Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches, as do most sites I view as reasonable sources of information. Most discoverability comes from feeds (blogs, HN, Reddit)--searching limits you to terms you've already thought of. General search seems to lead either to the places already mentioned in good cases, and to low-quality results that waste time and mislead you in bad cases. You can save time and improve thought process by going more directly to sources.
Email: Fastmail. But again, just using email less is helpful. My most common form of communication is using text messages to set up meeting in person.
Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? I haven't made any intentional effort to replace Facebook since I stopped using it, and don't feel any sense of loss. The same goes for Twitter/Instagram. The only thing these services ever did for me was make me feel angry, lonely, or inadequate.
Random side note: Stack Overflow has a serious content quality and up-to-date-ness issue. An alternative is using documentation, reading code, and mastering debuggers/REPLs. This gives you a much better understanding of your tools, and gives you much better solutions as a result.
I'm in a demographic that's very heavily invested in Facebook. FOMO was real when quitting, and I'm sure I've missed some event, someplace, sometime. But the neat thing is, people actually use other means of contacting me if they really want to hang out. I mean, it's not even hard: a text, a mail, whatever.
What I've noticed is that I actually meet people IRL more often now, because the events I get information about are the ones that really matter to me, and they don't get lost in a constant buzz of less important but attention-grabbing stuff.
I also realize I can miss talking to someone. It's a feeling I haven't had in a long time, because people used to show up in my feed every day and it was like they were there anyway. Now I can get a sudden urge to just shoot a few texts back and forth with someone about something that's actually meaningful and not just the usual facebook wall banter.
I'm quite introverted, so being selective is something that suits me well, but facebook also made me even more socially lazy and avoidant than I really am.
I'm only interested in friend's parties. Most friends know I'm not on Facebook now, and invite me separately (using WhatsApp, but that's another kettle of fish...).
However it has forced me to be more engaged with my friends, since without Facebook they have to make a concious effort to invite me, rather than spot my name on a list. I've spent more time personally messaging and catching up with friends as a result.
Facebook makes keeping up with people frictionless, but relationships thrive on doing it the hard way, and giving up time for each other. Facebook makes it easy to have a thousand acquaintances regardless of how many deeper friendships you have.
Not all of us use it for reading the 'timeline' and seeing what our friends' cats are doing this week. Organizations also use it for updates, scheduling, sharing ideas, etc. Email could work, but mailing lists lack many little features that make Facebook practical here.
I guess the modern alternative would be something like Discourse, but it's hard to tell a non-profit to replace "free, and add people with a couple clicks" with "$100/month, and make everybody create new separate accounts".
This. I feel like a lot of people don’t realize that a very significant portion of FB users dont scroll the timeline and strictly use it for messaging, event scheduling, checking out businesses, and other things that mostly deal with organizing stuff.
I know it is a silly anecdote, but i end up checking out my facebook feed out of boredom about once every few months, get disappointed in it, and then forget about it for another few months. It also helps that FB has dedicated first party apps for a lot of fb functionality that doesnt require the main fb app. I havent had the FB app on any of my phones since about 8 years ago, simply because i didnt feel the need, not because I felt some strong conviction against FB. Messenger app + Local app (for FB messaging and events respectively) has been a golden combo that worked great for me. Local, surprisingly, has amazingly clean UIUX that combines both event discovery and organization of your current events in a very seamless way.
Just a note, i am not affiliated with FB as a company in any way, and neither have i worked there. I just think that a lot of people tend to focus on the trashy common denominator part of FB (timeline) and ignore the good stuff. And FB makes it really easy to avoid the trashy stuff by having clean dedicated apps for functionality that i actually care about.
General search is still valuable for finding random programming examples that don't appear on Stack Overflow - there are a lot of blogs that usually have some helpful example.
For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text).
It'd be nice if this extended to optional accounts that had up to date contact information - this is the main thing I'd worry about missing (though I think Apple could just implement this by optionally pushing changes to the people in your phone with your contact information when it changes).
For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there.
Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people.
> there are a lot of blogs that usually have some helpful example.
Each with their own search, usually!
I can see the downsides to this, but in trade you're getting a bubble that protects you from a lot of nonsense.
> For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text).
That sounds like a fairly small project, and I can see the value. Maybe I'll code it up in the near future.
> For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there.
> Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people.
I'll concede this, but in my brief Twitter experience it was very easy for the noise to drown out the signal, and I didn't feel it was worth it to work around that problem. It doesn't solve a data problem I have: my data problem isn't that I don't have enough data sources, it's that I have too many, and too low quality.
>Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches
One upside of DDG is the bangs. If I know what I want is on wikipedia, just prepend !w.
I think folks need to learn how people searched pre-pagerank.
People treat google queries like a venn diagram with their top result being at the intersection, rather than using logical operators like AND, quotes, and -.
Why search wikipedia through DDG? Use address bar search shortcuts. In firefox any website search bar can be assigned a shortcut by right-clicking it. These shortcuts for wikipedia, HN, maps, powerthesaurus, reddit and others makes for ~80% of my searches.
Facebook without probably putting in a ton of effort cornered the ad hoc grouping market. I can talk to my family/friends whenever yes, but almost all my cycling groups lean on fb for example - it is the lowest common denominator.
This too in a world where many teams have their own websites, boards and the participants almost uniformly posting their rides to strava. Strava has been trying its clubs / posts stuff with very minimal success sadly :/
The article talks mostly about e-mail and search, but you know what's still the best social network on the interwebs? E-mail.
When I dumped social media two years ago, I gave my "friends" my e-mail address.
Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events, funny stories — all without the dross and anger-inducing cruft of a social media "feed."
E-mail has all of the benefits of social media: photos, group chat, near-instant delivery; with none of the drawbacks: tracking, advertising, stalking, third-party influences.
More importantly, what happened is that I found out who my actual friends are. I think the whole social media "friends" button has cheapened the word. We don't make a distinction between friends, acquaintances, associates, and people we just know. Your real friends will e-mail you.
> The article talks mostly about e-mail and search, but you know what's still the best social network on the interwebs? E-mail.
I'm pretty sure if you replaced "social network" by "ticket tracker", you would had made quite a bit of people laugh here, still here we are, unable to accept that some tools are just much more efficient in a task.
For me Facebook is something where I can reach everyone that I need to reach at once. The sad thing is the best social network is the one that people use. Sure everyone got an email, as this is a requirement to even have a social network account, but it's the usage that people does of it that make it impossible to use it as such.
I remember at nearly every team project at my university, we tried to make Slack happens, or Discord, or whatever else to communicate, instead of Facebook, but the response was never as instant and each time we came back to Facebook, simply because that's what most people in the group were online on at the same time.
Personally my actual usage of Facebook is mostly to quickly organize events, it's only useful to reach "everyone" at the same time. I remember one of the best example of event we organized, it was mid afternoon, I was in class with a friend and we decided to organize a friend gathering that night. We had nothing, not even somewhere to do it. We simply created a Facebook event, we invited about 20 friends to the event, 5 hours later we had a place, we had food, plenty of board games and more than a dozens people present.
Sure we can send 20 emails or SMS, hope that everyone read them in the afternoon, have everyone send a bunch of answers in random order, again hope that everyone read the one that are important mixed with all the random "I'm in". That's 20x more effort for each and everyone involved. At that event, my friend and I were the organizer, and we only had to send an handful of messages, the event was the source of truth easy to follow by everyone. Minimum effort, quick and easy.
Sure we can text you on the side, but the truth is, that add friction for each and everyone that aren't on Facebook. If something get updated and I forget to tell you, well I'm now responsible for you missing the update.
The older I get, the less this kind of thing happen, so yeah Facebook is less important, but that still why I used it, and it's still what makes it the best social network. It allow you more easily, more quickly, and more efficiently to be social.
> Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events, funny stories — all without the dross and anger-inducing cruft of a social media "feed."
I would like you to have a talk to everyone grandparents. The amount of emails chains I got from my family when I was younger...
I personally don't really follow people posts, in fact almost no one does them in my friend circle, it's mostly stuff shared from the news, which isn't important.
> none of the drawbacks: tracking, advertising, stalking, third-party influences.
Gmail and Hotmail don't track email and advertise?
> More importantly, what happened is that I found out who my actual friends are. I think the whole social media "friends" button has cheapened the word. We don't make a distinction between friends, acquaintances, associates, and people we just know. Your real friends will e-mail you.
That's kind of weird. Think a bit about it, why would a "real friend" e-mail you? Are you a "real friend" by not sending a message to your friend over Facebook because that's what he use? That would means you are not really a real friend to anyone... I'm sure that's not the case. You didn't found out who your actual friends were, you simply lost actual friends by making it harder to contact you and you slowly made them become acquaintances.
I think there's room for a Webservice/app focused on events only that defaults to using sms for people that don't have accounts.
The idea being that people can optionally make accounts with just their contact information which they can then give people access to (this way contacts stay updated by everyone with access rather than local copies on everyone's device that goes out of date).
The app would handle basics like RSVP, sending out SMS reminders for people, tracking number of people coming etc. Right now handling this over SMS and tracking it is a pain so people default to FB, but I think there's an opportunity here to get a foothold.
> You didn't found out who your actual friends were, you simply lost actual friends by making it harder to contact you and you slowly made them become acquaintances.
I reduced my social media usage because they were a huge time sink with the endless feeds, but I agree with you. It takes two to tango, so saying doing so lets one finds out who your real friends are is just condescending imo. Friendships don't start out 'real'; like any relationships, they require constant reaching out to people and be a part of their lives, and this has to work both ways.
Can you give a summary of what it is for and why people use it?
I read the landing page, clicked about, looked at the first page of the API docs and it's still not really obvious to me what it is for or how it's actually used.
What problem is it solving? Standard web backend for common social media platform stuff?
When 90% of the people you email are on Gmail or GSuite does Proton mail really help? Yeah you get end to end encryption for other Proton mail users, but I don't know a single one. Google is going to have all of my emails anyway.
As for Facebook it is best just to quit. I don't even use Facebook to keep in touch with friends anymore. The value in Facebook is some of the groups. Local neighborhood groups seem to be the best source of information or things happening around your area if you care to know about it. Also different hobbies/interests have local FB groups that are the most active place for discussion with far more users than a small subreddit or dying forum community.
Perhaps I am old but I don't know a single person that uses Whatsapp or Signal. Everyone just uses old fashioned SMS or iMessage if they have iPhones.
> When 90% of the people you email are on Gmail or GSuite does Proton mail really help?
This is such a common, but strange attitude to have in these circumstances. Think about how user migration works. It's not like it happens overnight and suddenly your 100% gmail contact list is 100% proton. No, it goes from 100% to 99%, then continues to 92%, then to 75%, and so on. Having this defeatist attitude guarantees that bad actors retain their users.
As an example -- I switched to use Signal for messaging a few years ago. I was the only one in my circle that made the jump. Slowly but surely, people have started to switch over. Today about 10% of my contacts use Signal, and our chats are encrypted e2e. Every few months a few more people make the jump. If all of these people had the same attitude as you, nothing would ever change.
I don't think it's necessarily a strange attitude, just more about what people might use email for versus what they might use instant messaging for - which target audience. My Signal experience mirrors yours, as I think folks really don't care too awful much which app is used, so long as everyone can use it together to chat/communicate as possible work peers, friends or family.
Email, however, is the line item on every single one of my bills (utility, credit, etc.), my mortgage, my doctors, my bank accounts - a cornerstone of what it takes to live in our modern society. Migrating to a new email address is daunting (to me) due to all these arms and legs having had this email address in use for ... 2 decades? (however long GMail has been around). It can be done, but it's a lot more work to go through for the average individual than just installing a new app.
Maybe in some parts of Europe, but not all. I'm in Norway and none of my WhatsApp contacts are Norwegian, everyone use Facebook messenger. I don't want to use WhatsApp more than I have to because of the way it tries to get access to my phone contacts and my phone number every time I want to add someone new
In South America too. In Peru, many mobile phone plans come with free data for WhatsApp, fb and Instagram which makes it way harder for people to even think of changing messaging platforms.
Seriously though, a real benefit you get from an e2ee email when no one you communicate with uses it is that all of your receipts, memberships, newsletter, etc. correspondences are not being read/scanned by your email provider.
For Signal I asked my wife to switch and she did (just for her and I) and we've been using it for over a year. My Dad recently hopped on as well. These things go slow, but when someone close switches it feels nice knowing that all my conversations are private.
>When 90% of the people you email are on Gmail or GSuite does Proton mail really help?
Depends on your threat model.
Having all your email in one place is a juicy target.
But the Swiss want a warrant for a specific crime, and then it's my understanding your government needs your password to decrypt the emails at rest.
Not being able to go on fishing expeditions is a good feature especially if you have years of email.
>Perhaps I am old but I don't know a single person that uses Whatsapp or Signal. Everyone just uses old fashioned SMS or iMessage if they have iPhones.
When I explain people can use Signal on wifi and not get any spam calls, many older folks are open to using it. You don't always need to sell Signal on privacy - older folks on a limited income may not have infinite data, being able to use wifi for calls and texts cuts data use and they like that.
A better question is how you use or create an alternative to X without becoming X in the long run.
Facebook is kings because of its market share which is why people use it.
There are ways of communicating with a close group of friends that don’t involve social media but for people who want to keep in touch with a large social circle there is really no alternative.
And far as the gmail replacement goes then it’s by far the easiest thing to find an alternative for and also probably the least important one.
I have a feeling that people who rely heavily on emails to stay in touch also probably don’t use social media so Facebook isn’t an issue for them.
However the problem is that due social pressure it’s a most impossible to drop from a platform without having it affecting your relationships.
Sure people switch as groups and slowly migrate from one platform to another but overall trying to drop X for Y tends result in you using both or quickly switching back.
I'm actually building an alternative to Facebook for people fed up with Facebook and just want to stay in touch with people and not much more. I would go as far as calling it a glorified address book with some extra features for having up-to-date contact details for everyone that has granted you the privilege of having them and a very cut down version of the feed.
Which brings me to the question of monetisation. I don't want ads or data collection of any kind so my first thought is to have a basic free account and a cheap premium account that lets you upload and share photo albums and that sort of thing. Thoughts on this strategy or possible privacy respecting alternatives?
My personal view on this (take or leave it) is that unless you are being backed by some very rich investors, you don't have a hope of gaining any sort of traction here.
I do like the 'address book' concept, though, and have toyed with similar ideas previously - a place for everyone to have a single page 'profile' with links out to their real social accounts etc. But in this age of privacy and tracking awareness, I don't think the average internet user will want to put all their contact info in one place.
The real problem with Facebook is that for most people it's frictionless... it's really easy for people who use it to chat and share with other users. For them, there's no real compelling reason to switch platforms. Asking them to at this point is like trying to sell a mobile phone on a new network that can't dial other networks.
I’d prefer people working on making existing alternatives better in terms of features than have yet another “Facebook killer” that doesn’t survive. Check out the Fediverse, help the alternatives for Instagram and Twitter thrive. If you want to create something independently, I’d suggest a perfect replica and replacement for Facebook Groups. We need what’s not yet supported by the current crop of FOSS alternatives and keeps people tied to Facebook.
How do you plan on solving the chicken egg problem? New users won't join unless their friends are already on it.
I think any new social media will fail unless it offers something really different and new (I don't think most people care about using a new social media just for privacy reasons). What makes yours different other than just privacy? The glorified address book does seem interesting but I would need to know more to understand how it will work.
FWIW, I'll almost certainly never use another social network that's not open source, or at the very least built on simple open protocols. Best of luck.
I respect the stance, and it's not an avenue that I've ruled out, but it's not a priority for me for the moment. Especially with the primary concerns that I'm addressing at first is the destructive incentive structure constructed by ad and data supported social networks.
If all the images are paid-for you have the advantage of basically not having to worry about bandwidth. (Assuming you're not bloating the site with MBs of JS libraries.)
Unfortunately -- Facebook has trained people to expect this feature for free. Not sure there's a simple solution here. But maybe you could release the site unmonetized then work on a paid white-label version for private networks / corporate intranets / etc.?
So you want me to switch from one platform I have no control over to another? The whole reason Facebook is evil is they can be since they have full control of the software and your data.
What would your goal be? To grow like Facebook, go public, and maximize profit? I have no reason that your product/company wouldn't just turn into another Facebook.
Essentially to provide a service similar to Facebook's core offering with a focus on maximising how useful the service is to you instead of how valuable your data is to me. This is why I'd prefer for users to pay a small flat fee and I can just focus on making features people want.
> I have no reason that your product/compny wouldn't just turn into another Facebook.
This is true for now. I have been exploring ideas of setting up the site as a non-profit of some kind or a foundation etc. At the moment this area needs exploring in more detail.
> The whole reason Facebook is evil is they can be since they have full control of the software and your data
Sort of yes. Lot's of companies have (comparable) positions of power while being subjectively less or not evil at all. But the question of becoming evil over time still stands. I'm not of the opinion that software that users run themselves will have any of the adoption required to dislodge something like Facebook and so is mostly a distraction I think. I do think these kind of federated networks will do well mind you, just not for what people use Facebook for. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this front though.
Hey, we're exploring the problem of monetization too! That's one of the things we're discussing right now in VC3 (https://vc3.club)- if you're interested, we'd love to have you join the conversation!
the only way I figure it's gonna work is to charge $20 / month for an 'instance' maybe two of them... this way a group of friends can have a private one and a family can have another private one.. at 20 per month for the group they can all chip in, or one person can pay for the whole group.
should be easy with upgrade option if storage gets huge, with the option to auto-download / export old data and keep it lean.
I've been thinking of doing this for years, but have not found the right people to box up a wp+bp combo with a couple extra plugins and settings that can deploy automatically like softalicious.. or one of those one-click DO deploy type things
one day.. the pieces are all there already, just gotta put em together.
Monetization is a perverse incentive. I'm willing to run my own services, maybe pay someone to host for me, but I don't want a company with an incentive to maximize eyeball time.
Having every single user run and manage their own software or pay another service to run it for them doesn't seem practical or efficient to me but I would be interested in ideas to the contrary.
Is an(other) alternative to Facebook the solution? Can we evolve beyond this? It seems to me like we all have what you’re building in our pocket already.
I think so. Facebook provides a lot of value to a lot of people but their monetisation model and general practices don't sit well with a lot of people so an "ethical" for lack of a better word alternative I think could be very desirable.
DuckDuckGo is really changing my world. It’s like I’m seeing a whole other internet I was missing before with Google search results. I get much more relevant answers and less SEO targeted garbage that says all the right words usually while saying nothing at all. I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before.
I'm at about 90% Duck these days, and 10% Google. But I'm not sure it's because Duck got better, or because Google got worse.
Google's results just seem less and less useful for the kinds of searches I do.
A recent example: There was a news event near where I live earlier this week. It made national headlines briefly. Yesterday I wanted to know if there was anything new about it. So I hit the duck with my search query and it showed newspaper web sites that had updated the story about three hours before, and some TV web sites that had stories from the previous night.
I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything, so I did the same search in Google. Big G's results were all at least three days old, and most were re-posts of re-posts of re-posts published on random web sites on the other side of the planet.
So, I continue to use the duck. And I've learned a lesson that I really shouldn't second-guess myself and think that maybe Google, with its trillion dollars to spend, isn't any better after all.
I use Duck for most searches now but I find if I'm trying to ask a question or search weird error codes or something Google is still better for that. I still use duck to input but use the g! command.
I think google has stayed the same for the most part. But because they want to crack down on misinformation, and things of that nature they have said recently that when it comes to political topics/news they want to stick to "trusted" sources. That's why if you search for a political topic on google/youtube, you're probably not going to get many non mainstream sources
I just recently realized that myself. I'd add "!g" to my searches about 1/3 of the time. That's been going way down lately. I'm probably more at 10%~15% on Google, but the majority has switched to DDG.
That being said, I still wish there were more alternatives. I have a lot of RSS feeds and there are big lists of tech blog RSS feeds. At some point I just want to index all of those so I can search for recent tends in the blogs of independent tech people rather than the big articles.
I'm consistently surprised that this comment comes up here so often. I've tried DDG at length, many times, and I always go back to Google because I find it SO much better for programming-related questions. Maybe the denizens of HN are accustomed to using SO's built-in search? But that's still only a piece of the larger puzzle. I get a lot of mileage from blog posts as well.
You're not missing anything. Google is far better than DDG and I'm shocked people claim otherwise because it's so fairly self evident.
That said I try to use DDG when I can but I don't lie to myself that I'm using it because it has better results -- it doesn't. It has better approach to privacy and thats why I use it. The fact that they know less about the searcher intrinsitcally means the results of searches will be worse.
I find a big reason to use DDG is because it has "!bangs" that allow you to redirect your search to other site's native search engines by appending/prepending them to your query. I can use "!pac" to search for Arch Linux packages, "!aw" to search the Arch Wiki, "!gh" to search Github, etc. So the quality of DDG's search may be lacking but I generally know the site I want to search and can use their native searches. Any way, if you want to get away from Google but can't get by with DDG, consider Qwant.
You are not alone.
It highly depends on what you search for even if it's programming related.
Google provides great results for common old-ish and repeated questions but you will notice less diversity - which can be pretty frustrating when you aren't looking for a definite answer.
You will find that it will give you old results from w3schools, codeacademy, SO, etc.
Some of which shouldn't go into production...
Just set your default to DDG and, when you can't find something, search again with "!g". DDG also lets you jump to specific sites ("!w for the pedia, !yt for the Youboobs, !imdb, !rt, etc).
Google is better. Bug DDG is good enough for 98% of what I need. Searching is mostly finding the right website, or an explanation of a specific problem. Sometimes I have a search query that doesn't give any usable results with DDG, and then Google comes to rescue. That happens about once a month.
DDG's quality actually decreased in the past year as now they seem to ignore explicitly required stuff in a query quite often. It used to be you just used quotes and got what you wanted, but these days that might get ignored. "-" for excluding similar popular words also seems to have stopped working.
I find it's a mixed bag -- sometimes DDG is better, sometimes Google is. It kind of reminds me of the old days pre-Google-dominance when you'd try Alta Vista and then Lycos or Excite if you didn't get what you were looking for.
Cynically, I wonder if Google has gotten to the point where they realize that serving the absolute most relevant results means they sell less ads. Of course, I don't think anyone is ordered not to make search quality better, just that incentives/resources get reallocated to things other than ten-blue-link quality.
I agree that the DDG results, especially for software development related searches, are often worse than searching Google or StackOverflow directly. So here's my workflow:
1. Search DDG. If I find a decent result, I stop here.
2. Append !so to the end of the search. This searches StackOverflow directly. If this works, I stop here.
3. Append !g to the end of the search. This searches Google directly.
This way Google becomes a last resort.
Also worth noting that you can actually navigate DDG search results using vim keybindings without the need for a plugin: something Google dropped support for a few years ago.
I tried DDG, I actually try it out intermittently. I ditched it again, this time because when I searched for an address it doesn't seem to scope the results to where I am located and gives me a similar address somewhere else.
Small little things like that are a pain to work around and something I take for granted in Google search. It's taken a long time for Google to get so good at what it does. I notice that if I am watching a YouTube video and then go to Google to search for something related, the autocomplete basically knows what I am likely to search for. Say what you will about that but it is pretty amazing technology.
When somebody brings up DDG's bangs, someone else will often chime in "yeah, but you can make your own in browsers so who cares?" That was often my response.
But the fact that there are community-maintained bangs is really nice. Bangs for all kinds of websites I probably wouldn't have made, but there they are. And since I'm often jumping on new computers, I don't need to bring/import my preferences. Just change the browser's search to DDG, then all my known bangs (and unknown!) are there.
Same for me. It’s “good enough” and the results page is cleaner. I used to get poor results for dev topics and image search but both have improved over time. I only use google for shopping searches, because it gives me better results for my country (belgium).
I find myself increasingly wishing they'd have some sort of subscription or something. Even if it did nothing to start, I'd like to be a customer, instead of an eyeball. Otherwise as nice as it is now, it's still inevitably headed down the same trajectory as Google, just not as far along yet.
DuckDuckGo can't even answer simple queries like "how old is Donald Trump", "president of France", "how tall is the Eiffel Tower", "distance from earth to Moon", and "distance from earth to sun"; it forces you to search its results for the answer. For all of queries, Google and Bing give you the answer front and center without making you click links or read the result snippets. Bing even has an interactive solar system viewer when you search for that last query.
These days search engines are supposed to be able to surface and present information from sources without user intervention. DuckDuckGo cannot do this (yet).
Neither did Google back in the early 2000s. But people still used it and loved it. I would say DDG2019=Google2007 or better in terms of search quality.
Instead of thinking that I must use the best search engine, regardless of the ethics of its business model; think that I will use the good enough search engine from among those with ethical business models.
Edit: I would additionally like to add that Google's search quality peaked early to mid 2010s, so DDG is not far from peak known search engine quality.
Apple Maps has replaced Google Maps for me. I’ve been trying to move away from Google and this has been an easy one. I don’t notice the difference most of the time. When I do, it’s because I’ve pulled up Google Maps by accident and it’s cluttered and spammy.
I had zero issues quitting Facebook but replacing Gmail and Android? That's going to be really tough considering Gmail is my online identify hub and Android facilitates so many utility services (banking, electronic identification, money transfers, etc).
Android is perfectly usable with microg! And then look into magisk for functionality requiring root access for things like ad-blocking and a firewall to prevent (or spoof!) all the traffic generated by all those shitty apps trying to ship your personal data off to Google, FB, Twitter, etc in the background.
Forwarding works. I mean, you can totally migrate out without much expenses, and that's the beauty of email. But GMail does offer good spam filter and okay-UI. It's hardly a bad software by itself.
Android is just simply unreplaceable, but it's FOSS at least.
Register a domain if you don't already have one and get Fastmail for 5 USD/mo (includes a calendar as well). If Gmail.com is your online identity hub, then you're not in control of your online identity.
If you want to contact an acquaintance because you'll be in their city, what do you use to communicate with them? Keep in mind people often change their phone numbers or at least lose their contact lists.
Last time I tried any of the OSM apps for search for random thing + navigate there flow, the results were a joke compared to the Google experience. Has it improved by an order of magnitude over the past couple years? I think this might be one of the cases where Google just has way more data for their algorithms.
Unfortunately, it's a lot more difficult to fully switch away from Google than this article gets into. If you use a smartphone, your only real options for OS are Apple and Google. Sure, one can install a custom ROM on an Android phone, but that is well beyond the scope of most people's interest or ability, not to mention that it would lead to warranty issues. If you're using a stock Android phone, Google will know where you all at all times with extreme precision.
Readit News
Email: Fastmail. But again, just using email less is helpful. My most common form of communication is using text messages to set up meeting in person.
Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? I haven't made any intentional effort to replace Facebook since I stopped using it, and don't feel any sense of loss. The same goes for Twitter/Instagram. The only thing these services ever did for me was make me feel angry, lonely, or inadequate.
Random side note: Stack Overflow has a serious content quality and up-to-date-ness issue. An alternative is using documentation, reading code, and mastering debuggers/REPLs. This gives you a much better understanding of your tools, and gives you much better solutions as a result.
Do you go to parties? Serious question. It's hard to discover events without Facebook these days. It's the only place some promoters advertise.
What I've noticed is that I actually meet people IRL more often now, because the events I get information about are the ones that really matter to me, and they don't get lost in a constant buzz of less important but attention-grabbing stuff.
I also realize I can miss talking to someone. It's a feeling I haven't had in a long time, because people used to show up in my feed every day and it was like they were there anyway. Now I can get a sudden urge to just shoot a few texts back and forth with someone about something that's actually meaningful and not just the usual facebook wall banter.
I'm quite introverted, so being selective is something that suits me well, but facebook also made me even more socially lazy and avoidant than I really am.
However it has forced me to be more engaged with my friends, since without Facebook they have to make a concious effort to invite me, rather than spot my name on a list. I've spent more time personally messaging and catching up with friends as a result.
Facebook makes keeping up with people frictionless, but relationships thrive on doing it the hard way, and giving up time for each other. Facebook makes it easy to have a thousand acquaintances regardless of how many deeper friendships you have.
I've never really been interested in going to a random party or event I wasn't directly invited to. I mostly got spam when I was using Facebook.
Not all of us use it for reading the 'timeline' and seeing what our friends' cats are doing this week. Organizations also use it for updates, scheduling, sharing ideas, etc. Email could work, but mailing lists lack many little features that make Facebook practical here.
I guess the modern alternative would be something like Discourse, but it's hard to tell a non-profit to replace "free, and add people with a couple clicks" with "$100/month, and make everybody create new separate accounts".
I know it is a silly anecdote, but i end up checking out my facebook feed out of boredom about once every few months, get disappointed in it, and then forget about it for another few months. It also helps that FB has dedicated first party apps for a lot of fb functionality that doesnt require the main fb app. I havent had the FB app on any of my phones since about 8 years ago, simply because i didnt feel the need, not because I felt some strong conviction against FB. Messenger app + Local app (for FB messaging and events respectively) has been a golden combo that worked great for me. Local, surprisingly, has amazingly clean UIUX that combines both event discovery and organization of your current events in a very seamless way.
Just a note, i am not affiliated with FB as a company in any way, and neither have i worked there. I just think that a lot of people tend to focus on the trashy common denominator part of FB (timeline) and ignore the good stuff. And FB makes it really easy to avoid the trashy stuff by having clean dedicated apps for functionality that i actually care about.
For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text).
It'd be nice if this extended to optional accounts that had up to date contact information - this is the main thing I'd worry about missing (though I think Apple could just implement this by optionally pushing changes to the people in your phone with your contact information when it changes).
For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there.
Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people.
Each with their own search, usually!
I can see the downsides to this, but in trade you're getting a bubble that protects you from a lot of nonsense.
> For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text).
That sounds like a fairly small project, and I can see the value. Maybe I'll code it up in the near future.
> For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there.
> Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people.
I'll concede this, but in my brief Twitter experience it was very easy for the noise to drown out the signal, and I didn't feel it was worth it to work around that problem. It doesn't solve a data problem I have: my data problem isn't that I don't have enough data sources, it's that I have too many, and too low quality.
Let me know what you think!
One upside of DDG is the bangs. If I know what I want is on wikipedia, just prepend !w.
I think folks need to learn how people searched pre-pagerank.
People treat google queries like a venn diagram with their top result being at the intersection, rather than using logical operators like AND, quotes, and -.
(Ex: "yoda -baby")
This too in a world where many teams have their own websites, boards and the participants almost uniformly posting their rides to strava. Strava has been trying its clubs / posts stuff with very minimal success sadly :/
When I dumped social media two years ago, I gave my "friends" my e-mail address.
Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events, funny stories — all without the dross and anger-inducing cruft of a social media "feed."
E-mail has all of the benefits of social media: photos, group chat, near-instant delivery; with none of the drawbacks: tracking, advertising, stalking, third-party influences.
More importantly, what happened is that I found out who my actual friends are. I think the whole social media "friends" button has cheapened the word. We don't make a distinction between friends, acquaintances, associates, and people we just know. Your real friends will e-mail you.
I'm pretty sure if you replaced "social network" by "ticket tracker", you would had made quite a bit of people laugh here, still here we are, unable to accept that some tools are just much more efficient in a task.
For me Facebook is something where I can reach everyone that I need to reach at once. The sad thing is the best social network is the one that people use. Sure everyone got an email, as this is a requirement to even have a social network account, but it's the usage that people does of it that make it impossible to use it as such.
I remember at nearly every team project at my university, we tried to make Slack happens, or Discord, or whatever else to communicate, instead of Facebook, but the response was never as instant and each time we came back to Facebook, simply because that's what most people in the group were online on at the same time.
Personally my actual usage of Facebook is mostly to quickly organize events, it's only useful to reach "everyone" at the same time. I remember one of the best example of event we organized, it was mid afternoon, I was in class with a friend and we decided to organize a friend gathering that night. We had nothing, not even somewhere to do it. We simply created a Facebook event, we invited about 20 friends to the event, 5 hours later we had a place, we had food, plenty of board games and more than a dozens people present.
Sure we can send 20 emails or SMS, hope that everyone read them in the afternoon, have everyone send a bunch of answers in random order, again hope that everyone read the one that are important mixed with all the random "I'm in". That's 20x more effort for each and everyone involved. At that event, my friend and I were the organizer, and we only had to send an handful of messages, the event was the source of truth easy to follow by everyone. Minimum effort, quick and easy.
Sure we can text you on the side, but the truth is, that add friction for each and everyone that aren't on Facebook. If something get updated and I forget to tell you, well I'm now responsible for you missing the update.
The older I get, the less this kind of thing happen, so yeah Facebook is less important, but that still why I used it, and it's still what makes it the best social network. It allow you more easily, more quickly, and more efficiently to be social.
> Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events, funny stories — all without the dross and anger-inducing cruft of a social media "feed."
I would like you to have a talk to everyone grandparents. The amount of emails chains I got from my family when I was younger...
I personally don't really follow people posts, in fact almost no one does them in my friend circle, it's mostly stuff shared from the news, which isn't important.
> none of the drawbacks: tracking, advertising, stalking, third-party influences.
Gmail and Hotmail don't track email and advertise?
> More importantly, what happened is that I found out who my actual friends are. I think the whole social media "friends" button has cheapened the word. We don't make a distinction between friends, acquaintances, associates, and people we just know. Your real friends will e-mail you.
That's kind of weird. Think a bit about it, why would a "real friend" e-mail you? Are you a "real friend" by not sending a message to your friend over Facebook because that's what he use? That would means you are not really a real friend to anyone... I'm sure that's not the case. You didn't found out who your actual friends were, you simply lost actual friends by making it harder to contact you and you slowly made them become acquaintances.
The idea being that people can optionally make accounts with just their contact information which they can then give people access to (this way contacts stay updated by everyone with access rather than local copies on everyone's device that goes out of date).
The app would handle basics like RSVP, sending out SMS reminders for people, tracking number of people coming etc. Right now handling this over SMS and tracking it is a pain so people default to FB, but I think there's an opportunity here to get a foothold.
I reduced my social media usage because they were a huge time sink with the endless feeds, but I agree with you. It takes two to tango, so saying doing so lets one finds out who your real friends are is just condescending imo. Friendships don't start out 'real'; like any relationships, they require constant reaching out to people and be a part of their lives, and this has to work both ways.
I believe that this social networking framework has a great future.
Look at these projects which created using this engine: Minds https://www.minds.com Pleio https://pleio.nl GCconnex and GCcollab https://github.com/gctools-outilsgc/gcconnex
There is even a Platform that will make building apps based on Elgg easier https://wzm.me/
Right now this project needs more cotributors to help it develop even more https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg
I read the landing page, clicked about, looked at the first page of the API docs and it's still not really obvious to me what it is for or how it's actually used.
What problem is it solving? Standard web backend for common social media platform stuff?
https://runyourown.social/
Federated social media could be the solution.
I tried hosting on my own server, but it's just too much of a time investment for one person.
As for Facebook it is best just to quit. I don't even use Facebook to keep in touch with friends anymore. The value in Facebook is some of the groups. Local neighborhood groups seem to be the best source of information or things happening around your area if you care to know about it. Also different hobbies/interests have local FB groups that are the most active place for discussion with far more users than a small subreddit or dying forum community.
Perhaps I am old but I don't know a single person that uses Whatsapp or Signal. Everyone just uses old fashioned SMS or iMessage if they have iPhones.
This is such a common, but strange attitude to have in these circumstances. Think about how user migration works. It's not like it happens overnight and suddenly your 100% gmail contact list is 100% proton. No, it goes from 100% to 99%, then continues to 92%, then to 75%, and so on. Having this defeatist attitude guarantees that bad actors retain their users.
As an example -- I switched to use Signal for messaging a few years ago. I was the only one in my circle that made the jump. Slowly but surely, people have started to switch over. Today about 10% of my contacts use Signal, and our chats are encrypted e2e. Every few months a few more people make the jump. If all of these people had the same attitude as you, nothing would ever change.
Email, however, is the line item on every single one of my bills (utility, credit, etc.), my mortgage, my doctors, my bank accounts - a cornerstone of what it takes to live in our modern society. Migrating to a new email address is daunting (to me) due to all these arms and legs having had this email address in use for ... 2 decades? (however long GMail has been around). It can be done, but it's a lot more work to go through for the average individual than just installing a new app.
Seriously though, a real benefit you get from an e2ee email when no one you communicate with uses it is that all of your receipts, memberships, newsletter, etc. correspondences are not being read/scanned by your email provider.
For Signal I asked my wife to switch and she did (just for her and I) and we've been using it for over a year. My Dad recently hopped on as well. These things go slow, but when someone close switches it feels nice knowing that all my conversations are private.
Depends on your threat model.
Having all your email in one place is a juicy target.
But the Swiss want a warrant for a specific crime, and then it's my understanding your government needs your password to decrypt the emails at rest.
Not being able to go on fishing expeditions is a good feature especially if you have years of email.
>Perhaps I am old but I don't know a single person that uses Whatsapp or Signal. Everyone just uses old fashioned SMS or iMessage if they have iPhones.
When I explain people can use Signal on wifi and not get any spam calls, many older folks are open to using it. You don't always need to sell Signal on privacy - older folks on a limited income may not have infinite data, being able to use wifi for calls and texts cuts data use and they like that.
Facebook is kings because of its market share which is why people use it.
There are ways of communicating with a close group of friends that don’t involve social media but for people who want to keep in touch with a large social circle there is really no alternative.
And far as the gmail replacement goes then it’s by far the easiest thing to find an alternative for and also probably the least important one.
I have a feeling that people who rely heavily on emails to stay in touch also probably don’t use social media so Facebook isn’t an issue for them.
However the problem is that due social pressure it’s a most impossible to drop from a platform without having it affecting your relationships.
Sure people switch as groups and slowly migrate from one platform to another but overall trying to drop X for Y tends result in you using both or quickly switching back.
Which brings me to the question of monetisation. I don't want ads or data collection of any kind so my first thought is to have a basic free account and a cheap premium account that lets you upload and share photo albums and that sort of thing. Thoughts on this strategy or possible privacy respecting alternatives?
I do like the 'address book' concept, though, and have toyed with similar ideas previously - a place for everyone to have a single page 'profile' with links out to their real social accounts etc. But in this age of privacy and tracking awareness, I don't think the average internet user will want to put all their contact info in one place.
The real problem with Facebook is that for most people it's frictionless... it's really easy for people who use it to chat and share with other users. For them, there's no real compelling reason to switch platforms. Asking them to at this point is like trying to sell a mobile phone on a new network that can't dial other networks.
Additionally, an adless "pro" feature could be purchased for some small fee that would be comparable to what ads rake in for the average user.
This is something I've thought about for a while but I've never had the resources to throw it together. I wish you the best of luck!
I think any new social media will fail unless it offers something really different and new (I don't think most people care about using a new social media just for privacy reasons). What makes yours different other than just privacy? The glorified address book does seem interesting but I would need to know more to understand how it will work.
Unfortunately -- Facebook has trained people to expect this feature for free. Not sure there's a simple solution here. But maybe you could release the site unmonetized then work on a paid white-label version for private networks / corporate intranets / etc.?
What would your goal be? To grow like Facebook, go public, and maximize profit? I have no reason that your product/company wouldn't just turn into another Facebook.
Essentially to provide a service similar to Facebook's core offering with a focus on maximising how useful the service is to you instead of how valuable your data is to me. This is why I'd prefer for users to pay a small flat fee and I can just focus on making features people want.
> I have no reason that your product/compny wouldn't just turn into another Facebook.
This is true for now. I have been exploring ideas of setting up the site as a non-profit of some kind or a foundation etc. At the moment this area needs exploring in more detail.
> The whole reason Facebook is evil is they can be since they have full control of the software and your data
Sort of yes. Lot's of companies have (comparable) positions of power while being subjectively less or not evil at all. But the question of becoming evil over time still stands. I'm not of the opinion that software that users run themselves will have any of the adoption required to dislodge something like Facebook and so is mostly a distraction I think. I do think these kind of federated networks will do well mind you, just not for what people use Facebook for. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this front though.
should be easy with upgrade option if storage gets huge, with the option to auto-download / export old data and keep it lean.
I've been thinking of doing this for years, but have not found the right people to box up a wp+bp combo with a couple extra plugins and settings that can deploy automatically like softalicious.. or one of those one-click DO deploy type things
one day.. the pieces are all there already, just gotta put em together.
Google's results just seem less and less useful for the kinds of searches I do.
A recent example: There was a news event near where I live earlier this week. It made national headlines briefly. Yesterday I wanted to know if there was anything new about it. So I hit the duck with my search query and it showed newspaper web sites that had updated the story about three hours before, and some TV web sites that had stories from the previous night.
I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything, so I did the same search in Google. Big G's results were all at least three days old, and most were re-posts of re-posts of re-posts published on random web sites on the other side of the planet.
So, I continue to use the duck. And I've learned a lesson that I really shouldn't second-guess myself and think that maybe Google, with its trillion dollars to spend, isn't any better after all.
That being said, I still wish there were more alternatives. I have a lot of RSS feeds and there are big lists of tech blog RSS feeds. At some point I just want to index all of those so I can search for recent tends in the blogs of independent tech people rather than the big articles.
That said I try to use DDG when I can but I don't lie to myself that I'm using it because it has better results -- it doesn't. It has better approach to privacy and thats why I use it. The fact that they know less about the searcher intrinsitcally means the results of searches will be worse.
Google provides great results for common old-ish and repeated questions but you will notice less diversity - which can be pretty frustrating when you aren't looking for a definite answer.
You will find that it will give you old results from w3schools, codeacademy, SO, etc. Some of which shouldn't go into production...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=c7+c8+extension+cord+%221m%22&t=h_...
let's force the titles:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=intitle%3Ac7+intitle%3Ac8+extensio...
That's completely broken, the titles contain none of the three things asked for.
yeah, I am not hopeful with duckduckgo either. I mean, Google is just as bad but I am pretty dismayed by the results these days.
I have - I found the results far less useful than Google's, the whole experience far more frustrating and it noticeably slowed down my work.
Cynically, I wonder if Google has gotten to the point where they realize that serving the absolute most relevant results means they sell less ads. Of course, I don't think anyone is ordered not to make search quality better, just that incentives/resources get reallocated to things other than ten-blue-link quality.
1. Search DDG. If I find a decent result, I stop here.
2. Append !so to the end of the search. This searches StackOverflow directly. If this works, I stop here.
3. Append !g to the end of the search. This searches Google directly.
This way Google becomes a last resort.
Also worth noting that you can actually navigate DDG search results using vim keybindings without the need for a plugin: something Google dropped support for a few years ago.
Small little things like that are a pain to work around and something I take for granted in Google search. It's taken a long time for Google to get so good at what it does. I notice that if I am watching a YouTube video and then go to Google to search for something related, the autocomplete basically knows what I am likely to search for. Say what you will about that but it is pretty amazing technology.
Yandex is another site I've been using for reverse image searches. I find it to be better than Google and Bing. Bellingcat has a great article on it, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid...
But the fact that there are community-maintained bangs is really nice. Bangs for all kinds of websites I probably wouldn't have made, but there they are. And since I'm often jumping on new computers, I don't need to bring/import my preferences. Just change the browser's search to DDG, then all my known bangs (and unknown!) are there.
Google takes you straight to the online installation at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
DDG finds this: https://publications.opengroup.org/c181 where the "Read HTML Edition Online" button is a non-working dud.
Still switching to DDG for most searches, though.
Didn't someone demonstrate pretty conclusively that underneath all of the specialization it was just bing?
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These days search engines are supposed to be able to surface and present information from sources without user intervention. DuckDuckGo cannot do this (yet).
Instead of thinking that I must use the best search engine, regardless of the ethics of its business model; think that I will use the good enough search engine from among those with ethical business models.
Edit: I would additionally like to add that Google's search quality peaked early to mid 2010s, so DDG is not far from peak known search engine quality.
DDG will answer some directly, like "10 feet to meters". Could be better.
As for Facebook you're fighting against the greatest network effects in the history of mankind.
Android is just simply unreplaceable, but it's FOSS at least.