That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of that.

Then sign up on a Mastodon instance, make some new friends, and set up a cross-poster.

Edit: I'm getting down-voted - let me expand ... I've set up a Mastodon account, started to integrate, and made new connections. I've also set up a cross-poster, so I can work on either, and I'm finding that my more valuable connections are also migrating to Mastodon. So although it's playing the long game, that's a strategy.

If you don't start, it will never happen.

on the first point - I'm not looking for new friends or to promote any of my own views. I'm looking to get birthday party pictures and the occasional meme from my existing friends and family. Like most people I think - I post pretty rarely, but like to comment from time to time on other people's posts/content.

I agree it's a chicken-egg problem. But there has to be enough value in it for people like me to be worth the pain of transition.

For me there's very little incremental value in another solution. The privacy benefits of using a different service are nebulous - I treat anything I post on facebook as 'public', regardless of my privacy settings, and I really have no reason to believe some other service run by volunteers will be capable of protecting my data, or respecting it at all.

I'm paying for facebook by looking at ads and having 'someone' know something (maybe a lot) about my public facing self. I think for most people that's been a reasonable trade.

I actually _wish_ there were more competition in this space, and a way for these social graphs to be more transferable in some way, but I haven't seen any options yet that are attractive enough to be worth the cost of switching.

[edit] for what it's worth, I didn't downvote you :) the idea of crossposting is a valuable addition to the conversation.

> ... I'm looking to get birthday party pictures and the occasional meme from my existing friends and family.

Noted. Mastodon really is a twitter substitute, not a FB replacement. For these things you're right - there is currently no FB substitute (at least not that I know of, I'd be happy to be proven wrong).

We wonder if Mastodon can become that.

> I treat anything I post on facebook as 'public', regardless of my privacy settings, and I really have no reason to believe some other service run by volunteers will be capable of protecting my data, or respecting it at all.

People are reporting that their FB data contains all their cell-phone call details - are you also happy with that?

> I'm paying for facebook by looking at ads and having 'someone' know something (maybe a lot) about my public facing self. I think for most people that's been a reasonable trade.

But it's not just the things you are explicitly saying are "your public face."

> ... I haven't seen any options yet that are attractive enough to be worth the cost of switching.

... or indeed, at all.

> [edit] for what it's worth, I didn't downvote you :)

You can't downvote a reply to your own comment or submission, so I know you didn't downvote me.

> ... the idea of crossposting is a valuable addition to the conversation.

Cheers.

> "Mastodon really is a twitter substitute, not a FB replacement."

That's interesting, because I'm one of those that never really 'got' twitter. I _think_ the main difference is the distinction between the relationships - 'follower' is different than 'friend'. Following seems to be more impersonal, and so Twitter seems to be more about public information feed from people that think they have something interesting to say (like an rss feed on a blog). Facebook seems to be more about sharing things/stories/events with your friends/acquaintances, although it does have the extra layer there of corporate and celebrity accounts that are followed as well. For me the second category of stuff has been in the 'nice to have' category; it's not why I log on a check my FB feed. I just never found any content worth consuming on twitter - I go to other communities (like HN) or use rss (Feedly) for that sort of stuff.

I bounced once I hit the friction of picking an instance. It's not something you can really join without knowing in advance who you want to talk to or what community you want to join. Like slack or discord, I'd use it to talk to a specific community that is already using it, but not to just join and see what's there, a la twitter or facebook. The flow for it goes community -> platform, rather than platform -> community which is a very different niche I think.

Thanks for the mention, I'd not heard of Mastodon before, and am new to the idea of distributed social networking. It sounds appealing on the surface, but I'm trying to understand its level of privacy/security for user data. (This may be my fundamental lack of understanding of the distributed system).

They say, e.g. your data isn't harvested for ad revenue -- how does one verify this? Is the data encrypted?

The useful part of block chain is the Merkel tree, where each small piece of data is tamper proof and consistent because it hashes the data that came before it. Having all the social data on one big chain would be silly, because it would never scale.

Scuttlebutt is a protocol just like you describe and is already being used by different clients and plugins to build a distributed social network that works quite well.