Alternatives to Facebook
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@penguinwrangler said in Alternatives to Facebook:
@scottalanmiller said in Alternatives to Facebook:
@penguinwrangler said in Alternatives to Facebook:
@kelly said in Alternatives to Facebook:
I've started to poke around looking for alternatives to Facebook. It is a hard sell to tell people to get off without having a good alternative. Have any of you tried anything else that might replace it, or the parts of it that you use? I looked a little bit at Vero (https://www.vero.co), and it looks promising since they are subscription based. However that is a hard sell still. Thoughts?
Alternative to Facebook.....how about a real life?
Real life is an alternative to staying in contact with people. That's why we like things like Facebook, a chance to not be socially isolated and cut off.
I disagree, Facebook makes you seemed connected when you are not.
I disagree. Facebook has allowed so many people I know, and everyone knows, to find each other, communicate, stay actually connected. This idea that talking via modern systems isn't "real" communications, but talking face to face is special or that old telephones are good while modern video chatting is bad is all just anti-tech reactionary stuff. It's not true. Facebook is every bit as "real" as any other form of communications. It's not some special exception to everything. But what it is, is enabling a level of connection that people have never had before.
Those of us in their 40s got to see how little communications, how lonely and disconnected the world used to be. Those young enough to have always had computers that connected really have no idea how disconnected and anti-social the world used to be. How even the slightest life events caused everyone to lose connection. How tiny your group of friends really was. Facebook, and many other tools, have changed that. The degree of communications, staying in contact, connecting with friends that is done today is so many orders of magnitude greater than it was without those tools.
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@penguinwrangler said in Alternatives to Facebook:
Facebook is all about the "me" and not about connections. It is also more perception/surface/glitz and not about depth and truly knowing someone. It is much harder to lie in person than on Facebook. It is not about being connected it is more about getting likes, again more about the "Me". I stay in contact with all my friends, without facebook. I might go days without knowing something but then when we do get together we get to have meaningful conversations.
You are mixing one perceived use of FB with the platform. You are reacting to disliking the like and posting system. I dislike that too, and I don't see it, because you can turn that off.
All that happens without FB, too. It's called television and people were watching that "in real life." In fact, ever been to a bar ni the US? They "all" have televisions on so that people can sit there pretending to be doing something social, while actually being completely alone. If we treat real life, like Facebook, and select one common bad use case, we'd say that "real life" social interactions are totally fake and while yes, people sit physically in shared spaces, we have carefully engineered activities like reality TV and sports that allow them to stare blankly at moving pictures so that they are able to mentally isolate themselves while being able to tell others that they "spent time with people." But it is all fake.
If you cherry pick, I guarantee we can make "real life" way, way less social and less real than Facebook. But when you look at both as a platform and what it enables people to do, FB allows people who want to be social to be far more social than they can be without it. Both platforms allow people to isolate themselves as much as they want. In fact, one could define avoiding Facebook and only using "real life" as a form of simply using Facebook in the most anti-social, isolated means possible. You can think of never using or deleting Facebook as a use case of Facebook at the extreme end of the anti-social scale.
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@penguinwrangler said in Alternatives to Facebook:
I might go days without knowing something but then when we do get together we get to have meaningful conversations.
This is where things like Facebook are a win, in my book. I don't have to go days without knowing something. Using messenger and posts, I can have truly meaningful conversations with people that I would not get to talk with otherwise.
That being said, I prefer smaller settings like ML (and some small FB groups) for getting to know folks and carry on good conversations and daily banter and learn about them and their experiences.
I think being able to combine your online and real life lives is especially helpful.
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@dafyre said in Alternatives to Facebook:
@penguinwrangler said in Alternatives to Facebook:
I might go days without knowing something but then when we do get together we get to have meaningful conversations.
This is where things like Facebook are a win, in my book. I don't have to go days without knowing something. Using messenger and posts, I can have truly meaningful conversations with people that I would not get to talk with otherwise.
That being said, I prefer smaller settings like ML (and some small FB groups) for getting to know folks and carry on good conversations and daily banter and learn about them and their experiences.
I think being able to combine your online and real life lives is especially helpful.
Yes, ML is better for really knowing people and conversations. But FB is better for the big, global spread of people. I have hundreds of people on my FB, most of whom would struggle to stay in contact otherwise. They have no other stability in their lives. The rich can afford phones and email that never changes, the poor rarely can. Things like FB create a single, universal point of continuous contact.
One of my best friends from HS lives in a rural area by a lake, has no money and does factory work. Before FB we'd lose contact for years because she was physically remote, and could not afford things like phones. Now with FB, she's able to get online for free every few days and we stay in contact. Even when we lived near each other IRL, it was impossible to find her reliably.
She only made it to my wedding because a week before my wedding, after years of being out of contact, I saw her walking down the street from a restaurant that I was in and chased her down.
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@scottalanmiller said in Alternatives to Facebook:
But FB is better for the big, global spread of people.
Precisely!
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Just a note for the people stating "don't use Facebook", the initial point of the thread was not to debate the merits of Facebook in particular or social media in general. It was to discuss options to recommend to people that are using Facebook to help them get off of it and on to something else where they are not the product. Telling them to just stop using it would be like recommending people stop using a smartphone. You have to provide an alternative, not just a negative, hence the discussion.
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MeWe seems to be a decent option.
I'm piddling around on a Diaspora pod (https://diasp.org/)... Diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) aims to be a decentralized Facebook.. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.
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@dafyre said in Alternatives to Facebook:
MeWe seems to be a decent option.
I'm piddling around on a Diaspora pod (https://diasp.org/)... Diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) aims to be a decentralized Facebook.. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.
My concern about Diaspora is that there doesn't appear to be much in the way of controls for guaranteeing the privacy of users. It appears that user privacy is dependent on the honesty of the ones running the pods. I haven't dug in to it very far, so I might be missing something.
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@kelly said in Alternatives to Facebook:
@dafyre said in Alternatives to Facebook:
MeWe seems to be a decent option.
I'm piddling around on a Diaspora pod (https://diasp.org/)... Diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) aims to be a decentralized Facebook.. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.
My concern about Diaspora is that there doesn't appear to be much in the way of controls for guaranteeing the privacy of users. It appears that user privacy is dependent on the honesty of the ones running the pods. I haven't dug in to it very far, so I might be missing something.
Yeah, I don't like that, if that is the case.
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@dafyre said in Alternatives to Facebook:
MeWe seems to be a decent option.
I'm piddling around on a Diaspora pod (https://diasp.org/)... Diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) aims to be a decentralized Facebook.. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.
Decentralized brings in a lot of complications.
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Decentralized Facebook is... email.
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@kelly said in Alternatives to Facebook:
@dafyre said in Alternatives to Facebook:
MeWe seems to be a decent option.
I'm piddling around on a Diaspora pod (https://diasp.org/)... Diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) aims to be a decentralized Facebook.. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.
My concern about Diaspora is that there doesn't appear to be much in the way of controls for guaranteeing the privacy of users. It appears that user privacy is dependent on the honesty of the ones running the pods. I haven't dug in to it very far, so I might be missing something.
This appears to be a valid concern. Each pod can have its own TOS and such as well.
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@dafyre said in Alternatives to Facebook:
@kelly said in Alternatives to Facebook:
@dafyre said in Alternatives to Facebook:
MeWe seems to be a decent option.
I'm piddling around on a Diaspora pod (https://diasp.org/)... Diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) aims to be a decentralized Facebook.. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.
My concern about Diaspora is that there doesn't appear to be much in the way of controls for guaranteeing the privacy of users. It appears that user privacy is dependent on the honesty of the ones running the pods. I haven't dug in to it very far, so I might be missing something.
This appears to be a valid concern. Each pod can have its own TOS and such as well.
Yeah, that's a really bad idea, overall. I get why they go that route, and it's fine for a kind of "group of forums" but doesn't address the kind of usage Facebook is for.
