Why Facebook?
Facebook, the worlds most popular social network has long been used for the purposes of staying connected to ones friends and family and for the promotion of online and local businesses. It has had such an impact on the way people use the internet and communicate, and it has even enabled new connections to be made from all around the world. Many people for a long time have regarded Facebook as a revolutionary idea that has shaped what the internet is today. But lately, information regarding what Facebook does behind the scenes has made it increasingly less popular. People are now seeing through a deceptive persona that was sold to roughly 30% of the worlds population.
As it turns out, Facebook has been a social network on the outside but on the inside it has been one of the worlds largest surveillance engines. It has collected data on it’s users and given that data to 3rd parties and governments. It has also taken part in social engineering experiments and behavioral manipulation to influence peoples moods and understanding of the world around them. Inevitably as this information has come to light, people are seeking viable alternatives that offer the same kinds of features that they benefited from on Facebook.
While there are some truly great social networks on the raise, very few have directly competed with Facebook in terms of features. Minds.com has come to be one of my personal favorites for the online content creator by providing much more reach then Facebook ever did while directly rewarding it’s users for their engagement. Seeing a social network built on values that I respect was enough for me to stop using FB and migrate to new platforms. But what I didn’t expect, was the difficulty I had in getting people who I was previously connected with and my local community to join me in making this shift. I couldn’t understand why so many people are reluctant to switch to other platforms, even when they knew about the deceitful nature of Facebook, So I decided to find out why.
I wanted to know why I was having a difficult time getting my friends and local community off of Facebook and on to something that was built with ethics in mind. After all, I was approaching them with the intention of providing something that was in everybody’s best interest. What I failed to consider was why people have a dependency to Facebook. I had always thought it was because people’s friends were already on FB, and switching to a social network that was less popular would take them away from the connections they already had. To my surprise, this was actually only a small issue, and an easy one to solve because a person does not need to immediately stop using FB just because they decide to expand their online presence to more ethical platforms. The truth was that I didn’t want to look at what made Facebook great in the first place. I was so wrapped up in what it is doing wrong that I was failing to look at what it was doing right.
A close friend of mine used an analogy that made a lot of sense to me. He said “Facebook is built for the promoter and the consumer, and most social networks are built for one or the other.” It took some time thinking about this before I really got it, but now I understand what he meant. An example of this in Facebook is it’s friends and “page liking” system. FB gives it’s users the ability to have an inner circle `friends` and an outer circle `liked pages` (similar to channel subscriptions) providing a personal network of meaningful connections and public pages/channels all on one place, making it great for both promotion and connection on a local and global scale. This system also gives people who desire a more private internet presence the choice to view and follow channels without having their content available for all the world to see (just the spies that FB provides it’s user’s information to).
When I was on Facebook, I rarely posted. I would sign in once and a while to contact friends or to see local classifieds. But for me, it wasn’t a good medium to express myself though writing, and that was the primary reason why Minds turned out to be a great fit for me. I still have not found a platform that has provided enough features in one place to make Facebook completely obsolete, although there are some new developments that look very promising.
Nextcloud is one of the most promising platforms I have come across, and ironically it was not originally built as social network. Nextcloud is made to bring the awesome power of the cloud into a user’s own personal server giving them nearly all the features of google cloud and dropbox in one place. In addition to being open source it also leverages both it’s usernames and domains to create federated identification and federated links to anything that it’s users want to share. Making it versatile and scalable. It also provides secure video and voice chat and user created apps making it the perfect foundation for a social network.
Another platform that uses a federated system is Mastodon (an open source Twitter alternative). Built with decentralization in mind, anyone can host there own Mastodon server and communicate with other servers, making it a powerful and secure tool for keeping up with your favorite channels. In a recent update to Nextcloud, users were given the ability to connect to Mastodon’s “fediverse” enabling all the power of Nextcloud to be integrated with a massive decentralized social platform.
More than once I have caught myself imagining the possibilities of Nextcloud and the beauty of it is that instead of making other platforms irreverent, it could make use of other platforms and bring them all to one place, In a unified federated ID, revolutionizing communication and social networking.
I also want to express my gratitude for Minds.com. I am glad that it has developed as it has so far, because it has tapped into a niche that was really needed on the web. I cannot think of a better public forum or system for promoting creator content. On top of all that, it has connected me to some great people that I otherwise would not have met. It has also provided it’s source code so that other instances of it can be hosted in different settings. One day I hope it will integrate a federated system so that these instances are able to interact with each other making it’s decentralized applications much more expansive.
In conclusion, there are many new possibilities on the horizon. And for those who are serious about only using thoughtfully made social networks, there are some great options out there. I still encourage my local community to start looking into new possibilities, and I will continue to help spread awareness of what a fair internet can look like. One day I hope to see local communities providing their own federated servers and creating a grid that empowers free and open discourse in a fully decentralized network.