Facebook ecosystem why they should jump ship. Another issue comes with, a number of people don't use Facebook, but they use Instagram, which is just a rebranding of the same evil at this point. Getting people to switch from that would prove tough.
Wasn’t that what people said about MySpace? And business analysts see weakness in fb for that reason too, they’re vulnerable. Just look at snap’s users leaving to see, stickiness works both ways: as soon as something better exists, people switch quickly
Well Nextdoor is a perfect alternative for all your racist relatives who just want to rant about poor people moving into their neighborhood. My whole family has accounts in several different areas of Pittsburgh and most of the posts are people taking pictures of someone walking past their house or parking on their street and asking "Does anyone know this guy? Does he even live here? I think they're planning on breaking into my house!!"
I joined Nextdoor thinking it would be cool to meet with local programmers and computer hobbyists. My first red flag was that apparently things involving computers are not a hobby in nextdoor. The second red flag was that it told me my community "needed" me to invite one other person before I even got to the feed - what? You could skip it but I would absolutely not have known based on the language used. Finally, I got to the feed and... It sucked. It felt like it was all just NIMBYs, but even then it felt dead and lacking any decent content.
Yes but on Ring neighbors for example, it seems most of the “concerns” are just people walking up to the door while having pigment in their skin. Usually it’s obvious they’re doing door to door sales or the like, but the comments imply something is amiss.
I tend to avoid such generalizations. I lived in an unsafe neighborhood and saw people do what they can to improve their situation, with poor if any help from government. Call them racist seems unfair and totally misunderstanding their problem.
>Usually it’s obvious they’re doing door to door sales or
This is a common tactic to identify if someone is home or not and to look for packages to grab, if not an attempt to social engineering credit card or checking info.
I would find it helpful to also have listed the sites' revenue models. Advertising-based funding is an Achilles' heel apparently easily exploited by groups with coherent goals... Those sites that use donation models (especially anonymous sourced) seem to be more healthy, especially if said sites suddenly come under the glare of the latest "unacceptable of the moment" meme.
De-platforming seems to be a powerful tool for censorship.
May I suggest that you add the opengraph and twitter meta tags to your page code[1], that way sharing your site via existing social media channels will result in a much nicer preview 'card' as opposed to just the text 'DELETE FACEBOOK'
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[1] Yes, I know that doing this is somewhat ironic, but it will help your engagement if people know what the site is before they click on it.
This is pretty bad -- clicking thumbs up on an alternative has no feedback/doesn't do anything, submitting a new alternative also doesn't do anything, and the lists aren't curated at all (is Reddit really an FB substitute? Google Allo is dead, why is it on the list?).
I still wish Signal would allow you to register with just a username or email. One thing I liked about Wire more than Signal, but even less people I'm likely to meet will be using Wire vs Signal, which is already rare enough.
Where you go largely depends on where most of your friends are. I spend more time on WeChat as most of my friends are there. After I installed SnapChat, I don’t think I ever come back because nobody I know is on it.
Speaking of Facebook alternatives, I discovered a neat app not too long ago called Aether. It's like a decentralized P2P reddit. The community is fairly small but the app itself is really amazing, and I think was made entirely by one person.
I'm not associated with the creator at all, and it doesn't necessarily fill the same niche as Facebook, but I think it is worth sharing nonetheless.
https://getaether.net/
I enjoyed Aether, until I noticed my backup job was very busy with a few directories, and saw that Aether created a bazillion tiny files, even just deleting them all took a while on a SSD. If that ever changes, I might try it again, but since I never saw it mentioned as an issue that will be done properly later, I'm not holding my breath.
Alternative to what, exactly? I can email updates of my life to family pretty easily. No ads, totally free, private, supports replies, images, whatever really.
This is what my family who never joined Facebook did. We all just send everybody email updates once a month. No need to see ads or Grandma's racist reposts every day!
I thought HN had a feature that automatically stripped sentence-ending exclamation points from submission titles? Similar to the feature it has that turns "1 million" to "1M"
Ultimately, I don't think it's helpful to most users to throw a smorgasbord of possible vaguely-related alternatives at them. A more useful resource would be to take up the strategy of Wirecutter, in which the best and second-best options are highlighted, with actual explanations and thoughts. I think if you had to sit down and try to explain how Digg is a good alternative to Facebook to the average user, you'd realize how annoyed those users would be when they find that Digg is no such thing.