[vkou]

> Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discussions all have viable quality alternatives.

What is a quality alternative to Facebook? Diaspora was DOA, Mastodon is a cesspit, Twitter is nothing like Facebook, and G+ is long-dead.

[JoshMnem]

> What is a quality alternative to Facebook?

Independent forums and self-hosted blogging. They are about content and real connections with like-minded people. Instead of mindlessly posting little updates throughout the day just for the sake of posting updates, people should save it for when they actually have something to say.

In general: read books not timelines.

[vkou]

> Independent forums and self-hosted blogging.

My social circles consists of ~6 different cliques of people with no intersection between them. I'm not going to move them all to one forum. Nobody will want to cross-post their life updates in 6 different forums.

> Instead of mindlessly posting little updates throughout the day just for the sake of posting updates, people should save it for when they actually have something to say.

Forums solve the posting part of Facebook, but don't solve the other, even more important part - the reading part.

I derive more value from reading what my friends post, then I do from posting myself. The UX for me getting this information through forums/self-hosted blogging is horrendous (And my aunt is not going to figure out how to self-host her own blog, either.)

[closeparen]

Forums and blogging are for internet strangers; Facebook is for your real-life community. While you of course accept some risk of Facebook content becoming accidentally public, there is little to no intersection between the content I would intentionally share on Facebook vs. HN or a blog.

At minimum, blogging would need a universal federated identity system with reciprocal ACLs, which is already starting to sound a lot like Facebook.

More to the point on antitrust, the quality alternative to Facebook that most of my peers are now using is Instagram, which Facebook conveniently purchased.

[JoshMnem]

For people who grew up before the Internet, the idea of needing to share everything with everyone you know isn't a necessity. Some things were better before the Internet. My real-world social life improved after I left Facebook. The quality of the information that enters my mind on a daily basis also improved. I don't read timelines or experience life by constantly thinking about whether I should post the current moment online. There are other ways to stay in touch with people.

I recommend Digital Minimalism.

http://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/

[ajxs]

My personal opinion is that there isn't a quality alternative. I don't think that these platforms are the least bit beneficial to the well-being of their users. It's a very unfortunate fact that I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon, the idea of online 'social networks' is firmly entrenched in modern culture and has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. I think that antitrust should be just the beginning, I feel that more needs to be done at a legislative level to set reasonable limitations on the invasiveness of the companies behind such networks. Part of this would be closing the legislative gaps that make regulations difficult to enforce against such companies.

[euyyn]

My understanding is all kids moved to Instagram / Snapchat as soon as parents started using Facebook too, and now parents are on Instagram too so I expect kids are already using something else.

[antidesitter]

> Mastodon is a cesspit

Explain what you mean.

[vkou]

It's full of instances with definitely illegal, and possibly borderline-illegal content, and even worse - spam. You have to extensively, and aggressively blacklist, to avoid getting flooded in this crap. (And unless you want to wade knee-deep through that dreck, what you do, is to just copy & paste a blacklist some other poor bastard curated. I'm sure there's no vector for abuse, or censorship there...)

Mastodon also fails to solve the harassment problem. Facebook and Twitter do a piss-poor job of it, but Mastodon takes it to another level.

> The attack vector looks like this: a group of motivated harassers chooses a target somewhere in the fediverse. Every time that person posts, they immediately respond, maybe with something clever like “fuck you” or “log off.” So from the target’s point of view, every time they post something, even something innocuous like a painting or a photo of their dog, they immediately get a dozen comments saying “fuck you” or “go away” or “you’re not welcome here” or whatever. This makes it essentially impossible for them to use the social media platform.

> The second part of the attack is that, when the target posts something, harassers from across the fediverse click the “report” button and send a report to their local moderators as well as the moderator of the target’s instance. This overwhelms both the local moderators and (especially) the remote moderator. In mastodon.cloud’s case, it appears the moderator got 60 reports overnight, which was so much trouble that they decided to evict Wil Wheaton from the instance rather than deal with the deluge. [1]

The problem is that Mastodon conflates identity, and community. You will get moderated by third parties for belonging in a particular community, if that community is poorly moderated. Because the definition of poorly moderated is universal, you get a balkanized, political nightmare, where half the toots half the world sends are unreadable to the other half, even if the sender is not personally violating any rules of either community.

For a social network in 2019, this is unacceptable.

Oh, and if you're one of those people who cares about privacy, the only reason Cambridge Analytica, and its ilk aren't harvesting data from Mastodon, is because it's irrelevant. Yes, you can have private conversations with a particular group of users on it, without leaking data. Guess what? You can do that through e-mail, too. As soon as your toots are public, they can be scraped, your social graph can be re-constructed, packaged, and sold to the highest bidders.

[1] https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challeng...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...

[ionised]

It sounds like you just want Facebook.