Public networks are dead. We did it for two decades and now people need to go back to something more real and private. Social networks in the current form are just attention seeking. We've been trained to say things that will garner likes and retweets. I welcome text and chat, maybe even voice to text but not in the public form. Closed networks only now.
Facebook has such a network: WhatsApp. In the US apparently not that omnipresent, but it's everywhere in many countries. Facebook has the data, and knows exactly how such closed-networks are in demand, can (not) be monetized and what features are needed to make them grow.
In e.g. The Netherlands anything from your neighborhood-watch to parents-info, or anything related to school, via business-groups, your bachelors party, to the weekly scissors-collectors-club-coffee-meet . All of these organize, inform, discuss, on WhatsApp.
Yes, I use WhatsApp, my family uses WhatsApp, my wife's family uses WhatsApp. I found it to be an incredibly effective tool and was a really big fan of Jan Koum and Brian Acton pre-sale to Facebook. And now, I wonder how to replace it. Signal did not become a replacement, if anything it's not that great because user friendliness trumps everything else. Networks are sticky and shifting a network is a damn near impossible task, but then people are using WhatsApp over Facebook Messenger or SMS, so I guess the question is, how do you create another shift? I'm personally developing more and more conviction around the idea of doing something that first tries to tackle this on a personal level before doing it for others e.g How do I get my family off WhatsApp. Well, I might need to run the equivalent as a private server or I might need a way to bridge the chat to pull them over. I might need some sort of really key collaborative feature also.
I definitely think there's a sort of missing tool for family, friends and community. One that's totally private. Maybe like an open source facebook groups. But hosting is a must because no one wants to run it, we just want to know its open source, vetted and we can guarantee it's private. Where Signal was for 1:1 text on Mobile, I think something else could be community first.
> I'm personally developing more and more conviction around the idea of doing something that first tries to tackle this on a personal level before doing it for others e.g How do I get my family off WhatsApp.
You are on the right track, but I would say we don't need even need to get them "off" WhatsApp, we just need to get an intolerant minority [0] who refuses to compromise.
I deleted WhatsApp from my phone and told my close friends and family "For reasons X, Y and Z, I don't want to use Facebook products anymore. If you want to reach me, I am using Matrix. I can add you to my communick account [1] and I can help you set up your client. I know that this is an inconvenience but I think we should all revise our priorities and stop putting "convenience" above all else.
Some of them did. Some of them didn't, so they call me on the phone, or send me an email. A few of them even started to use Matrix as their primary method for communication. The important thing is that my refusal to use WhatsApp made the set "people who use only WhatsApp" set a bit smaller and the "people who could transition away from WhatsApp" set a lot larger.
Thanks for sharing that sentiment. I don't quite take the same view on it but understand the approach can be effective. I stopped using slack at some point and it meant I did not speak to the specific group of friends who only communicated through slack. It turned out to be a so-so thing. In some ways I don't know whether it had more negative or positive impact. By taking a stance on it, maybe it was only detrimental to myself or beneficial, whichever way you see it.
On the family front, there's a WhatsApp group and people have learned to use it for that activity, so I can't see that behaviour changing especially when 60+ year olds are in it too. It just became the defacto mode of communication somehow. Yet funnily 10 years ago, I was not a WhatsApp user. A friend of mine dragged me on there. It reminds me of 2006 when people kept asking "Are you on Facebook", like a bunch of drug addicts.
I personally want to move some of my private content and conversations off public servers and on to one I control. Off public networks and on one I know I've secured. That to me as an engineer now makes a lot of sense. But there's also a significant burden to that and I don't think anyone else can do it. Also I don't imagine anyone will setup VPN across my extended family. So there's some things to think through before trying anything.
> so I can't see that behaviour changing especially when 60+ year olds are in it too
Both my parents are getting closer to their 70's, I got both of them to use Element. Yes, they are still on WhatsApp, yes they would prefer if I used it as well and my grumpy old man always complains about the many quirks from Element's UI on iOS. But at the end of they day we still talk frequently, they still get to see their grandkids, we still have a group to share photos and videos, etc.
The important point that I want to drive home: even if they are still using some other app, my refusal to join has made them aware and able to adopt an alternative.
> I personally want to move some of my private content and conversations off public servers and on to one I control.
As long as you are using
(a) your own domain to keep control of your identity
(b) something based on open standards so that you can port different providers
(c)end-to-end encryption
does it really matter if you are running the service?
My girlfriend is Brazilian and she uses WhatsApp a...lot...
I would say the problem with this idea is that your family is often just one group chat. She has maybe 50 threads of different groups in WA, for her moving off WA would be near impossible not because all the groups she communicates with are on there. The other thing to keep in mind is, the "HN Crowd" knows the full implications of having conversations on WA, for just about everyone else they just see a really convenient app that works extremely well. After using it I concluded that it works better than the native iMessage app on your iPhone, which just speaks to how good the app is (in terms of being an app).
The argument to move people to another app is really uphill battle because it's purely ideological/data privacy/etc related. I could easily convince someone to move to Slack from Teams because Teams sucks as an app. But the issue with WhatsApp is that as an app, it's one of the most well build and best performing.
This is the thing. WhatsApp works really well. And so did Facebook groups. I think once communities are established they stay where they are. So anything new is for new usecases. Trying to get people to migrate isn't the answer. It's about new solutions or habits solving specific purposes. For me it's a lot to do with the fact that each chat itself in whatsapp isn't threaded. You can create communities but that's not right for informal stuff and then I can create separate groups but then it gets confusing. So actually you need topic based chat. Ability to create new topics in the same groups. Basically slack or discord for family and friends.
Sorry, but your whole argument is just a basic rehash of all the standard excuses that people give themselves to avoid having to make difficult choices and just sticking with the status quo.
There is nothing "impossible" about leaving Whatsapp. I'm also from Brazil, I also had the "family chat group". My cousins are still my cousins after I left the group. I can still talk with them through in person, on the phone, email, SMS. The fact that some of them don't want to join Matrix is not a deal breaker, just like my refusal to be on WhatsApp should not be a deal breaker for them.
>deleted WhatsApp from my phone and told my close friends and family "For reasons X, Y and Z, I don't want to use Facebook products anymore. If you want to reach me, I am using Matrix. I can add you to my communick account [1] and I can help you set up your client. I know that this is an inconvenience but I think we should all revise our priorities and stop putting "convenience" above all else
I'm assuming you're social life has suffered?
This is the problem via the lack of universal messaging standards... I am looking at you Apple..
I wonder what percentage of your friends and family dropped off?
I ran a similar experiment to you and found it really really difficult as almost 90+% didn't want to deal with the hassle of using a different application.
Please read Taleb's article that I posted. What you are describing is exactly the idea of using the principle of "intolerant minority" to effect change in the majority behavior.
> 90+% didn't want to deal with the hassle of using a different application.
On the positive side, this means that 10% of your friends are willing to try a different application to keep connecting with you. This means that if we take Dunbar's number (150) as the average size of a social circle, every person that refuses to join WhatsApp leads to 15 other people getting acquainted to an alternative network. Any network that managed to capture 10% of WhatsApp userbase would be more than sustainable, and if you imagine that as soon as secondary effects kick-in, the friction will get lower and lower.
> I wonder what percentage of your friends and family dropped off?
Dropped off from casual conversation? A good part. They are still friends, though. I can pick up the phone and call them, or send them an email like people used to less than a generation ago...
If your friends/peers can not accept personal change or let it affect your relationship, then you are dealing with shitty friends to begin with.
What I’ve found to work is taking it one family member at a time. And do it in person, get them to commit to using it. Then ask if you can set it up for them, show them how it works. Join them into the group chat, and then at least you’ve removed the friction to joining.
Why is this downvoted? Telegram is IMO the best alternative to WhatsApp.
It has a much better UX than Signal, more desirable features, not to mention more users and channels. There is an on-demand E2E encryption for those who want it. Pavel Durov is not on a friendly terms with Russian govt now for those who care about it. You can pay for the service to support the company, get rid of ads and gain some meaningless features.
E2E is only available as a one-to-one, not a group. It must also be switched on for every chat. Part of the allure of E2E is that an individual who needs it (say, a reporter) is indistinguishable from those that don’t (the general public), and those that are best blending into the crowd (like an anonymous source).
There are other failure modes here (who speaks to whom isn’t necessarily hidden, just the text), but it’s a better starting point than “on-demand e2e for those that want it”.
I disagree on the UX. It is overly complicated, with all kinds of hidden gestures and unintuitive ways of doing things.
Just the other day i was trying to share another user with my wife and just couldn't figure it out. I think there were some hidden privacy settings for that user that i wasn't aware of.
It's still centralized. The server is not open source. The "on-demand E2E encryption" has never been properly audited by independent parties. We shouldn't need to worry or care about the political affiliations of the company offering a product to be able to use it.
Most of the (sane) parents that I know hate those WhatsApp groups with a passion, but they unfortunately have to be there "because there's where the future of our kids gets decided" or some such, meaning where everything related to the kids' school or kindergarten is now discussed.
I agree though about the cultural influence of WhatsApp outside of the US, as what you described about it matches my experience about its use here in Romania.
Public networks are a lot more hostile than we realize while we have moderation armies at work. That may not be a sustainable model. I think the way forward is building the right tools to help communities self-manage. It will be more like Discord and less like Twitter.
It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. The people who consume content within a niche tend to be very likeminded and often times quite willing to rally behind and support the bastions propelling the niches that they identify with. Even for smaller creators, I've seen time and time again that all you need is one or two highly dedicated and engaged fans to make being a creator an extremely lucrative endeavour.
I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities that become a sort of privatized social network as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche.
I am a content creator (newsletter) where I interview music producers. The main goal behind it is to create a community where we have a place online, and multiple places offline to chill, chat and do our thing.
I am on the lookout to find how the online thing looks like, and honestly, it always comes back to a facebook group. I hate facebook. But it is the option with the least friction, for now.
Every other option, adds friction. From single signups to downloading mobile apps.
I haven't checked sociables yet (gonna, as soon as I hit reply), but I'm letting you know of my thoughts because it's a problem addressed to everyone.
Appreciate the reply. Did you have a chance to check out the platform? We are always looking for ways we can better tailor the platform to serve the needs of people like you.
The challenge with moderation is that, in most localities, the service provider is legally liable for content shared on the platform. They generally don't have to catch everything but must show what is, after the fact, deemed to be "best effort" moderation.
Self-hosting content is really the only solution for a social network that doesn't include moderation. Any centralized datastore will be subject to local laws around the globe.
It's also often the only place to find local information even if you do have affordable internet. Especially in smaller counties and towns. Someone might show up in the count, but it doesn't mean a strong attachment.
Yes, the public internet is very close to nil outside the big countries, it's very noticeable nowadays doing verbatim searches on google for the last X time period, and setting the location to some random country.
Public / private and walled garden are not what you are saying.
I'm saying only your friends on Facebook will see your posts, so it is private, unlike twitter where the whole world will see them. And you can create groups if you want to have even more private discussions.
Twitter, LinkedIn are walled gardens, but public ones. Facebook is a private walled garden.
Yes, but "friend" has quite a wide meaning on Facebook.
Compare it to a WhatsApp group: there one defines exactly the people who should see a given message. "Friends" becomes mixed between "true" friends, neighbors, colleagues, ... people you once we're closer with but passed ways to some degree, ... after a while it's semi-public at least unless you have a strict (un-)friending policy. For average users the visibility is also hard to understand.
yes thanks for clarifying that. I really do mean, private as in, no one outside of your circles of real connections can see it and it's entirely invite only. Who do I invite into my home and personal conversations? Well not the people on facebook or twitter I'll tell you that much.
8 years ago, in marketing workshops I ran (badly but that's another topic and the public was really out of touch, it was more an intro to social networks, anyway), I boldly claimed "Facebook is dead but don't worry Messenger is here" and then I'd explained the concepts of direct messaging, humane digital relationships, always-on concierge service, etc.
I still think people better move from social networks to messaging services with people they actually have connections with (real life or digital).
> > Public social networks will continue to be very important in people's lives—for connecting with everyone you know, discovering new people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. People find these valuable every day, and there are still a lot of useful services to build on top of them. But now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there's also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that's focused on privacy first.
> He acknowledges Facebook is an odd fit for this approach, saying, "frankly we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing," but:
> > I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about.
The irony. HN is probably one of the few places left I feel like actually every so often leaving a comment. Why is that? The value of the network perhaps. Or that it does in some ways feel like a closed network. It's so niche, the self promotional nature is quite limited to posting about things you're working on. There's no retweet/advert like culture that results in infinite threads.
Anyway, if HN was a closed network that would be good too. I don't see why the comments need to be public, I don't see why any of it needs to be public. I mean in 2009 a friend recommended it to me, but equally if it was invite only he could have sent me an invite. But that's the way I discovered most great things, someone I personally know told me about it or shared an invite. And I think if there was to be a great new network that it should actually be invite only, totally private and even then I think "public" spaces within that private domain should be limited to fixed size groups. On any given day, if a room has more than 10 people in it, I probably know I'm not going to enjoy that conversation or setting. I think its the same of the internet. Crowds are not cool, they're anxiety inducing. So 20 people max in a group.
No, there are no features on HN that help us network, and I rarely, if ever, even look at what user posted a story or comment, so at least for me it is not social.
Just because it is user-generated content does not make it a "social network"
What is your definition of a social network? In my view a social network requires that you actually represent social connections on the platform. Afaik there is no way for me to establish such a social connection with you on HN.
Explicit social connections are dying trend on social network, as weird as it sounds.
TikTok, Twitter's "For you", Reels - all of them are considered to be social networks, and they depend on algorithmic feeds recommending content to you.
Interesting point. Then I think we should acknowledge that former social networks are morphing into something that should no longer be called a social network?
Niche subreddits are usually good, unfortunately when a subreddit becomes famous lots of people start posting without learning the etiquette.
Moderating a big subreddit is not easy, you can go from having several chains of comments removed (eg. r/science) to getting flooded with bots (eg. reddit.com).
Reddit is becoming more and more dead as time progresses, I'd say its high-mark was the mid 2010s, until 2017-2018 or so.
Of course that its actual traffic might still increase for some time, but it has lost the (counter-)cultural ascendency that it used to have. That's what you get for hiring a former Atlantic Council member as your "policy director".
Public networks have value for entertainment, movies, TV, and music all should be sponsored by social media apps, especially independent music. These social apps also need to abandon the predatory and destructive (ad boosting) schemes they've created and instead tax big (and very profitable) media companies alone.
Undercover the truth has been that social media has always been simply a channel for commercials, and they should embrace that truth and make it les sof a ponzi scheme, and more of an easy way to scroll through specific areas of interest for individual people. If social media was honest and fair, the metrics on consumer sentiment would be game-changingly valuable to everyone in business, but as of right now, pure corruption, deceptive marketing, and endless new schemes are being invented by people trying to leverage social media against the unaware masses on it.
Closed networks can be just as easily corrupted, and they can be weaponized against users with no way of anyone knowing what occurred. Closed systems can hide valuable knowledge and truth from the public, they create a nightmare for law enforcement as well in solving crimes perpetrated on groups or individuals, they also encourage maintaining multiple individual accounts and paywalls around data that does not need to be private... Neither solution is perfect. Many of the massive public social media services have been operating as if they are closed networks lately as they try to squeeze money and data out of users over time (e.g. Twitter not allowing posts to be accessed without having an account).
I am really tired myself of all the tricks, gimmics, and schemes that social media creates jus tin order to operate successfully on it, and new tools are often the same old schemes, but in reality, there is now barely any other cost-effective way to promote yourself to the world... Google search can also be kind of considered the same as social media in a way because many have to pay for prominent placing and manipulate keywords, and even do things like registering an SSL cert and pay hosting to be ranked higher on results... TikTok has basically become a massive video search engine on the flip side of that.
The problem is these networks thrive on free and coerced labor form content creators and businesses, they offer little reward for hard work, and they facilitate wide-scale fraud, info theft, ID impersonation, and disinformation. Those things need to be addressed thoroughly moving forward, or it will all turn into a desolate strip mall with little value to anyone but the land owners.
I want to offer a counterpoint to the current consensus in the comments from (my) real-world interactions. In many countries outside of US, Twitter is occupied by a minority audience which is usually in its own bubble. Instagram is much more popular especially in Millenials who are now in the age group where they start to be more politically active and less motivated by the "pure entertainement" side of the social media.
Facebook, is dead for them in terms of engagement because its the "old people" place and discoverability is quite bad outside of groups. I know many people who use Instagram for social/policy commentary in their stories, and its very inefficient because its one-way. Pictures do not allow for proper discussion or easy discoverability of comments.
Even tiktok has better interaction via duets and pushing up new content all the time but conversation is limited.
I believe that instagram is mainstream enough to entice this group into a forum-like experience and drive insane engagement. Currently, if you are not traveling or doing some kind of beauty influencing, instagram is dead and its successor (tiktok) is limited to short videos. There is a legit market for more long-form/term discussion place in that (very important) age group outside of the US especially.
I am bullish on the offer, especially since Twitter seems to be prioritising US.
Instagram isn't used by most people to 'drive insane engagement'. It's a relaxing place to share pictures and memes - and one that fortunately avoids most of the political insanity which makes other social networks exhausting and polarising. I don't want less 'limited' conversations on instagram. Its a place I look at and post pictures from my life, memories, moments with friends.
Fuck engagement. Fuck the competitive scurrying for likes. Fuck Tiktok. Fuck 'the next' social network. I just want a place to post pictures for my friends and see theirs.
I have often found that participating on Instagram quickly turns into a comparison game with unhealthy results. But the view you expressed feels so healthy and in the right spirit of social media - to share special moments with your friends and family without all the fuss of engagement, likes etc.
The ill-effects of social media were almost depressing and I stopped using them altogether. But this also meant I had almost no one initiate a conversation with me. If you have anything to say about how to best use social media healthily, I'm all ears.
Here's hoping it doesn't already water down the utility of a service that has been made a great deal less functional by having to imitate Snapchat and Tiktok.
It seems like a completely desperate move to make such a fundamental change to something as wildly successful as Instagram.
I would suspect that zoomers who grew up on Tiktok are going to consume less social media as they age than previous generations. We are all are driven by a thirst for new experiences and a generation that grew up as digital meth heads are not going to be looking for something more powerful than meth.
Meta was probably a decent short Friday over $246.
> Currently, if you are not traveling or doing some kind of beauty influencing, instagram
I dunno, it’s a nice little closed network for me. I see updates from friends and family, only they see my updates, Insta has gotten pretty good at surfacing the cat videos I like to watch.
I don’t want to see the opinions of the general public or the political opinions of my friends (I’d much rather get both from professional journalists), and neither show up on my Instagram
Frankly Groups should not be part of Facebook. Facebook is/should be the 'friends' network. Sharing things among a select group of known people.
Instagram is the public/open network. Share pictures and reels with whoever wants to see them. Groups fits into that more as you rarely have a group among your own friend set, but rather among a group of random individuals with similar interests. Meta has it upside down.
Same here. A lot of people I know don’t have twitter. Instagram on the other hand is widely popular in my age group. (30 somethings) Twitter has a bad reputation with a lot of people because of Elon Musk. Meta has that too, but Zuckerberg is just not such a hate figure for the average liberal here in Germany as Musk is. Political/activist Instagram is very much a thing (despite what people claim here) and that community will certainly try it, also for the mastodon integration. (there are big leftist mastodon instances in germany like chaos.social)
The thing I don't like about mainstream social networks is that they control not just what you say and what you see, but also how you say it and how you see it. Meta says we're all gonna share our thoughts and opinions via short texts posts on Instagram now, so that's what *we're gonna do.
Don't like it? Well, too bad, because that's how the app works now. Oh, and by the way, you can post whatever you want, unless the algorithms decide it's against the community standards, and even then, only the posts of upstanding digital citizens that promote the narrative they want will actually be shown to others.
And literally all of your online interactions are going through a few tech companies now. You don't have freedom of speech, expression or even thought, unless you comply with the Meta/Alphabet approved narrative.
*There is always the option to not participate if you prefer to sit in a closet with your Raspberry Pi.
> you can post whatever you want, unless the algorithms decide it's against the community standards
To the extent that social media is like a village (a medium-to-large number of people expressing themselves), there have always been community standards in any society.
> mainstream social networks
People who sufficiently resent aspects of broader society can find smaller groups. These smaller groups will themselves have community standards.
The expectation of unfettered freedom of speech is at best naive, especially when the things people say incite violence.
> there have always been community standards in any society.
When Meta says "community standards" they aren't actually community standards at all. Meta unilaterally decides what their "community standards" are. I've had posts about lighting a campfire for my family, and showing off vegetables from my garden flagged as "violating community standards". We're not even getting into sex, religion and politics, which I also believe are areas of life that we need to be able to have open conversations about in public forums, rather than having an unaccountable organization unilaterally decide for us what is right and wrong.
> The expectation of unfettered freedom of speech is at best naive, especially when the things people say incite violence.
Given the tendency for violence to be associated with calls for free speech, I understand how you could assume that I'm talking about speech that incites violence. But actually, I'm talking about much more innocuous things like talking about non-traditional relationship styles, alternative lifestyles, body positivity, open medical data, thought experiments and well thought out challenges to the status quo.
> open conversations about in public forums, rather than having an unaccountable organization unilaterally decide for us what is right and wrong.
You will not find me to be an apologist for social-media business. That said, a for-profit company has "rights" too, or at least a team of lawyers to defend the operation on behalf of the ownership and/or shareholders.
A social-media company has operational goals other than ensuring that you and I can say what we want, however we want, at our convenience and on their dime. And those rules will likely conform to many (if not all) the values of society.
Even HN itself restricts debate. Do you object to this too?
I have become less and less concerned about freedom of speech since I have been on the internet. If an app wants to delete my posts, thats okay for me unless I am paying them. Governments in the past have had full control of the information flow, and I don't think that has changed. Whatever freedom of speech we had is now maligned by really annoying and vocal people. Internet just feels hostile. I spend most of my online time on Nintendo games now, they don't let me say more than 4 pre chosen cheers and I am perfectly fine with it.
It doesn't even have to be this convoluted. They can just do what they did with email. Step one, wait until they have the vast majority of users, then due to spam/'problematic' content, algorithmically block the vast majority of other instances from interacting with theirs.
Isn’t this exactly what you’d expect to happen given Twitter has become a raging dumpster fire and Meta has enough networking effect to get a Twitter clone off the ground?
File under: “Obvious things to do when you think about it”, really.
Twitter is "a raging dumpster fire" only for Space Man Bad people motivated by politics.
For the rest of us, it's actually better than it's ever been, especially if you're like me and living outside of North America. It's snappier and more open than Twitter 1.0, and it's not banning people at the behest of the FBI.
It loads no faster for me. The For You feed is worse for me. Top replies to posts I do want to see are consistently more hostile. These used to fall to the bottom or behind a filter click like they should.
The speed increases were mostly for non-us. I dunno my for you used to just be American politics drama, tiresome to read as a non-American. Now it’s generated from my following interests.
So they are copying twitter now, I guess the circle of the internet has been completed, or maybe they after they fail this they will take a shoot on copying vbulletin/ipb forums from 2007 again?
My first take was "They are also, along with Bluesky, attempting to grab the Twitter sceptre of power."
There is a tidbit in there about "compatibility" with other networks, including Mastodon; I wonder if their implementation of the protocol will include Mastodon reaching into their garden. If it does, I might believe they have learned something.
Maybe Meta is trying to follow the model of Chinese tech companies.
* Copy what works
* Build re-usable internal systems so you can quickly go from prototypes to millions of users
* Internal competition where teams are trying to create the same product and outdo other internal teams
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that Meta can successfully copy Chinese companies. One major reason is that software developers in the US are significantly more expensive so you have to be more strategic.
Chinese companies are dominating in social apps. TikTok is just the start.
Ah... so the one that myriad people have been chasing for at least 2 decades, now. I've lost count of the number of companies I've consulted to who were chasing that chimera. Good luck to them, I say, while gleefully taking money off them.
I am waiting for the day they integrate something like this in whatsapp. Welcome to your new social media app 2bn users. Would be the first social media account my parents have
The people who care about decentralization and like Meta/Facebook are two separate circles, but its interesting that they're supposedly building on ActivityPub.
Facebook only had a XMPP gateway for their own chat service to let you use it with an XMPP client. You could never communicate with other servers from Facebook or vice-versa. It was Google who actually bait-and-switched with federated XMPP.
Their choice to make the app "compatible with Mastodon" (uses the ActivityPub protocol and is basically a huge Mastodon instance) reminds me of the famous Microsoft "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" model. Not sure that Extinguish part is going to work though, considering AP/Mastodon are open source protocols/platforms and easily forkable.
> Not sure that Extinguish part is going to work though, considering AP/Mastodon are open source protocols/platforms and easily forkable.
That's not really a safeguard against "extinguishing". When you become the first mover, your extensions to the protocol/platform drive out competitors that cannot afford to interoperate with you.
Actually, it may be pretty easy for a Meta-owned AP instance to drive out a lot of competitors. It definitely won't have the space/compute/bandwidth constraints of the average instance, and can work around most protocol warts by just throwing money at them. At the same time, federating with it might have a huge cost for a small instance.
Tumblr said they'd work towards ActivityPub a couple of months back as well, I wonder if that work will ship at some point soon.
As much as you have to be skeptical with anything to to with facebook, I still remain cautiously optimistic about this. Although the kind of content you can follow on tumblr is infinitely more fun than on instagram imo :)
What's the point of posting this? You may not be their target demographic. No one's forcing you to use it.
If I see a post about a new Lisp dialect (something I have no interest in), commenting "That will be a hard no from me thanks." is a waste of time and space.
I'm curious to hear why people would be enticed by this app when it seems to be nothing more than recycled mastodon by one of the least privacy centric companies in the world.
There's no explanation about why the OP thinks the way he does. If there was some interesting commentary or question, that would be worth reading about.
Have you considered the same argument about your own post? Comments pointing out useless comments are just as useless as the useless comments themselves. Hence the voting system which isn't being engaged with -- which promotes or demotes the exposure a comments gets -- perhaps you might agree the right answer is to downvote and move on?
> If I see a post about a new Lisp dialect (something I have no interest in)
But I am interested in social media apps, its hard not to be these days. I just don't see the point from Meta's point of view, apart from more data collection maybe, and I don't see the point from the users point when Mastodon and Twitter are doing this, with arguably more respect for their users than Meta.
Yeah,I really don't want to hear more from influencers. Even when I don't follow a single one, Instagram still promotes them on my feed for no reason. I was reporting this earlier but now I have just stopped using the app.
While I don't believe it will be as huge as Twitter, and that Twitter users won't migrate there.
This have the potential to do it well for Instagrammer that wants a new medium but in a platform that is not for shitposting and memes. However when you think about it, it's just Facebook all over again :D
> There are currently no set plan for monetization being shared, which could mean no ads to start? In which case, expect the emphasis to be on an organic social strategy.
I wonder if, collectively, people will ever stop falling for this kind of bait & switch.
It isn't a Twitter clone built for the sake of it.
This is Meta wanting data for its LLMs aware of the latest trends and news-worthy events as they happen. Probably generate ad videos and banners on-the-fly, even?
I'm no fan of Meta, but I'm hesitant to write off their chance of success at this, considering how successfully they took market share from snapchat with their stories product.
Instagram is great for visual artists, but its extreme focus on images (and short videos) seems to favour shallow ideas. Text seems more appropriate to my likings.
I think it makes a lot of sense to try this now and that it could be a good platform to push the protocol. My hunch is that this will help mastodon, and maybe hurt twitter's ad revenue if not their user count. A lot of hate for meta properties, but tying it into meta is a network effect mastodon doesn't have, but will tangentially now. I feel like if this goes well, it'll be good for most of the other social networks.
I have tried a few times but I can't last more than 2 weeks on twitter without deleting it.
Even people I have enormous respect for intellectually end up coming off as unfunny comedians, obnoxious and vapid performance artists or political hacks.
Meta runs the world's most highly regarded adverting platform which is already populated with the campaigns of almost every brand on the planet.
Brands already have limited ad spend with the global economy the way it is. And the fact that this will be a new channel that will be highly effective, work with their existing tools and require no additional effort will be compelling.
And that will extinguish what little revenue Musk hasn't fettered away. Twitter is finished.
Women show off their cameltoes and boobs, there's even hardcore porn that's not being removed despite being reported on Instagram.
But if you dare to post "Nice boobs" when the poster starts off to show her nice boobs, it's "harassment".
Yes and no. IG requires that you post an image/video. This is their Twitter clone.
To me it's an obvious move. Try to move in when Twitter is in an odd transitional period. Not saying I have any interest in using it, but from a strategy standpoint it makes complete sense.
