I joined Facebook years ago not long after it took off from its college roots. I also quit it years ago when my feed became full of junk.

The one thing I miss is contact with my friends, family, and ex-cowokers. Most of them weren’t technically inclined so that was the only platform they were on. Some of them did move to Instagram, which I did as well until Facebook bought it.

I then tried wt.social shortly after it started up. It seemed like a great alternative, but its growth is very slow, It has 450,000 users according to wikipedia. Now there’s a version 2, Trust Cafe. The same article also mentioned that they’re looking into connecting to ActivityPub.

What do you use in place of Facebook to stay in contact with friends and family? Mainly, I just use text messaging apps. I use Lemmy and Mastodon for news and information.

I have both a Mastadon and Lemmy account (actually two) as well as a kbin account so I'm fine with having several. It's interesting to see the interconnectivity of the two platforms. I'd love to see more of this.

I just read Cory Doctorow’s article “Let the Platform Burn”. It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for some time. Instead of joining yet another social network and recreating yourself, why not create your personal social network object and link it to others via a federation of the personal social network objects?

I call this object the Earthling object with all due respect to our extraterrestrial readers. The object would be maintained by its owner and contain whatever information the owner choses to add such as a bio, pictures, blogs, posts, or documents. The object could contain links to your friends, family, and coworker objects.

Once set up, you could serve it yourself or use an Earthling Service Provider (yet to be invented). It would be a lot like running your own Lemmy instance or joining an existing one. The essential feature of this approach is that all the data within the object and access to it is completely under your control. Should you decide to ‘go dark’, you can delete or disconnect the object and disappear from the social networking community. Right up there in importance is that you can move this object around to any location you like without having to rebuild it. Communication would be along the lines of ActivityPub.

There are most certainly many issues with the concept and some of the features already exist. As Cory mentioned in his article, Mastodon allows you to export all your data from one instance and move it to another. Kbin seems to already provide at lot of these features with it’s magazines, microblog, and people sections.

While the Earthling object would have extensive controls on who sees what in your object, people might prefer not to keep all their eggs in one basket, joining different networks for different purposes and only providing personal data for the specific purpose. Did I mention that the Earthling object would have an avatar feature so you could take on multiple personalities?

This post is part entertainment and part ‘wouldn’t it be nice’. Maybe there are others out there that have already thought through this and are a lot further along. I believe there are similar efforts in the Web 3.0 arena. Anyone else interested in having their own Earthling object?

Let’s say the internet gets so bad that it becomes almost impossible to carry on a civilized conversation on a social network or to avoid a flood of anonymous emails. The people become fed up and can’t take it anymore. A revolution takes place and a miracle happens: every one is required to get a real id that can be traced back an actual person. This id is then required to do anything on the internet.

How many people are going to still post death threats, character assassinations, or make racist or sexist comments. How many people are are going to email you saying they’re a Nigerian prince that wants to give you money. It would sure go a long way to cleaning up some of the cesspools that make up social networking and the garbage pit that is email today.

Knowing who you are cuts both ways. A woman trying to hide from an abusive boyfriend or husband would want to keep her identity unknown. People facing political persecution would like to keep a low profile.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to setting up ids would be verification. How do you prove someone is who they say they are when documents can be easily forged and fake identities created. You could use finger prints or eye scans, but the effort to set up the infrastructure to do so would be massive.

Then there is the issue of maintaining the information in a safe and secure manner. We couldn’t rely on any countries government. They wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to use it to track people. It would have to be an independent agency.

Is setting up such a system unfeasible? Even if all the hurdles could be overcome and a real id system could be created, is that something we would want? Are we better off with the way it is today and just live with its ills or relying on mods and spam filters to keep thing somewhat under control.

I’m aware that Web 3.0 is making strides in this area. It remains to be seen if it will be viable.

I’m a recent refugee from Reddit and a very long time social network user. When the Apollo app announced its demise, I joined beehaw.org and kbin.social and love these new networks. The discussions seems much more reasoned and friendly. I do miss some of the more esoteric groups such as music theory and jazz. I’m sure they’ll be created as the threadiverse (kbin, lemmy, etc.) continue to grow. In this case, growth will be good. Is there, however, a point where these new networks get too big?

Imagine 56 million daily users (the current figure for Reddit) using the threadiverse platforms. If they were divided evenly into groups of 10,000, that would be 5,600 instances. Surely, such growth would take years, unless Huffman pulls another catastrophic move such as making you pay to be a member and having to view ads as well. Even if he did, I doubt Reddit would completely go away. It would join myspace and AOL in the backwaters of the Internet.

Back to my point. Let’s say there are 20 million daily users. Magazines on kbin and communities on lemmy would have 100’s of thousands or even more that a million subscribers. The subreddit r/worldnews has 32 million subscribers. There could also be 100’s of thousands of magazines/communities. Reddit has 2.8 million subreddits. I know communities are tightly limited on beehaw.org, only being added when there is sufficient interest and support for them. On kbin, it appears any member can create a magazine. I could be wrong. Lemme.ee also allows members to create communities without restriction as far as I can tell.

Assuming there were enough instances to support such a volume of users, would that be a good thing or would discussions turn into flame wars, vitriol, and personal attacks? Even if such things were kept under control would threads become full of pointless or uninformative comments that kept you from reading quality posts. I don’t know one way or the other although I suspect, at some point there would be such a thing as too big. Most likely, it will take years for the threadiverse to grow so there’s plenty of time to plan and implement mechanisms to handle it.

I just set up all the subreddits I still want to following in Reeder, an RSS app. I'm able scroll through the posts ad free. It the occurred to me that this is a loss of revenue to Reddit. Could RSS be the new target for onerous fees?

It could be the case that RSS usage is small compared to 3rd party apps like Apollo so not of much concern. It also may be the case that it isn't possible for Reddit to charge for the usage. If they can't charge, they may just disable RSS altogether. I'm only guessing. I'll take off my tinfoil hat now.

This article is on Medium, which has a paywall. I'm a member, but not logged in. I was able to read it so it may depend on how many times you've read Medium articles.

One point he made that I found interesting was:

So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that?

He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don't think so in general. I've got a lot great information from forums.

I've been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn't last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn't

To me, Reddit's sky high pricing for the use of the API is intended to kill off apps like Apollo and for its users to move to the advertising filled web site or its own app, which I've never used.

If Huffman came out and said this was a revenue move right off would everyone be as upset as they are? Are people upset because Huffman completely mishandled the move or because they got their ad free experience turned off? If Reddit had an app the same quality as Apollo only with ads, would they be OK with it. I've only used Apollo so I can't speak to the other apps.

I can't blame Reddit for wanting to make money. It doesn't make a profit. Investors have to keep pouring in money to keep it going. They're going to want to see a return on their investment at some point. Usually they cash in on an IPO, but IPO's are generally only successful if the corporation looks like it will be profitable or at least the stock price continues to go up. That's how capitalism works.

In my case, I probably would have left regardless. I can't stand adds in my feed. I probably wouldn't have heard of lemmy or kbin if there hadn't been such an uproar. So I'm glad it went the way it did.