If we use Twitter to announce that people should #deletefacebook, what social network do we use in the event that it becomes necessary to #deletetwitter?
you ssh into your own trusted openbsd system, run bitchx and connect to efnet, just like the good lord intended back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
I do miss the mad west of the IRC/NNTP days. I also miss multiple search engines. Yahoo/Lycos/Hotbot/Dogpile/AltaVista all give you different results and you could have fun searching around.
NNTP, so awesome until 95% of its resources were consumed by its abuse as a file sharing platform for (naughty to nasty) images and pirated software and until power-hungry local group moderators started abusive banning/deleting practices against people who disagreed with their opinions on politics etc.
People want their own fluffy & safe social bubbles, not open, distributed networks.
mIRC is the only familiar one. Then again, this was back when I was a kid. Vaguely related, AIM was my jam. I was a script kiddy and needed IRC to talk to all the l337 h4ck3r5.
Social networks are nothing more than a reflection of our society. Blaming Facebook and Twitter is easy but the hard part is dealing with the polarisation in politics, the intransingence of Russia, the inability of people to know who to trust and what is real or not and the slow disintegration of our institutions.
Having access to the detailed user data of billions of users is definitely something new and it's being used for efficient propaganda worldwide. FB has again completely naively unleashed a beast they had no intention or intuition on how to control. Anyone who remembers Facebooks early days should not be the least bit surprised that they are playing fast and loose once again.
The digital economy at large is based on the mass manipulation and abuse of negative emotions. Profit over people.
"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
As a ham radio nerd, packet bulletin board systems should really make a comeback. They fell apart as the internet came about, but in an effort to re-invigorate the now-unused spectrum and hardware TNCs[1] all over the place, APRS[2] was created, which has this nifty feature[3]. We also have a type of email system called Winlink[4] (which runs using the ARDOP protocol[5] or VARA[6] replacing Winmor[7] and Pactor[8]).
I've been using MeWe recently, it's basically like classic facebook (chronological, not full of crap you didn't sign up for) but sadly doesn't have a critical mass of users yet.
