Facebook is a quasi-monopoly. Its threat comes from regulators, not consumers nor advertisers. (You saw something similar with Uber, by the way. When they lost their Teflon coating, prosecutors and municipal regulators got bold while their grassroots supporters melted away.)
But I'd argue Uber is largely replaceable -- you still have public transport and taxis while Facebook has no alternative and most people are too inert to even think of replacing it...
We can all see how the media grows bolder and reports quite negatively on Facebook but I wonder if that even makes any difference.
Facebook does have alternatives, though. The website does nothing new, only serves it to you in one place. This used to be great when your feed was populated by content generated by people you actually know and care about in your personal life, but facebook pulled the rug out from under us when they gradually increased the amount of advertising pollution you had to sift through to get to any original thought.
Facebook has changed from that useful platform it once was to basically nonstop custom-tailored commercials, but the alternatives that it sought to replace have not and never will. Want to keep in touch with your relatives or friends? Directly engage people again. This can be as simple as an email thread, group text messaging, or an application like GroupMe. Need to plan events with your group? Throw it on a google calendar, who cares about who said they are going or who left your invite on read? Contacts? Your phone and address book on your computer. Keep your photos on something nonproprietary and therefore future proof; contrary to popular belief, no one will remember all the likes your pictures from Cabo got you in two weeks anyway.
Facebook has no alternative because it takes years to build something halfway decent. A social network today must work across all devices seamlessly, integrating with realtime notifications, user accounts and addressbooks across devices and that’s just for a start.
At https://Qbix.com we have spent our own money on a free open source alternative platform to Facebook.
I think we’re still pretty bad at marketing it. Would appreciate some feedback if you check out the site and watch the video.
But it needs a huge effort to make it as nice and appealing as say stripe.com is for payment integrations. Those guys are amazing.
We recently released version 1.1 on github. We have chatrooms, galleries, events, trips, back end and front end components which all work together like BSD systems all work together. Just slap them on pages, theme it and there u have your own social network. It took us years and nearly $1M in funding. But you can’t see much of that at a glance, or play around with it, yet. That should change in 2019.
Don't bother with any arguments that PHP powers huge sites including Facebook and Wordpress. The whole point of this thread, and presumably Qbit's very existence, is that they are not good role models.
If you are trying to be a modern, secure, respectful replacement for Facebook, be modern, secure, and respectful.
A strange response considering you’re not the only person on the Internet. You didn’t post any alternative, and if you had, it would probably have the 1% of the install base of PHP. Remember that most people hosting this thing aren’t going to be setting up their own VPN and Linux. In fact, even YOU don’t do it, you probably will just use AWS creating MORE centralization in “the cloud”. That’s pretty hypocritical. Meanwhile the LAMP stack or NGinX + PHP stack is widely deployed on the web. And many of the installations have the latest PHP. What is less secure about the latest PHP than your favorite language?
Finally, about being modern and chasing trends. Wordpress is not modern but it powers 1 in every 3 websites. Ghost is modern and is used on 0.1% of websites. Thanks but we’ll pass.
I am not even sure how PHP is disrespectful, so I’ll leave that one alone.
If it makes you feel better, we are also working on an app hosting the whole network from a random computer or a mobile phone on a local network.
Your answer somehow conflates popularity with quality.
PHP has a lot of very well documented problems.
Also, do you have a source when claiming that most PHP installations use more modern versions? I seriously doubt that particular claim is true. Most business people think of IT as a one-time expense. You can still find a ton of 5.0 - 5.3 installations out there. Hell, in my country there are good amount of PHP 4.x websites as well.
I’m responding to your “most people are too inert to even think of replacing [Facebook]” comment. My point is, they already have. That presents an easy regulatory solution to Mark Zuckerberg. Break up Facebook.
