Ask HN: How Would You Build an Ethical Facebook Replacement?

2 points

8 years ago

If the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook incident[0] is an example of Facebook's negative affect on society it doesn't appear too far removed from its standard business model. However, With over 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook clearly provides a very useful service. I understand that Facebook being replaced by an ethical competitor is tremendously unlikely, that said, how would you do it?

How would you build a Facebook replacement without a Faustian deal with surveillance capital?

- Wikipedia: has built humanity's largest encyclopedia without it

- signal: has built a whatsapp clone without it

- mastadon: has built a twitter clone without it

- peer 2 peer: has solved many distribution and scale problems

- federation: has solved many single points of failure problems

- GNU & FOSS: has provided many thoughtful approaches to similar problems

I would love to try and keep this discussion positive and fairly technical.

Please don't just:

- list all the obvious obstacles

- point out that this will never happen

- get stuck too deeply in the 'what is ethical?' conversation.

Technically, how would you approach solving this problem.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm

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