Perhaps 'Facebook News' alternative rather than Facebook itself?
Unless you consider getting your friends cousins updates, and liking their posts through an RSS feed as a Facebook alternative.
back
4 comments
The pivot of Facebook from "here's a way to connect with family and friends" to "here's a steady drip of 'engaging' content made to generate 'likes'" is very interesting.
Plenty of people still use it primarily to connect with friends and family though. Just there's news and memes too
Don't forget the sprinkles of propaganda
Propaganda is endemic, nobody is immune, it's the matrix around us. Self selecting echo chambers with the brand of propaganda containing the message they like best, and if they don't like it, switch to another brand. DRINK MORE OVALTINE!
I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. Facebook does so much stuff, everyone uses it for different reasons. Like me, I use it for the marketplace nowadays, and for events. Some people like groups, some like meme pages
It would be interesting to have something like FB Purity [0] run in a headless browser that will RSS you meaningful posts based on rules you provide. I'd totally use something like that.
If there was an open standard api/protocol for liking/commenting I reckon this could actually work quite well. I guess you'd also need some kind of standard for identity and "friending" too (perhaps something akin to Open ID).
I mean, ActivityPub? That's basically what it is.
Yeah. One can go read the protocol. But the Activity Vocabulary probably gives a good idea for the versatility, the use of (core) ActivityPub[1]. ActivityPub is streams of actions, most of which we know & are familiar with already from existing social media.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-t...
I guess so. ActivityPub seems a lot more complicated than what I have in mind. With RSS itself, most developers could create a reasonable implementation in a weekend. I see no reason why couldn't have something of similar simplicity for commenting.
There’s [Webmention](https://indieweb.org/Webmention), which is considerably simpler than ActivityPub.
It wasn't an open protocol but Google Reader had this. And it had commenting. I had some of the most thoughtful and productive conversations on there. Total shame we don't have that anymore.
yeah thats what I immediately thought as well.
Unfortunately FB has somewhat successfully added a lot of services to its product that are now the "default".