This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized services...)

I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services.

The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents).

The success of things like Facebook and Twitter has never seemed like that much of a mystery to me: they basically allow people to have a web page without needing to make one. There was MySpace that did that, and then people wanted to add on privacy and discussions, etc. to their webpage, so Facebook supplied that; Twitter was basically providing a way for people to post rss/Atom feeds, etc. But then you cede control to these large providers.

I don't think that model completely applies anymore, with messaging, photo sharing, and what not becoming so integrated, but I think the fundamental issues are the same, in that that the internet was developed with a greater ratio of providers:users in mind than is the case now. I think there was a much more federated model in mind when the internet was developed than is the case today.