With an open standard, I don't see why you can't host your own social network similar to how people host their own email servers or websites right now.

What's an "open standard for a social network"?

Currently, it seems to be ActivityPub, which projects like Mastodon use.

It's a protocol. People don't use social networks because of protocols.

Coming back to this statement:

> With an open standard, I don't see why you can't host your own social network

You also need:

- photo hosting

- video hosting

- comments

- timelines

- feeds

- search

- social graphs

- (etc.)

for a social network to have any relevance.

> People don't use social networks because of protocols.

I agree with this point: usability is often not affected by what happens in the back. However, with open standards, it would be possible that people create other social networks because of protocols.

You mention all these technical problems that have to be solved to create a social network. I can see someone building an open source framework for all of these. For example with personal websites, everything except social graphs and feeds already exist.

There are quite a few open source framework for all/many of these.

Mastodon, Scuttlebutt to name a few. They are somewhat popular, but they are bad at many of the things I described.

This is the question!

I look at what people do with reddit, Facebook, twitter, various forums, and it looks like a more spiffy USENET.

We have a piece of that standard.

More needed

Much. Much more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368649

> You can pick a different one, but if they're all spying on you, tracking you, and advertising to you, it's not really going to make a difference.

If you can easily switch, then you can pretty easily find the one that isn't tracking you. The problem is that it's hard to switch.

But we can count the moments til a sacrificial lamb pops up, as with Bernie Madoff, or the epipen guy for pharma. Token examples without stopping the potential for their crimes to be repeated by everyone else in practice in the slightest.

We need to uninvent the wheel.

That will be a problem as you can't unring a bell - it is far easier to unscramble an egg.