7 ms·

I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for f

by ceres 4y ago

I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. At this point anyone who willingly joins a new VC funded social media monstrosity is just a masochist. Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!

jqpabc123 4y ago
Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.
- ttul 4y ago
  Indeed. Ask anyone running the general discussion group for a small town. The difficulty of effective, fair, and efficient moderation cannot be overstated.
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    Ask anyone running a general discussion group for a neighborhood. It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation. Most people eventually quit if they're not being compensated in some significant way. On the other hand, if anything goes it can probably be fairly hands off.
    - ceres 4y ago
      > It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation And yet some Reddit mods manage subs with 10s of thousands for… free.
      - jqpabc123 4y ago
        If you want to work for free, Reddit will gladly accommodate. But they also have thousands of very well paid employees. Average salary $150K+.
        ttul 4y ago
        Indeed they do. And on that team is a massive number of salespeople who are constantly farming the world for advertising dollars and a large team of machine learning engineers helping to ease the burden of moderation.
- mopsi 4y ago
  I've run an online community since 2001 and I've yet to meet the boogeymen of self-hosting. A small site and forum with ~100 users doesn't cost a shit to run ($5 per month, the cost of a coke and a sandwich where I live), updates itself automatically via CPanel, and it isn't much of an issue if it goes down for an hour or two every other year. That's an acceptable cost for not having to submit to anyone's whims about allowed content, and for not having to tolerate "redesigns". Twitter is probably down more than a standard Apache server.
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    That's an acceptable cost for not having to submit to anyone's whims about allowed content Only 100 users and anything goes --- yes, I can see how that might be acceptable. I can also see how most people might have little to no interest in participating.
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      The small community can make its own rules. I’ve seen Mastodon instances with both stricter and less strict rules than Twitter. And it’s fine because people can just spin up a new instance if they don’t like it.
  - Kye 4y ago
    Where are you hosting that still offers CPanel on a $5/month plan?
ransom1538 4y ago
"Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden," Saying this on HN is irony crystalized.
- ceres 4y ago
  HN is not a powerful walled garden. It’s a site mostly used to share links and comments. Places like it abound on the internet. In case of any shenanigans, they’re liable to lose users to an alternative faster than you can say digg. Even though it’s owners are powerful people in tech, I’m willing to bet it’s not generating billions for them. And with anonymous accounts, their incentive to harvest data and use it for ad targeting is little.
  - mikem170 4y ago
    And hacker news content is searchable and accessible by anyone on the internet, not hidden like on so many other services. This is a big deal for so many things, where solutions and advice can be retrieved instead of having to reinvent the wheel.
fullshark 4y ago
Cause they crave an audience, and find technical challenges in alternatives.
jasode 4y ago
>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences. Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok. Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.
- ceres 4y ago
  Not everyone is a wanna be influencer who wants to reach a billion people. If that’s the case private Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and Telegram groups wouldn’t be as popular as they are.
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    But many people are. It's the same mentality as buying a lottery ticket.
- boplicity 4y ago
  > Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing. Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a sustainable platform.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    That is exponentially more difficult.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    "quite large" is very different from "everyone", and that's what has been so great (and terrible) about Twitter: it feels like everyone.
SanjayMehta 4y ago
I saw their sign up page asking for Linkedin and whatnot, and noped out of there.
- roydivision 4y ago
  Only your email address is required, the rest of the information is optional.
EGreg 4y ago
So then build your own: https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform
mtkhaos 4y ago
I prefer a functional inside out approach. Getting funding for it and start up soon, but you will own everything.
jghn 4y ago
> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters in the people I followed, but the overall breadth was large. In theory something like the fediverse provides this as well, but I'm not sold.
- ceres 4y ago
  > The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. With ActivityPub, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
- wakamoleguy 4y ago
  I’ve been finding this to be the case with the fediverse so far. I have different accounts on Mastodon and Bookwyrm, since Bookwyrm is more tailored to book reviews and quotes. But I can follow Mastodon, Bookwyrm, Peertube, and Pixelfed accounts from one main “reader” feed, providing more of a mix than I ever got on one platform alone.
  - jghn 4y ago
    Agree, that's why I say in theory it's a good replacement. I don't yet buy it'll take off. I find it much more likely that we start seeing a bunch of walled gardens pop up instead. But if I'm wrong, then great.
- Jorengarenar 4y ago
  One acronym: RSS I have almost everything in one app: YouTube, Reddit, HN, Twitter, blogs, webcomics, news etc.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 4y ago
nopenopenopeno 4y ago
>Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb Exactly. Landlords should not exist.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
risyachka 4y ago
>> Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. Come on, you are getting A LOT from all those platforms. You feed someone else's enterprise just as much as it feeds you. Those who have even small audiences get a lot of value, not sure why you are trying to picture it as one way street.
barbazoo 4y ago
People will, for the time being at least, want what these platforms give them, which is the illusion of reach and a constant feed of stimulation. I feel like I don't get the from, say, Mastodon and I think personally think that's ok.
noasaservice 4y ago
> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! That would be the fediverse (Mastodon). Find a server with people who share your interests, or make your own. Making some VC shithead richer all the while you're gamified with rage and adverts is not what I want to continue doing. Thankfully, with the Muskpolaypse, that's looking more and more sustainable. We're even now seeing news agencies casually adding their mastodon user. > To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. And in Mastodon, data portability is a thing on every server. I can pack up all my data from one to the next. And, any server that tries to be an advert spreading server will soon get defederated. Spam is not acceptable, at all.
seydor 4y ago
The problem lies with advertisers. They have become centralized by 2 companies. If it was possible to monetize small communities it would be great, but it hasn't been for 10+ years. It's a pity that we never hear from Advertisers
drcongo 4y ago
I'll be cheering it on anyway, just because it's fun to watch Musk burn his money.
boh 4y ago
> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! So just group chats.
winternett 4y ago
I make music, and for that small communities like mastodon just don't work. In order to be heard and to grow a following, you need to be able to just be heard by a wide variety of people-- That visibility is exactly what sites now sell (nefariously and deceptively) as a commodity that often doesn't return the investment... Paying to be viewed and heard (ads) is not cost effective for most artists.. It's almost always a scam, and it makes life as a musician even more impossible than it was prior to the Internet. You're better off now buying a billboard by the highway instead of trying to share free music on social media. I think it's insane how limitedly people view the Internet, and how often it's only viewed only from one personal perspective at a time... Designers think from their personal perspective and that's it, there is only one success path and post format imposed on millions of people with these platforms. This is Elon's problem right now too. He is trying to work out issues that suit his perspective, to the disappointment and dismay of many who those decisions will stump. What the Internet needs is a community that separates big industry from independent creators (and that also does not charge people who are not making a profit to function), and also separates advertising from organic content They'd also need to police that heavily, just as much as illicit and negative content... That's the only social solution that will work moving forward. All these social platforms, like the metaverse seem to think that they can just build yet another shopping mall full of ads and then people will want to hang out there, and that won't work. Sites like facebook and Twitter were originally successful because they were free and equal for visibility, but as they try to tweak that, the same sites fall apart and fail. People are growing wise to the sites that begin the free to paid shopping mall conversion model. People now want social sites and apps that help them to make money in simple and direct ways, and apps that free them from needing desk jobs, not sites that want to trap them into watching ads and spending money on big business products and services and scams like Crypto and NFTs. The app makers that don't get that will languish with weak user bases, and they will burn a lot of money in the process.
- agallant 4y ago
  I also make music, and have found the Fediverse to be a far more welcoming and varied place than commercial social media. Sure, I'm only getting maybe hundreds of impressions - but that's better than the dozens I got organically (without paying) on Twitter. I'm not making a living from my music - but from your profile it looks like you're not either. Of course a site that enables making money "in simple and direct ways" would be a hit - but I'd suggest that what you're missing isn't a site but a time. Early social media was part of the general gold rush of commercializing the net - a lot of easy money was bubbling about. The Fediverse doesn't really have that gold rush, but neither will Twitter 2.0 - it'd require a paradigm shift (like the Metaverse - which I'm not particularly bullish on, but it's a possibility) for fresh investment at scale. Anyway, depending on your creative goals, I encourage you to still check out the Fediverse. It won't be simple and direct, but (if you're not already popular / willing to pay for ads) you'll probably get more genuine listens and engagement than you will from commercial alternatives.
unity1001 4y ago
> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. The absolute majority of the people on the planet have neither the time and technical knowledge, nor the desire to maintain their own platforms or stacks. Decentralized communities suffer from all the problems of user-friendliness and ease of maintenance that Open Source generally suffers from.
cmurf 4y ago
I agree. If these aren't public benefit corporations, I'm not interested. I used to gleefully ridicule all things Twitter. But I've come to see it as more of a public benefit than a public menace. The automated censoring aggravates me because it does get things wrong, even after requesting review. So a tweak was in order, but this is not that kind of tweak, it's worse. I think we need something like it. I'm not sure if one is enough or if two is too many.
e_i_pi_2 4y ago
> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it I've seen a lot of people talking about the need for a nationalized version of something like twitter as a result of seeing how much damage one person with money can do. That would make it more like a community garden where people are doing it on their own land, but communally owned and in the same location as other people to take advantage of all the benefits that make it successful in the first place. Small decentralized communities are nice, but never really went away and fulfill a different need - there's plenty of small forums or discord channels for programming questions, but I still prefer to use stackoverflow when it's an option.
- ceres 4y ago
  I'd like to think that the "killer app" for the fediverse isn't going to be Mastodon or the other current alternatives but the ActivityPub protocol or something akin to it. Whereas decentralized online communities have existed, they were mostly isolated which meant that users had to make multiple accounts if they wanted to participate in various niche interests. Now that you can create one account in one server and still be able to participate in other federated communities in a "global square" if you wanted to is an important departure from communities of the past.

by ceres 4y ago

jqpabc123 4y ago

Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.

ttul 4y ago
Indeed. Ask anyone running the general discussion group for a small town. The difficulty of effective, fair, and efficient moderation cannot be overstated.
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  Ask anyone running a general discussion group for a neighborhood. It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation. Most people eventually quit if they're not being compensated in some significant way. On the other hand, if anything goes it can probably be fairly hands off.
  - ceres 4y ago
    > It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation And yet some Reddit mods manage subs with 10s of thousands for… free.
    - jqpabc123 4y ago
      If you want to work for free, Reddit will gladly accommodate. But they also have thousands of very well paid employees. Average salary $150K+.
      - ttul 4y ago
        Indeed they do. And on that team is a massive number of salespeople who are constantly farming the world for advertising dollars and a large team of machine learning engineers helping to ease the burden of moderation.
mopsi 4y ago
I've run an online community since 2001 and I've yet to meet the boogeymen of self-hosting. A small site and forum with ~100 users doesn't cost a shit to run ($5 per month, the cost of a coke and a sandwich where I live), updates itself automatically via CPanel, and it isn't much of an issue if it goes down for an hour or two every other year. That's an acceptable cost for not having to submit to anyone's whims about allowed content, and for not having to tolerate "redesigns". Twitter is probably down more than a standard Apache server.
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  That's an acceptable cost for not having to submit to anyone's whims about allowed content Only 100 users and anything goes --- yes, I can see how that might be acceptable. I can also see how most people might have little to no interest in participating.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    The small community can make its own rules. I’ve seen Mastodon instances with both stricter and less strict rules than Twitter. And it’s fine because people can just spin up a new instance if they don’t like it.
- Kye 4y ago
  Where are you hosting that still offers CPanel on a $5/month plan?

ransom1538 4y ago

"Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden," Saying this on HN is irony crystalized.

ceres 4y ago
HN is not a powerful walled garden. It’s a site mostly used to share links and comments. Places like it abound on the internet. In case of any shenanigans, they’re liable to lose users to an alternative faster than you can say digg. Even though it’s owners are powerful people in tech, I’m willing to bet it’s not generating billions for them. And with anonymous accounts, their incentive to harvest data and use it for ad targeting is little.
- mikem170 4y ago
  And hacker news content is searchable and accessible by anyone on the internet, not hidden like on so many other services. This is a big deal for so many things, where solutions and advice can be retrieved instead of having to reinvent the wheel.

fullshark 4y ago

Cause they crave an audience, and find technical challenges in alternatives.

jasode 4y ago

>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences. Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok. Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

ceres 4y ago
Not everyone is a wanna be influencer who wants to reach a billion people. If that’s the case private Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and Telegram groups wouldn’t be as popular as they are.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  But many people are. It's the same mentality as buying a lottery ticket.
boplicity 4y ago
> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing. Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a sustainable platform.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  That is exponentially more difficult.
- pjc50 4y ago
  "quite large" is very different from "everyone", and that's what has been so great (and terrible) about Twitter: it feels like everyone.

SanjayMehta 4y ago

I saw their sign up page asking for Linkedin and whatnot, and noped out of there.

roydivision 4y ago
Only your email address is required, the rest of the information is optional.

EGreg 4y ago

So then build your own: https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform

mtkhaos 4y ago

I prefer a functional inside out approach. Getting funding for it and start up soon, but you will own everything.

jghn 4y ago

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters in the people I followed, but the overall breadth was large. In theory something like the fediverse provides this as well, but I'm not sold.

ceres 4y ago
> The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. With ActivityPub, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
wakamoleguy 4y ago
I’ve been finding this to be the case with the fediverse so far. I have different accounts on Mastodon and Bookwyrm, since Bookwyrm is more tailored to book reviews and quotes. But I can follow Mastodon, Bookwyrm, Peertube, and Pixelfed accounts from one main “reader” feed, providing more of a mix than I ever got on one platform alone.
- jghn 4y ago
  Agree, that's why I say in theory it's a good replacement. I don't yet buy it'll take off. I find it much more likely that we start seeing a bunch of walled gardens pop up instead. But if I'm wrong, then great.
Jorengarenar 4y ago
One acronym: RSS I have almost everything in one app: YouTube, Reddit, HN, Twitter, blogs, webcomics, news etc.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
4y ago

nopenopenopeno 4y ago

>Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb Exactly. Landlords should not exist.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

risyachka 4y ago

>> Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. Come on, you are getting A LOT from all those platforms. You feed someone else's enterprise just as much as it feeds you. Those who have even small audiences get a lot of value, not sure why you are trying to picture it as one way street.

barbazoo 4y ago

People will, for the time being at least, want what these platforms give them, which is the illusion of reach and a constant feed of stimulation. I feel like I don't get the from, say, Mastodon and I think personally think that's ok.

noasaservice 4y ago

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! That would be the fediverse (Mastodon). Find a server with people who share your interests, or make your own. Making some VC shithead richer all the while you're gamified with rage and adverts is not what I want to continue doing. Thankfully, with the Muskpolaypse, that's looking more and more sustainable. We're even now seeing news agencies casually adding their mastodon user. > To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. And in Mastodon, data portability is a thing on every server. I can pack up all my data from one to the next. And, any server that tries to be an advert spreading server will soon get defederated. Spam is not acceptable, at all.

seydor 4y ago

The problem lies with advertisers. They have become centralized by 2 companies. If it was possible to monetize small communities it would be great, but it hasn't been for 10+ years. It's a pity that we never hear from Advertisers

drcongo 4y ago

I'll be cheering it on anyway, just because it's fun to watch Musk burn his money.

boh 4y ago

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! So just group chats.

winternett 4y ago

I make music, and for that small communities like mastodon just don't work. In order to be heard and to grow a following, you need to be able to just be heard by a wide variety of people-- That visibility is exactly what sites now sell (nefariously and deceptively) as a commodity that often doesn't return the investment... Paying to be viewed and heard (ads) is not cost effective for most artists.. It's almost always a scam, and it makes life as a musician even more impossible than it was prior to the Internet. You're better off now buying a billboard by the highway instead of trying to share free music on social media. I think it's insane how limitedly people view the Internet, and how often it's only viewed only from one personal perspective at a time... Designers think from their personal perspective and that's it, there is only one success path and post format imposed on millions of people with these platforms. This is Elon's problem right now too. He is trying to work out issues that suit his perspective, to the disappointment and dismay of many who those decisions will stump. What the Internet needs is a community that separates big industry from independent creators (and that also does not charge people who are not making a profit to function), and also separates advertising from organic content They'd also need to police that heavily, just as much as illicit and negative content... That's the only social solution that will work moving forward. All these social platforms, like the metaverse seem to think that they can just build yet another shopping mall full of ads and then people will want to hang out there, and that won't work. Sites like facebook and Twitter were originally successful because they were free and equal for visibility, but as they try to tweak that, the same sites fall apart and fail. People are growing wise to the sites that begin the free to paid shopping mall conversion model. People now want social sites and apps that help them to make money in simple and direct ways, and apps that free them from needing desk jobs, not sites that want to trap them into watching ads and spending money on big business products and services and scams like Crypto and NFTs. The app makers that don't get that will languish with weak user bases, and they will burn a lot of money in the process.

agallant 4y ago
I also make music, and have found the Fediverse to be a far more welcoming and varied place than commercial social media. Sure, I'm only getting maybe hundreds of impressions - but that's better than the dozens I got organically (without paying) on Twitter. I'm not making a living from my music - but from your profile it looks like you're not either. Of course a site that enables making money "in simple and direct ways" would be a hit - but I'd suggest that what you're missing isn't a site but a time. Early social media was part of the general gold rush of commercializing the net - a lot of easy money was bubbling about. The Fediverse doesn't really have that gold rush, but neither will Twitter 2.0 - it'd require a paradigm shift (like the Metaverse - which I'm not particularly bullish on, but it's a possibility) for fresh investment at scale. Anyway, depending on your creative goals, I encourage you to still check out the Fediverse. It won't be simple and direct, but (if you're not already popular / willing to pay for ads) you'll probably get more genuine listens and engagement than you will from commercial alternatives.

unity1001 4y ago

> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. The absolute majority of the people on the planet have neither the time and technical knowledge, nor the desire to maintain their own platforms or stacks. Decentralized communities suffer from all the problems of user-friendliness and ease of maintenance that Open Source generally suffers from.

cmurf 4y ago

I agree. If these aren't public benefit corporations, I'm not interested. I used to gleefully ridicule all things Twitter. But I've come to see it as more of a public benefit than a public menace. The automated censoring aggravates me because it does get things wrong, even after requesting review. So a tweak was in order, but this is not that kind of tweak, it's worse. I think we need something like it. I'm not sure if one is enough or if two is too many.

e_i_pi_2 4y ago

> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it I've seen a lot of people talking about the need for a nationalized version of something like twitter as a result of seeing how much damage one person with money can do. That would make it more like a community garden where people are doing it on their own land, but communally owned and in the same location as other people to take advantage of all the benefits that make it successful in the first place. Small decentralized communities are nice, but never really went away and fulfill a different need - there's plenty of small forums or discord channels for programming questions, but I still prefer to use stackoverflow when it's an option.

ceres 4y ago
I'd like to think that the "killer app" for the fediverse isn't going to be Mastodon or the other current alternatives but the ActivityPub protocol or something akin to it. Whereas decentralized online communities have existed, they were mostly isolated which meant that users had to make multiple accounts if they wanted to participate in various niche interests. Now that you can create one account in one server and still be able to participate in other federated communities in a "global square" if you wanted to is an important departure from communities of the past.