fromjason.xyz 鉂わ笍 馃捇
@fromjason@mastodon.social  路  activity timestamp 3 days ago

> I wanted to clarify my comments about Facebook鈥檚 similarities to AOL. I don鈥檛 think Facebook is a bad company or that they won鈥檛 be successful; they seem like smart passionate people who genuinely care about making a great space for their users

No shade to Kottke but this sounds exactly like what people are saying about #Bluesky right now.

https://kottke.org/07/07/facebook-vs-aol-redux
fromjason.xyz 鉂わ笍 馃捇
@fromjason@mastodon.social  路  activity timestamp 3 days ago

It's facisnating to see how the #OpenWeb ideology was formed in the late aughts. Technologists and early Internet tech personalities have long believed in open and free information.

That's great for academia, and the accumulation of humanity's knowledge. But when we extend that ideology to personal data we end up with what we have now.

Open Web evangelists criticizing early Facebook for being too private is an incredible heap of irony.

Think of it this way. Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you're not a Facebook user, you can't do anything with the site...nearly everything published by their users is private. Google doesn't index any user-created information on Facebook? AFAIK, user data is available through the platform but that hardly makes it open...all of the significant information and, more importantly, interaction still happens in private. Compare this with MySpace or Flickr or YouTube. Much of the information generated on these sites is publicly available. The pages are indexed by search engines. You don't have to be a user to participate (in the broadest sense...reading, viewing, and lurking are participating).
Think of it this way. Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you're not a Facebook user, you can't do anything with the site...nearly everything published by their users is private. Google doesn't index any user-created information on Facebook? AFAIK, user data is available through the platform but that hardly makes it open...all of the significant information and, more importantly, interaction still happens in private. Compare this with MySpace or Flickr or YouTube. Much of the information generated on these sites is publicly available. The pages are indexed by search engines. You don't have to be a user to participate (in the broadest sense...reading, viewing, and lurking are participating).
Think of it this way. Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you're not a Facebook user, you can't do anything with the site...nearly everything published by their users is private. Google doesn't index any user-created information on Facebook? AFAIK, user data is available through the platform but that hardly makes it open...all of the significant information and, more importantly, interaction still happens in private. Compare this with MySpace or Flickr or YouTube. Much of the information generated on these sites is publicly available. The pages are indexed by search engines. You don't have to be a user to participate (in the broadest sense...reading, viewing, and lurking are participating).
fromjason.xyz 鉂わ笍 馃捇
@fromjason@mastodon.social  路  activity timestamp 3 days ago

Looking back, no one could've predicted just how good Facebook would become at data mining our personal information.

Would opening Facebook up so that social activity is indexable on Google help prevent the surveillance capitalist system we have today? Surely not.

Knowing what we know now, do we really want our posts, likes, comments, and shares available for anyone to quantify, analyze, use against us etc?

Is that the same as open accessible knowledge on the web? I don't think so.