I don't know if I'm posting in a right thread, but I've recently been researching some possible Facebook alternatives. Let's see Facebook as two things:

1. An instant messenger platform

Out of all platforms, in my opinion, the best solution is XMPP (Jabber), as it's an open standard, supports end-to-end encryption and it's federated (decentralized, so we don't rely on any third-party). Basically, anyone can start an XMPP server (provided that he/she has a server running 24/7), or you can register at an existing one.

There are a lot of clients of the network: PC users can use Pidgin, Android users can use Xabber and there are a few web-based clients.

As you can probably see from this post, it may not sound too normie-friendly. There are a few rough edges in existing solutions, but it shouldn't be much harder to configure than a mail server. Additionally, many small instant messenger networks (in the past also Google Talk) federated with the network (that is, for example, person@gmail.com could communicate with otherperson@jabber.de), Facebook allowed for XMPP connections to their services (without a federation), so that you could use any XMPP-supporting messenger application to communicate with your friends, but later dropped the feature, possibly in order to force people to move to the Messenger application.

The upside to this network over other ones is that this network has been proven over time, standardized, the software is stable and there are no privileged players in this network. In this case, it's very similar to the E-Mail system.

I saw in some thread on this board a comparison of Facebook services to utilities. I think it's a good metaphor. I see at least 2 solutions to the Facebook messenger problem:

a) Regulate existing messengers to provide the XMPP interfaces for federation, stopping the walled garden status of Facebook. The upside to this could be that Twitter users could easily communicate with Facebook users.

b) Use local governments to provide and advertise public XMPP services. This way, instant communication could become a real utility, independent of any central company with security guaranteed by said local government.

1. A social network

There are two competing solutions, both federated, both without a central part. Unlike instant messaging, this is a very uncharted territory, but similar metaphors exist. While it's possible to decouple a social network from an instant messaging service, many of those solutions do couple one with another.

First, ActivityPub, is a quite fresh protocol, that has been standardized by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium), but there isn't actually a working implementation of that yet.

Another is a Diaspora protocol. There are a few working clients, that already provide a working network under similar goals, one of them is venerable Diaspora (server). In my opinion Diaspora (server) itself doesn't provide a replacement Facebook experience.

There is a client called Friendica, which implements the Diaspora protocol (and I think the ActivityPub as well) and has an interface similar to Facebook, so normies could migrate quite easily. What is more, some Friendica and Diaspora servers provide a possibility to use a Facebook account directly from the Friendica/Diaspora interface.

An interesting part is that the Diaspora network is quite popular in Germany, so when you browse public posts, it may be a bit off that 30% of the posts are written in German.