Take

I understand the point that not everyone want to have their own web sites. Everyone who thought the advent of the web meant people would own their own domains and set up their own weblogs were living in a bubble. It's not that people don't have them, of course. I just mean people people.

Last summer I listened to one of my dad's friends talk about keeping up with some of his acquaintances and some people in a club of sorts of shared interests. To him, for that purpose, Facebook is the best thing since sliced bread because it lets him do that. He can operate a computer and especially a phone well enough to do that, and he's really positive about it.

I'm guessing he's heard about what Facebook does and doesn't care, because he's not willing to put any effort into it. If it's there and it works, lovely. Making an effort to replace it with something else: son, are you kidding me? I don't know anything about that stuff, and I want to talk to a dozen people who don't either.

There's a lot more people like him than like the people who want to have their own web sites. Probably by a factor of hundreds.

Of course, the people who make Facebooks are way less than the people who make web sites too. It's not a completely hopeless calculus. Someone could still come along with something better and steal them away and ruin Facebook's day. But the Diaspora-like people who expect those people to give a damn about decentralization and federation and hooking things up are living on entirely separate planes of existence.

I'm being unfair – some of them are talking about privacy and agency and control instead of focusing on technology, and that can move people too, but only some people sometimes. Right now, people who care have brains that are on fire and in constant pain, and people who don't don't understand what the fuss is about.

They need to speak in the language of "how do we let you do something you couldn't do before" if they want people who spend most their day not thinking about this at all to have a reason to move. (Or in the words of jwz, "how will this software get him laid". There's a disclaimer there which is almost haunting, but I guess it underlines what out-Facebooking Facebook entails.)

Me, I'm just happy to be able to have something outside of Facebook and outside of Twitter, outside of the zoo of everyone else combined with whatever today's monetization strategy calls for. To me, not being an animal in their zoo is important. But not everyone thinks like that, or sees Facebook or Twitter like that.

We're probably far more likely to see Facebook out-Facebooked by something that's a bit more convenient but with a far more horrible backside than we are by seeing it replaced by something someone like me, or someone like the Diaspora people. If you think I don't like Facebook, I'm walking city blocks around TikTok. (You know, just to end on a positive note.)