Why Facebook’s Rivals Just Keep Failing 

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Oct. 28 2014 11:57 AM

The Search for the Anti-Facebook

Why rival social networks keep emerging—and keep failing.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
When it comes to Facebook challengers, the gap between hype and viability may be wider than it seems. Above, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Photo by Robert Galbraith/Reuters

You’re tired of Facebook. I’m tired of Facebook. Your cousin, your grandmother, and Josh Miller’s teenage sister are tired of Facebook. Babies who haven’t even been born yet are already tired of Facebook. I’ve heard tell of far-off countries in which some people are not yet tired of Facebook. But it’s only a matter of time until they are.

Will Oremus Will Oremus

Will Oremus is Slate's senior technology writer.

Our grievances against the social network are myriad. We’re tired of the ultrasounds. We’re tired of the political rants by people whose politics differ from ours. We’re tired of chasing likes, tired of the self-promotion, tired of people being tired of our own self-promotion. And we’re tired of entrusting our thoughts, conversations, photos, and browsing habits to a giant corporation whose fiduciary duty is to help advertisers sell us stuff.

And yet: There’s a smartphone in your pocket and you have five minutes to kill. What else are you going to do—play Flappy Bird?

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The search for an alternative to Facebook—a better, more humane place to post our photos and see at a glance what our friends and family are up to—has been underway for years. It has inspired countless flops and failed experiments, from Bebo to ConnectU to Path to App.net to the re-launched Myspace. Even Google, the most powerful tech company in the world, couldn’t build a serious Facebook rival.

Yet that hasn’t stopped others from trying. If anything, the buzz about would-be Facebook killers is reaching a new crescendo.

The latest great hope is Ello, a minimalist social network that aims to be a cooler, ad-free alternative to the corporate giants. It gained traction last month by allowing people to join anonymously at a time when Facebook was under fire for forcing everyone to use their real names. That practice particularly affronted transgender activists, many of whom became Ello early adopters. Despite an invite-only policy, Ello grew so fast that its servers were overwhelmed.

On Thursday, Ello announced that it has raised $5.5 million from venture capitalists. More interestingly, it followed that announcement by declaring itself a public-benefit corporation, signing a charter, and swearing off ads and personal data use forever. The moves vaulted the company to the top of Techmeme, a site that aggregates the day’s most-talked-about tech news, and earned it a fresh round of admiring coverage.

But history suggests that, when it comes to Facebook challengers, the gap between hype and viability may be wider than it seems. 

The concept behind Ello sounds a lot like that of Diaspora, another idealistic experiment that was touted as a Facebook rival when it launched in 2011. Diaspora’s turbulent rise and—well, failure to rise further, I suppose—is chronicled in Jim Dwyer’s new book, More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy From Facebook.

Inspired by a lecture on Internet privacy, four NYU students hatched the idea for Diaspora in a computer lab and proceeded to raise more than $200,000 in a then-record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. The promise: a “decentralized social network” with open-source software. Users could start their own “seeds,” or personal servers, and maintain control over all the personal data they shared with their friends.

The company made headlines, attracted techies and privacy mavens, and even slipped a naughty word into the New York Times. And then it launched—with a slew of bugs and security problems. Things got worse when Google announced its own social network, with some similar-sounding privacy features. Finally, personal tragedy struck just as the project was unraveling. Supporters kept Diaspora alive, and it still exists today. But it never made a dent in Facebook’s dominance.

There were plenty of reasons Diaspora didn’t take off, Dwyer told me in a phone interview. But the biggest was probably the simplest: No matter how many people joined, it still felt like a “ghost town” compared with Facebook. (Sound familiar, Google Plus?) It’s awfully hard to build a social network with better features than Facebook—especially when the one feature people really care about in a social network is that all their friends are on it.

It doesn’t help that Facebook has managed to bake itself into the most popular sites all across the Web, and is beginning to do the same with mobile apps.

Despite Diaspora’s struggles, Dwyer doesn’t believe Facebook is invulnerable. Other upstarts might have a better chance, he speculated, if they could build a network that maps onto existing, real-world social groups. That’s what Zuckerberg did at Harvard and other Ivy League colleges before expanding Facebook to universities and then high schools across the country and the world.

“You can see from things like Ello, from Diaspora, that whenever some kind of alternative emerges, people stampede to it,” Dwyer said. “There’s a power to this idea.”

But what if the idea of an “anti-Facebook,” powerful though it might be in theory, is fatally flawed? That’s what Bradford Cross, co-founder and CEO of the social news platform Prismatic, has come to believe after years of struggling to build a vibrant online community of his own.

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