Kategori: Internett

Using  federation to fight and win over Facebook is possible. But it will take time. Here are two ideas for how to start strengthening the open web right now.

What is the allure of Facebook? Why is everyone using it (including me), even though it’s clearly bad for our online freedom and privacy (read: bad for the world)? There are a ton of features which makes Facebook almost impossible to escape, like

• «Everyone» is there, making it easy to keep in touch with old and new friends
• There’s a group for anything
• It’s dead simple to create new groups, making it ideal for collaboration
• A simple chat function lets you see if someone is online and start talking with them right away, straight from the tab in your browser that you already have open
• Get all the latest news from your favorite blogs, web comics and everything else in one place by the click of a «Like»-button.

And all of this is available anywhere, not just where you have your chat client etc.

These are some of the functionalities we need to replicate if we want people to move away from Facebook. In many ways Facebook are what the internet should’ve been from the very beginning: You should’ve always been able to start collaborating with anyone; friend, acquaintance or anonymous unknown person. You should’ve always been able to tell people you meet to add you online to keep in touch. In a way you always have, but Facebook made it all so much simpler. But they didn’t just make it simpler, they locked it up, data mined it and let NSA in to look around too. That’s why it’s high time the open meadow of the internet takes these features back from the walled garden of Facebook.

The recent revelations about NSA and GCHQ spying and the fact that Facebook don’t let you see everything shared by those you subscribe to («Like») unless they pay for you to see it should make it clearer than ever that change is desperately needed.