Yes definitely. People who doesn't use facebook by choice are thought of being crazy. I use facebook, for me its a great to keep in touch with my friends and family members who are all over the world. I have a friend who doesn't want to jump in to the facebook bandwagon and our mutual friends thinks he is crazy for not using facebook. The side effect is he almost never gets invited if there is a get together and have no idea whats going with most of our mutual friends. He does have a close group of friends he keeps in touch with (like me, on phone or whatsapp).
I hate facebook's privacy implications, I sympathize with his views. But facebook, the platform, is actually useful to me so I continue to use until a better alternative comes out.
We've been contaminated by greed as a community. We think about building the product that will make us millionnaires when we should be working hard to design consumer tools and protocols that avoid lock-in and promote freedom. We're mislead by people from other spheres that will be the grand winners and leave us with a f-up world and playground. We either build for them or are assimilated by the lure of dollars. Where has the spirit gone ? This isn't what I learnt hacker to mean.
trying to make your non tech friends and family use diaspora is quite problematic.
Its a chicken egg problem: social networks need people. people wont join if peoole is not already there
I'm a big supporter of freedombox - but today you can use a diaspora server operated by someone else, basically no pain. But freedombox is a long ways from a similar no-pain experience.
I have failed to find any list of "known attacks" against diaspora. But I would like to point out a fundamental flaw: What is to stop anyone from setting up a malicious server in diaspora?
Even if I don't trust facebook, I still trust them more than a random individual running a server.
Hopefully there are some solution for this? Perhaps server operators don't actually see any unencrypted data?
The solution is to run your own server. If you want ultimate control, you have to do it yourself, which is painful - and one of the reasons I like freedombox which has, as a goal, to minimize the pain. They just aren't there yet.
The benefit of using a diaspora server operated by someone you trust is the decentralization. Facebook gets EVERYTHING about EVERYBODY, diaspora server operators only get everything about the users on their particular server.
For younger generations who grew up with this kind of tech, it's just not conceivable. For them, Facebook is a synonym for having contact with their friends.
In a discussion we once had in class, I mentioned that an option that hadn't been listed besides Facebook, Google+, Diaspora, etc was "none of the above". I got bewildered stares of disbelief in return.
Maybe. This is rapidly becoming less true. I had to give a talk at a school the other day ("tech is cool, join the tech industry!") and the bulk of the students didn't have Facebook accounts -- because their parents are on it.
Maybe that'll change when they reach a University age, but it was striking how few of them used it.
Instagram is even taking over among people in the post-adolescent set. The engagement I see seems to be more vigorous, especially if you're dialed-in and you're making good/interesting photos.
Now that's a really good point. No self-respecting kid will use the same _one-to-many_ platform to communicate with friends and parents. Maybe they'll add some convenient 'Circles' feature, but the association with 'those old people' will remain.
Actually Facebook is most likely going to erode from the younger generation/s upwards. They don't need Facebook at all, their social network is new and can be formed on other services.
Over the coming decade, Facebook will become an older person's social network (35+). They'll completely lose the youth demographic.
The least cool thing is to be where everybody else is, your parents and teachers included. This effect is already hitting Facebook.
Because it's supposedly antisocial behaviour as you don't follow the herd and it has been noted that high profile serial killers and mass murderers don't have facebook.
To me it's either people who can't be bothered or people who actually care, are knowledgeable enough and value their time and privacy.
I feel like a lot of people don't realize just how omnipresent facebook is in places like college campuses. I personally know about four people who aren't on facebook. There's a whole sphere of social interaction that you can't be a part of if you're not on facebook.
I hate facebook's privacy implications, I sympathize with his views. But facebook, the platform, is actually useful to me so I continue to use until a better alternative comes out.