[bumper_crop]

From 2006 to 2014 I owned my own platform. Several actually. But I turned them down after it became a lot of work to maintain. At the time, it wasn't so obvious the web was dying, but in hindsight I probably helped kill it.

In the beginning the web was so new, and growing so fast, with new things, amazing sites, and more people getting online. Like all things in life, competition arises, and better sites started getting much more of the market share. People's expectations for what a website could offer rose tremendously, and would abandon a site if it wasn't up to snuff. Sites needed to have ever improving visuals, better content, better people, better interactivity, better everything.

And I couldn't keep up with it. Users went from being happy to try out something new to dismissive and bitter. More and more it felt like work to try to make them happy, to keep building more and better things. And that's exactly what happened. The Internet became work. It's why we all have to be paid to come to work and build the Internet. No one does it for free, because it's a thankless grueling job. The only websites that survived were the ones that made money, and could afford to use that money to hire people. Google, Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, 9gag, and even Something Awful became money oriented rather than community oriented. They had to, or else.

The advice to "Always Own Your Own Platform" is a euphemistic way of saying make a whole company out of your site and underpay the only employee (you) for ever. The reason we don't own our own platform anymore is because it's soooo annoying to do so. It wasn't an accident.

[jlfyhilfyu]

While the damage is severe, I don't think it's permanent. Mastodon is far from a powerhouse, but is chugging along happily with a slowly growing user base. Matrix arrived just in time to help prevent Slack and Discord from becoming the defacto real-time communication systems for open source projects. Even SA is starting to heal now that it's out from under lowtax and his bullshit.

[cehrlich]

One thing I'd be curious to know is how large the current open platforms are compared to those of 20+ years ago. The internet as a whole is so much bigger that it's hard to maintain a sense of scale.

For example, how many people are using Matrix now, compared to IRC 20 years ago? IRC had 10M users in 2003 [1], Matrix has 28M 'global visible accounts', but who knows what that means.

Maybe it's ok for these platforms to remain 'small', growing slowly. Sure we'd all love to win the fight for a free internet tomorrow, but it's also important to maintain a realistic perspective.

Disclaimer: Usenet is still growing, but I presume that's just alt.binary - According to Wikipedia [1] it had 15M daily posts in 2010, and 171M daily posts in 2021.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

[hammyhavoc]

53m global visible accounts as of March, mate. https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1505009553884205063?...

It means exactly what it says. We don't know how many people in European governments, militaries, healthcare etc use it, but we know that they use it, though that information is not possible to discover publicly. We can see how many public accounts there are.

Usenet is predominantly piracy at this point.

[lancesells]

I agree with you. But I do think Mastodon and Matrix / Element all have a marketing problem. It's seems to be "here's a clone of a service you use but you own your content".

I'm not saying that they don't do things better but they don't market it that way. To beat Twitter be better than Twitter. Make something memorable and unique, give features that beat the stockholder driven choices of the other guys.

[Arathorn]

Element (on Matrix) may be superficially a clone of slack or discord, but it already does some things significantly better:

* End-to-end encryption

* Spaces as freeform hierarchies of rooms

* Widgets, to embed arbitrary webapps into your chatrooms

* Open standard API

However, the point is more that Matrix can do way more than this given it’s a protocol: Element Call is already a better UX for conferencing than Hangouts or Zoom; thirdroom.io is a super promising virtual world system built on Matrix, etc.

We probably do need to market it better though!

[generalk]

Definitely, better marketing around differentiation.

I'm a huge dork for open standards, I frequently miss the days of Gaim/Pidgin and having Google Talk be Jabber/XMPP underneath, and being able to IM my friends wherever. Personally, I'm probably going to dork around with Matrix/Element because it sounds like my kind of thing.

But I can't figure why I'd switch to it for work.

I moved my company recently from Teams to Mattermost. The UX was the biggest selling point. Collaboration happens in Mattermost in ways it simply couldn't happen in Teams.

Putting aside the fact that we're not going to churn company comms every quarter for funzies, why would I switch us to Element? What can I do with Element that I can't do with Mattermost or Rocket.Chat or Slack or anything else?

[Arathorn]

What you can do with Element is:

* Have signal-style end-to-end encryption by default, if you care about keeping your data secure on the server.

* Pick from a huge range of alternative clients, including hooking up custom ones thanks to Element being built on the open Matrix standard. For instance, if you wanted to plonk an Intercom-style chat box on your website which funnelled into your support chatrooms, there are a a bunch of different matrix-as-chatbox clients you could use

* Bridge to other platforms as if you were using them natively (as per the sibling comment) - e.g. if you already have other chat systems flying around the place, you can easily unify them in Matrix

* Talk to people outside your company. If you care about collaborating with external people (other developers; customers; partners; suppliers; sibling companies etc) then Matrix's intrinsic decentralisation means you can just talk to them via the public Matrix network. For instance, I spend my life collaborating with folks on the mozilla, KDE, GNOME, Ansible etc Matrix servers without having to think (let alone manage a million different tabs and identities and crappy clients for their various communities).

So, that's the pitch.

[Shared404]

Depending on if/how often you use your internal chat to communicate with external partners, Matrix's bridging could be a selling factor.

[hello_marmalade]

As much as I love FOSS, Element isn’t even close to Discord. Discord has one click streaming, easy to understand voice rooms, etc. You don’t have to sort out hosting, and the overall UI experience is sharper and feels more polished. Visually Element is nice, but it has some clunk to it.

[hammyhavoc]

Discord isn't even close to Element. Discord provides no privacy and a single point of failure. Matrix however will offer peer-to-peer lite servers running on-device that'll even work offline via BLE. Try using Discord during an invasion or natural disaster.

This idea that Discord is accessible globally is such an America-centric naïvete.

[Klonoar]

>Discord provides no privacy and a single point of failure.

Normal users fundamentally do not give a shit.

OP is contrasting Element as a client, and it is subpar in comparison to Discord's UI/UX. No protocol differences can paper over this.

[sanderjd]

Ok but going back to the grandparent's point: what is the incentive to do that? It's really hard to be better than Twitter. I know Twitter kind of sucks and everyone here thinks they have too many employees, but the truth is that all of those employees are doing stuff, that despite it kind of sucking, it remains incredibly hard and extremely expensive to actually make something better. I just don't see how these platforms can compete with the primary incentive structure being altruism. It's way too much to ask.

[cmg]

> It's really hard to be better than Twitter.

It is, but right now people don't care as much about privacy as features and community. It's not what people who focus on openness or privacy want, but it's the reality. Where are the celebrities and brands? Where are the conversations happening? Where are my friends? This is the challenge.

[sanderjd]

Yes ... but that's never going to change, so what's the proposal here?

[winternett]

The key in my perspective is to not scale too far.

Twitter, Reddit, and many other mega-platforms began the process of sucking (exactly) when their user bases got too big. operational costs also soared as they over scaled to stay dominant, while they began to fear changes in functionality because of a circular cycle of fearing user backlash.

No one platform can service massive levels and disciplines of users well, yet everyone keeps getting greedy, and always loses sight of that fact. Costs of competition at monopoly level create a paralyzing fear of losing a grip on users... That fear makes those platforms resort to corrupt methods to retain and addict their users to their product, and makes execs and investors unable to see outside of the vapor cloud they create...

Also, never go IPO if you want to keep your product's soul... Cash out early like Tom from Myspace, and let someone else crash and burn the idea as a CEO... :P

[bsder]

> But I do think Mastodon and Matrix / Element all have a marketing problem. It's seems to be "here's a clone of a service you use but you own your content".

Well, Slack and Discord have the ability to throw around money to solve that problem. Open source projects mostly don't.

So, open source projects have to hit some nerve and then slowly grow into useful and then a dominant project. See: the trajectory of Blender.

[rsolva]

My mastodon pitch is it’s «ad-free, community-run and features a chronological feed (no algorithms)».

I used to open with the fact that it's federated, but it's a much harder concept to sell initially. People do appreciate it later on though, when they find out they can follow and interact with a bunch of other social networks and communities.

[hello_marmalade]

My biggest problem with Mastodon is it’s psychotic user base.

[rsolva]

This is entirely dependent on the instance/server you join. I can't guarantee that you'll find a pre-existing community that fits your interests, but you can start your own independent server an carve out a niche to your liking. That is not possible on any other commercial and centralized social media platforms.

[hammyhavoc]

Source?

[mrtksn]

I've heard of Mastadon, even tried it but couldn't get any value of the contents on it. The last time I looked at it, most of the content was about Mastadon and welcome messages. I was expecting to see some crazy stuff like flat earthers or antivaxxers but even that was not available.

I'm also not sure that I used it correctly, maybe I needed to find servers or something.

Anyway, my point it is that the lack of discoverability is not just a marketing issue but it seems like baked in these platforms. Something is not there yet and that's why it's not growing like crazy.

[rapnie]

> I'm also not sure that I used it correctly, maybe I needed to find servers or something.

You needed to find people to follow. Unlike corporate social media content is not pushed to you by algorithms. You have to build your own social network manually. Not doing so you have an empty personal timeline, and a too busy global timeline that is full of irrelevant stuff to you.

> Anyway, my point it is that the lack of discoverability is not just a marketing issue but it seems like baked in these platforms. Something is not there yet and that's why it's not growing like crazy.

Strange as it may sound on HN, but I am happy it is that way. There is a different culture now on the fediverse, and it is one that likely won't survive that 'crazy growth'.

[mrtksn]

That doesn't make sense though unless there's a directory of recommendation engine or search engine for interesting people. Otherwise it means that I'm supposed to follow people that I already know, which is ridiculous because I don't want yet another channel to see the same stuff I already see.

On HN there's the front page where interesting stuff is curated algorithmically and smart people that I don't follow or know perviously make interesting comments on that stuff. Mastadon doesn't seem to offer anything like that.

[pgcj_poster]

I think the trick is to find an instance where the people mostly share your interests. When I first tried mastodon.social, I didn't get anywhere. But when I found a more niche instance, I was able to find a lot of good content on the local timeline, which gave me people to follow and gradually exposed me to the larger fediverse.

[mrtksn]

Where do you find this content? Can you link a few examples of good content(in your opinion, of course)?

[rubyskills]

It's funny because you could argue that slack and discord replaced IRC. I wonder if we will have cycles or if commercial hosted solutions will always win this arms race.

[asddubs]

unless you happen to own freenode/libera.chat, you don't own your own platform on IRC either. same for mastodon, unless you happen to own the mastodon instance you're on, you don't own it.

And the old web had plenty of platforms too, tripod and geocities were platforms as well. You could take it a step further still and say that unless you have a server that's sitting in your own basement, you don't own your own platform, since any hosting provider could decide to pull down your site as well.

it gets real lonely if everyone does own their own platform, and it certainly wasn't the case in the old web either (though it was definitely more common to own more of your own platform). Still, I don't really think this is the defining feature of the old web. I think the level of commerce is much more important, something like ao3 feels old web, and that's because it's a user-centric platform, rather than business-centric

[Zak]

This is where federation matters. I can choose where I host a Matrix room or Mastodon account and other people using other service providers can interact. It's even possible to move a Mastodon account from one provider to another without losing contacts, though this looks to have some rough edges.

I don't think everyone should necessarily own their platform, but it's very valuable to have the option to migrate anything that's a critical part of your identity or business to a different provider.

[hammyhavoc]

Anybody can and could start an IRC server. I ran one. I ran a BBS too. Now run a Matrix server.

[throwaway14356]

one could argue irc has improved by the platformists abandoning it.

[sneak]

Slack and Discord are the de-facto realtime communication systems for open source projects, though. I wish it weren't so.

[stitched2gethr]

> People's expectations for what a website could offer rose tremendously, and would abandon a site if it wasn't up to snuff.

Amazon.com is basic text and image elements on a white background. The full-feature sites often just look like blown up versions of the mobile sites.

I believe there are multiple issues with owning your platform but I'm not sure this is the defining factor, at least anymore.

[Method-X]

For most regular non-tech people this is true. I think it’s best to control your own platform but you can still leverage Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc to grow your brand and make sure they’re onboarded to your own platform of sorts.

[rapnie]

> to grow your brand

Well, yes, if that is what you want to do. If you just want to be you online, and not 'grow a brand' it is best having a platform where you are in more control of doing so than these corporate advertising platforms that are indeed tailored to building brands.

[FormerBandmate]

Videos on YouTube will get 800x more views than views on yourownvideowebsite.com (assuming you aren’t a major Hollywood studio). Donald Trump went from 90 million followers on Twitter to 3.2 million followers on his own Twitter clone, and he has such a loyal following that people literally committed treason for him. Network effects are impossible to ignore

[spencerchubb]

That is such an incredible example. If Donald Trump doesn't have strong enough if a brand to overcome network effects, nobody does lmao

[webmaven]

> Donald Trump went from 90 million followers on Twitter to 3.2 million followers on his own Twitter clone, and he has such a loyal following that people literally committed treason for him. Network effects are impossible to ignore

You're not wrong, but please note that those are Trump loyalists that followed him to a service that Trump didn't actually use until quite recently:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/trump-makes-first-post-on-truth-s...

It kind of seems that far from being ignored, network effects were the main reason Trump was using Twitter in the first place.

[CM30]

It's probably worth pointing out that many people who followed Trump on Twitter weren't fans of his, but people who wanted to keep up with what he was saying (perhaps as critics, journalists, etc) and already had a Twitter account for other purposes. The folks who folowed him to his own Twitter clone were (by and large) actual fans who suppported him.

If you dislike Trump but want to monitor his actions, following him on Twitter might make sense. Joining a platform dominated by Trump supporters probably wouldn't.

[winternett]

Trump was a TV celebrity well before Twitter... That's not a good example.

These days YouTube does nothing to promote posters that aren't rich and/or famous already.

Having my own site and embedding my YT content is the only thing that helps me to be visible amongst a sea of celebrities who are already popular and promoted for free on the front pages of social sites like Twitter and YouTube.

[laurex]

Does no-code make this better or worse?