I know this has been a regular topic of discussion lately, as Facebook users are looking for alternatives, but there is a harsh reality I think netizens of the fediverse need to acknowledge that will keep the majority of Facebook users locked in. That is the personal social graph that Facebook has built up for users over the years. No other site on the web has a way to find nearly anyone you have ever known, from high school friends to long lost family members. The reason for this is because of the format of Facebook being “you” on the web. Your profile is your name, your personal info, and it is even linked to your phone number and contacts, making social networking incredibly easy.
The closest that exists for this on the fediverse is Friendica, but it is more of a reddit/twitter hybrid imo, and while you can make your profile page personal, the posts you make will go to the entire fediverse. This lack of privacy and tailoring of your messages to a particular audience is what is going to make Facebook unbeatable for the foreseeable future. People want alternatives, but these alternatives simply do not exist.
I would be very curious to hear about efforts to make sites on the fediverse more personalized and enabling of people to control their audience, because this (along with improving user experience) is the biggest thing I think is keeping people from making the switch.
Hmmh, the network effect is the opposite side. It’s the effect that binds people to platforms. Platforms are just as useful as the network of people they connect you to. We need to overcome the network effect here.
And that’s really, really hard. I mean look at how Bluesky does it. They invest a lot of money to make it possible. They waited for the right moment and sort of caught their competition with their pants down. Furthermore, they did some marketing stunts like the invite-only period to hype their own product. And have journalists and influencers talk about it.
The product needs to be excellent. And even that’s not enough. If you’re as good as the competition, or just slightly better… There isn’t really an incentive for people to switch. Companies like Google fail at inventing a product that competes with Facebook.
Ultimately, I don’t see a good way of competing with social media platforms. People just don’t care about their privacy, so that’s not something you can win them over with. And even if their platform is operated by a bad person like Elon Musk, and has a really toxic atmosphere for better part of the last decade… The majority still doesn’t really care. It took him (Musk) to deliberately run X into a brick wall to get things going. Something like Reddit taking away user freedom, clamping down on all kinds of things, selling user data etc doesn’t do much in that context.
I’m a bit disheartened as you can tell. I’m always advocating for Free Software, more ethical alternatives and for people to care about their freedom. But in my experience that’s a niche thing. I don’t really get through to regular people. I kind of make the best of it. I have a profile on the Fediverse. If people want to talk to me, they can come here and talk to me. But yeah, that does away with my high school friends.
Edit: And by the way, are you sure Friendica posts go to the whole Fediverse all the times? They have groups and privacy features. If these features are implemented well, they shoud stop your posts from propagating to arbitrary places.
I suppose there’s two sides of the network effect. One side is how it works against a platform. In the case of the fediverse, it is working against it, for sure. The other side is how it helps a platform. For facebook, it helps. However, I would argue that these things are not immutable. Why did facebook develop a strong network effect? Because it provided a value that a lot of people saw, and encouraged them to sign up. It attracted users before it had a solidified network in place, because it built the infrastructure for the network effect to take place.
I do agree that open software is a relatively niche concept, but I think a lot of people these days can see very clearly how having one person own a whole platform and control the direction of it is a bad thing. Many of my more “normie” and less tech minded friends are talking about finding alternatives. I wish I had a place to direct them that provided the social networking functions of facebook, but it just is simply not a thing at this time. Even if there was not many people they know on there, as they join, we could find each other. We would do it as a group, as many of them are currently doing for bluesky. However, I am not recommending friendica yet because it is still not quite there.
As for the private posting functionality, I see no options to enable that, if it exists. I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done on the UI and tutorials side to enable and instruct users on how to fully utilize the site.
Agreed. Note however, that it’s not only open software that is a niche. There are many closed services as well that don’t get any traction. For example the several email providers that don’t read your private mails. They’re a niche, too and people keep using GMail. Or other shops than Amazon. People often just use the dominating service. That doesn’t really have to do anything with open software or anything. I think it’s a bit of convenience and mainly people use what they’re familiar with.
Unfortunately I don’t know much about Friendica. I heard it has privacy, friend circles/groups, different post types, a feed and interconnects with other platforms. But I’ve never used it myself, because I don’t really do social media except this platform here (Lemmy). I think Mastodon is very popular, but it’s not alike Facebook at all. Other than that I can recommend writing a blog or having a website… But you can’t really share family photos there. Or one of the Linktree clones, so people can at least find you and get your contact details if they want.
And yes, I also don’t think these platforms are immutable. It’s just impossibly hard to overcome. But all the current services have started somewhere. And this isn’t the early internet anymore. It’s a different story for Google Search, they’ve been here a long time. But all the Facebooks etc had to outcompete someone and overcome the network effect. And they did so successfully.