https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/us/politics/facebook-data-sharing-deals.html
... And someone has to start something new. What are your candidates to maybe replace Facebook ? Little/unknown yet social networks.
In my opinion, the solution isn't to initially replace the messaging platform. Rather, user metadata management first and foremost must be addressed. There needs to be a way for people to have something like OpenLDAP+SAML that is federated. User metadata can then be used on whatever shiny app is cool at the time.
Messaging platforms come and go, but the people are what remain fairly constant. Applying this logic also means you can give people multiple options and use the same logins on multiple applications.
If I were to take a first stab at this, I would probably use something like the OpenLDAP fork ReOpenLDAP [1] and use my domains and my friends domains to set up master-master replication. Each domain owner is master for their domain. I have no idea what saml2 provider I would put in front of it. This system would store password hashes, ssh public keys, contact information, bio (used for signatures and "about me" boxes).
There should be a combination of web API's and a web UI to self service account info so that anyone can maintain, update or otherwise remove their data when they want.
I have several ideas:
* Secure Scuttlebut, with clients that are getting more and more user friendly, i.e. mobile https://www.manyver.se/
* looking into individual community discourse servers, i.e. I would really like to be more active in purescript, or shutup and sitdown communities
* for personal communication, I moght be trying to get more of my ingroup on threema. It is reasonably secure messenger, and you need to buy it to use it, and I would like to support that :)
I'd like to propose Movim :)
It's a federated social network fully built on the XMPP protocol.
Responsive, with desktop and mobile apps. It offers microblogging features like Mastodon, but also more advanced blogging (Markdown, edit, comments, likes), chatrooms, direct chat, video-conferencing, communities, tags... and all in real-time.
You can have a look on https://movim.eu/. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask them here!
Email.
It lets you have private and group chats, organize events, share photos and links, keep contact lists, etc. I know is hard to see, but email is quite sexy: it is decentralized and vastly adopted, more so than FB. It works on every platform and it's been around for a long time. And it's not going anywhere. It's the dream of all the anarco-crpyto-hackers and it already exists! Sometimes it's hard to see the obvious.
And I think email could still be vastly improved by better clients. It just so happens that there is currently no big economic incentive to create one.
I believe that we are still in the very early moments of the Internet, and we are collectively doing a lot of stupid shit. Like the first few decades of synthesizer music. We have to go through some silly stages before getting back to our senses and developing some taste.
Also RSS, newsgroups and other blasts from the past. Everything has been reinvented poorly and plastered with ads, but just wait a few years...
Previous discussion of NYT article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18712382
Google+ refugees are also looking for a new home. Lots of people are flocking to MeWe, but I don't think another proprietary monolith is the solution. Distributed, decentralised, federated social networks are the solution.
Diaspora and Mastodon are among the more popular options. I'm looking at Friendica and Hubzilla, because from there you can connect to people on both Diaspora and Mastodon.
A law mandating open access to APIs would do wonders to spur competition.
Remember Pidgin? Knitting together disparate IM platforms into one client was great. You can't do that with Facebook, their TOS doesn't allow for it.
Open access to 3rd party clients that can bridge platforms will break the network effect lock-in and allow for real competition to emerge.
I wrote a filesystem-and-own-email-account-only cronjob for myself to do it, it and its predecessors have been working fine for about a half-decade
Did anyone hear about openbook.social ? They had a failed kickstarter campaing but got their goal in a second one. I think the beta starts in january. I'm keen to test it out. TIt's privacy focused and hopefully 100% open source.
HN badly needs an article downvote
Mastodon
You're not supposed to submit stories like this. In fact, that people do this is the reason that URLs in these kinds of stories aren't clickable. Links on the site are community property, and the submitter doesn't get to capture them with a special comment at the top of the thread.