[jwalton]

Everyone wants to break up Facebook back into Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp. I don't think that would really solve any of these issues.

I think we're thinking about this the wrong way - we should break up Facebook the same way we broke up Bell into baby Bells. Make "Facebook" a utility. Split Facebook into five different companies, maybe some not even in the US. Each "Facebook" company would have to provide Facebook service to a subset of current users. Allow new people to run Facebook providers.

Unhappy with the customer service from your current Facebook provider, or with the quantity of ads? Don't like the algorithm that's running your timeline? Switch to one of the other providers who may do things differently. Create competition in this market where there simply isn't any.

Some people will point out this forces all these providers to interoperate somehow, so users on one Facebook provider can talk to users on another. This is a really great part of this plan! Our social networks become based on open standards and interoperability instead of being walled gardens.

[arcticbull]

Didn’t the baby bells that came out of AT&T all merge back into the new at&t? Notice the capitalizations there representative of their corporate logotype at the respective times in the narrative arc. How could we avoid that happening in 10-20 years?

[edit] Further, im not sure how you’d slice it up horizontally instead of vertically - that is to say Facebook is Facebook for “millennials,” Instagram is Facebook for gen z“. It feels like each of these vertical slices retain the same incentive structure they have today but targeting different demographics.

What could slicing it horizontally look like? An independent infra AWS? A social graph? Curious your thoughts.

I think the problem is the incentive structure - a company goaled on engagement will focus on the most engaging content. That’s hate, division, fear and anger. Without a fundamental reimagination of incentives I think the same beast will emerge. The new T-1000 of corporations - as Colbert referred to at&t at the time.

[wombatmobile]

AT&T and the baby bells are not analogous to FB. The analogy is too generous to FB and overstates its importance.

FB is not a medium. It may be a de facto platform for social organisations and advertising, but it's still just an app.

Whilst FB made more money than MySpace and lasted for a longer time, its demise is inevitable for the same reason, and we're seeing the slide occur now.

FB, like AOL and MySpace before it, was fashionable when its feature provided new reach for participants. Sooner or later, these apps reach maximum cachet and after that, they are for "old people".

FB is for old people. And that's not even the worst of its problems.

[int_19h]

What's really needed is a legal requirement for open APIs and federation. The only reason why Facebook is so hard to drop once you've been on it for a while, is because they have your social graph locked in - either everybody switches together, or people get "left behind". If they are forced to interoperate with others, that's no longer an issue - and I suspect that this alone would be enough for healthy competition to shrink them down, without any forcible splitting.

[specialist]

For trust busting:

I'd break out FAANG's advertising operations. Prohibit conflicts of interest, fraud.

I sorta expected the online advertising bubble to pop, mooting the need for remedy. But somehow it keeps not popping.

Set some threshold. Reach a certain size and your ops get divided up. Spitballing: $10m annual revenue, 100k monthly visitors, whatever. So indies like daringfireball can continue to do their own thing.

[jboy55]

Lets break up Facebook into Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Reddit and HackerNews.

Lets be serious, the youth market is strongly moving towards TikTok, and its feed algorithm already has created a notion of 'the different sides of TikTok', for conservative vs liberal content.

[bcherny]

In what ways is this different than today’s world, where depending on what you want to do (connect with people with similar interests, talk to friends, look at cat videos) there’s a bunch of options for what service to use?

[function_seven]

The services available today don't federate with one another. I can't reply to an Instagram post from my Reddit account, or send a message from WhatsApp to iMessage.

While I'm not sure parent's suggestion is feasible or would solve anything, it is more like the AT&T breakup in that the system is still cohesive, even if operated by separate entities.

[sammorrowdrums]

Those services don’t, but as a Mastodon user, it doesn’t seem such an unlikely suggestion. I have been impressed with fediverse since I joined about a year back, and love the that the feed isn’t manipulated, and that censorship is often the choice of an individual not wanting to see more from a user they find objectionable or from a community/server level when say your server doesn’t want pornographic posts from some other server on fediverse, which frankly reflects sincere human interaction much more than Facebook moderation and their feed algos, and if you did want to see what your community doesn’t, you can both stay and also create an account on another server if you wish.

Federated social media for me has been much less toxic in terms of discussion quality and is much less addictive, I love checking it but I don’t doom-scroll to oblivion…

But server doesn’t get payed to make me doom scroll to oblivion so incentives are much more aligned.

[bmarquez]

Currently, I'd have to recreate my social graph if I move to a different service. With the proposed interoperability, I wouldn't have to.

[jboy55]

If you maintained the same social graph on each service, you'd still have all the misinformation being shared amongst the same graph members.

Its one thing if the content being served is what some nefarious actor wants a group to consume, for influence sake. Its another when its the content produces and consumes themselves. The current misinformation discourse on FB is the current culture, especially the culture of a large group of people. It originates both on and off FB. 'Q' didn't originate on FB, it originated on 8chan, let that sink in.