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by otterdude 266 days ago
All those out of work programmers here's an opprotunity to create some disruption, pad your resume, and possibly create a job.

While we still have a free internet, it would be great to see efforts to create technology to replace centralized social media, cloud-tech, and businesses.

We need to make it so fucking hard for the gov, advertisers to get access to your data that it very expensive to maintain a system like this. And please please please do not work for or lend talent these jerks!

2 comments

The network effect and the funding is the hard part. People want to be on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram because they spend billions hosting images for free and they have a million para social friends there

Any competitor will have to compete not on technical competence or privacy, but on "can I upload lots of HD video?" and "are my favorite celebrities there?"

Offramps to let people migrate easier, syndication to let people leave and still do POSSE, a solution to the problem that all free image hosting eventually attracts CSAM, those are difficult problems

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all took advantage of "viral marketing", ontop of lots of venture funding for advertising potential.

Distributed/P2P tech is essential because of the income from marketing maintains these systems, selling user data. P2P changes that by allowing people to own their data and share it their way. User-Hosting shouldn't be such a wild idea in 2025, especially if its like IPFS based which already has infrastructure for low-effort hosting such as a chrome plugin.

As long as transition is easy I dont see why change cant happen. A browser plugin to scrap your existing profiles and bring them to NEWSITE.com is all thats needed

There's No reason change cant happen especially when so many people see social media as despotic, and gov takeover of tiktok beckons. Be the motherfucking change yo!

I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.