11-24-2016, 02:17 PM
Well, aside from wanting an app and distributed data sharing, what you basically just described was LiveJournal and all its variants, the predecessors to the modern social network. Welcome back to 2003. 
But I feel like the elephant in the room here, and the main issue behind most of Facebook's various questionable decisions, is the simple question of: How does this get paid for? For that matter, it's one of the most fundamental issues of the Internet as a whole right now. There are loads of advertisements and loads of companies collecting and selling data, because running popular websites is expensive. And there simply aren't any other good monetization options anyone has found (yet?) that have actually worked out, at least not on large scales. Small, private sites can potentially get by on paid accounts and\or donations, but anything with mass popularity pretty much has to have free and open access.
And if you can't charge your members for use, options for keeping the lights on become very limited.
The truth is, I don't think there is any sort of "magic bullet" solution here. No software app that can solve the myriad issues of privacy and data-sharing and data overload and advertising and monetization and everything else. I think this is a matter that society is simply going to have to work out for itself, arriving at whatever compromises people at large can swallow through their choice of platforms.
Plus, on the social side of things, I honestly think the data-overload problem is an even bigger issue than privacy. It's not just Facebook's News Feed. It's EVERYTHING. People in modernized countries today are absolutely overloaded with information every moment of their lives, and most folks just aren't equipped to deal with it. Facebook's news feed is one of thousands of examples of that underlying problem.
And there may not be a solution to it aside from time. Time for humans to develop coping strategies, and time for software tools to find a way to implement filters that don't simply create echo chambers.
But I feel like the elephant in the room here, and the main issue behind most of Facebook's various questionable decisions, is the simple question of: How does this get paid for? For that matter, it's one of the most fundamental issues of the Internet as a whole right now. There are loads of advertisements and loads of companies collecting and selling data, because running popular websites is expensive. And there simply aren't any other good monetization options anyone has found (yet?) that have actually worked out, at least not on large scales. Small, private sites can potentially get by on paid accounts and\or donations, but anything with mass popularity pretty much has to have free and open access.
And if you can't charge your members for use, options for keeping the lights on become very limited.
The truth is, I don't think there is any sort of "magic bullet" solution here. No software app that can solve the myriad issues of privacy and data-sharing and data overload and advertising and monetization and everything else. I think this is a matter that society is simply going to have to work out for itself, arriving at whatever compromises people at large can swallow through their choice of platforms.
Plus, on the social side of things, I honestly think the data-overload problem is an even bigger issue than privacy. It's not just Facebook's News Feed. It's EVERYTHING. People in modernized countries today are absolutely overloaded with information every moment of their lives, and most folks just aren't equipped to deal with it. Facebook's news feed is one of thousands of examples of that underlying problem.
And there may not be a solution to it aside from time. Time for humans to develop coping strategies, and time for software tools to find a way to implement filters that don't simply create echo chambers.
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