[ceres]

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!

[jasode]

>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.

[boplicity]

> 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.

[TheRealPomax]

Island influence stops at the water. Yes, you might get quite famous on your own island, and if that's what you're going for, power to you. Everything from mailing lists to mastodon will do that for you. But if you want to reach "everyone", you need a network that will potentially broadcast to "everyone". Should you want to reach "everyone"? Very different question, but that's not the issue raised. The upside to users on a centralised platform is that their potential reach is that entire platform's user base. The exact same is true for any other platform, but the numbers differ by orders of magnitude, and as we all know: bigger number must be better.

[the-printer]

This is not a refutation because I think that you’ve given a nice response to the topic. But I think that the people who are concerned or interested with reaching “everyone” deserve being beholden to the Big Box platforms of today; whichever ones rise and gain steam in the future that use phrases like “foster dialogue and bring people together” in lieu of “drive engagement and bring in ad dollars” then crash and burn under the weight of internal whistleblowers and damning The Guardian exposés.

I think the future of online communities will be community for the sake of community…and nothing else. Very mundane and boring on the outside, driven by nothing other than “I’m sharing waffle recipes and I’m going to just upload them to the internet on my hosting provider or via my old Compaq Presario and I do not care about engagements just email me later and goodbye.”

[pjc50]

"quite large" is very different from "everyone", and that's what has been so great (and terrible) about Twitter: it feels like everyone.

[horsawlarway]

It might feel that way, but I promise you it's definitely not "everyone".

Hell, it's only about 45 million in the US (assuming you believe Twitter's own numbers - which I definitely do not).

So at best, you're getting 1 in ~8 folks in the US. More realistically, I'd assume your audience is more likely 1 in ~20 in the US - assuming you manage to get literally everyone to follow you.

Is that larger than you're going to get on your own site? Probably.

Is that everyone? fuck no. It's basically no one. You're reaching the worst 5% of the country - those who have nothing better to do than browse twitter, or those who are using twitter to promote themselves.

[lelag]

Tweets often do reach much further than active users of the Twitter platform as they are often embedded in mainstream news stories and such.

[horsawlarway]

Sure - but that's true of every site on the web. Conflating mainstream media's reach with Twitter's is fairly disingenuous, since mainstream media also highlights basically every other platform in similar ways.

The brief exception to this is politics - where Twitter was an easy way to get a relevant soundbite from a politician on a topic. I think that era is waning very quickly.

[kibwen]

Which, if they can be spread outside of Twitter, refutes the earlier point that "influence stops at the water". The web is the platform.

[darkwater]

Mmmh everyone that I follow or Twitter thinks I should read. I follow Musk on Twitter and I don't see any of his shitposting, or I don't see many celebs or journalists tweets either. Am I not one of the everyones?

[twobitshifter]

Why should people populate your island when the smart thing to do is make their own?

[babypuncher]

That is exponentially more difficult.

[moron4hire]

> 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.

One of those things is not like the others.

This HN website, phpBB forums, etc., don't interface with other systems. Mastodon does. Usenet and BBS' problem was more that they just predated the massive influx of always-online users that came with the advent of smartphones.

It's not like Twitter is a single server through which all content gets pushed. It's a replicated, distributed network of servers. ActivityPub servers are too, except the shards in network are not all owned by the same entity.

How would you learn about something via Twitter, sans promoted tweets? You'd find out about it from the retweets of the people you follow. That's literally the same thing you'd do in a Mastodon instance.

The big difference is that nobody in the ActivityPub network has the power to force content into your feed. Hasn't that been one of the biggest complaints of mid-2000s era social media? That the algorithm takes presidence over your own preferences? Never in my life do I want to see another "here's one weird trick you can do with a couple of pennies in the bottom of a plastic bag" click-bait article. That's basically impossible to propagate within the ActivityPub network. But that doesn't mean nothing can propogate through the network.

I'm having long, engaging conversations about topics I care about with people within the ActivityPub network. Almost none of those people are on the Mastodon instance I am currently inhabiting. I'm having more of these conversation than I had on Twitter, where I have 15x the number followers. From my perspective, my word is getting out further through ActivityPub than it ever did on Twitter.

[sleepybrett]

Let's just go back to FIDOnet

[barbazoo]

What makes Mastodon not able to accomplish this?

[mikeryan]

The trouble with Mastodon that I’ve seen (on Twitter) is folks are a bit confused with its federated nature. They’re not sure which server to use nor the “rules” governing that server.

Mastodon is really better suited as a collection of smaller communities much like Reddit's r/ forums then for one “universal” platform.

It’s already had some scaling issues with folks trying to use it as well.

[dymk]

Key technical decisions made early on kneecap its ability to be performant and to scale to anything approaching Twitter's userbase size, if instances want to still be part of the fediverse.

[gre]

What are those decisions, got a link?

[tshaddox]

As far as I know, Mastodon is a federated system, so there‘s no mechanism to have an algorithm pick certain content and massively boost its distribution across the network.

[registeredcorn]

>The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences.

But reaching a larger audience is inherently negative, not positive. What is the purpose for speaking to 10,000 users vs 10-20 users? If for marketing, or some other money making scheme, sure there is an advantage. But for users who care about specific content, what value does a cacophony of noise offer? As it is, unity and cohesion will always master diversity and confusion, so shouldn't a "larger audience" be the antithesis of what adds value to a platform?

To a degree, such things can even be seen in major platforms themselves. If we go to something like YouTube, there are different categories of content, and within each categories, sub-genres of content sorted by various factors users are truly interested in. It then does not make sense to attempt to reach the audience invested in makeup tutorials, to also foster users and content around HFT on NASDAQ. If anything, one group would accidentally stumble over the other, and be the worse off for it. This in turn, would hurt both communities atmospheres, and degrade the "convenience factor" of the platform itself. (The more categories and unrelated categories, the harder it is for the user to navigate the platform to find "worthwhile" content, and the harder it is for the owners to curate the UGC.)

[ceres]

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]

But many people are. It's the same mentality as buying a lottery ticket.

[jasondigitized]

Why is broadcasting the high order bit? I personally don't want to scream my message to thousands of people. I want a high signal:noise two way dialogue with a small group of people who know what they are talking about.

[wcunning]

Discoverability, basically. You can get a lot of incredibly good information from Twitter with a very carefully curated follow list. You can get that from Mastodon as well, but you're going to have a much harder time finding the same people in a fully decentralized world. I think I'd rather that existence, which I'm noticing as I wind up in more niche Facebook groups and Discord servers than on broader platforms like Instagram or Twitter, but it's not zero value per se.

[jghn]

> 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.

[wakamoleguy]

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]

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.

[ceres]

> 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.

[Jorengarenar]

One acronym: RSS

I have almost everything in one app: YouTube, Reddit, HN, Twitter, blogs, webcomics, news etc.

[registeredcorn]

>I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc.

I don't mean to sound overly dismissive, but maybe instead of putting the onus on a social media website to provide that experience, wouldn't it be more sensible to get that from a news aggregate site? I.e. Google News, Fark, Reddit, etc.?

Part of the issue with how modern social media platforms is the intent to keep users on their platform for many hours at a time.

Instead, limit content on social sites to the subject of the platform, and allow users to find that other content outside of the site would be a "better" way to manage their experience on the platform. For example, a platform devoted to Formula 1 would not be a good place to inject articles about COVID information or political events. It wouldn't be a good place to do so, not just because it would be severely off topic, but also because it would be managed by people who would otherwise be focused on curating the topic they are (presumably) knowledgeable on.

Basically, I'm saying it's not a good idea to get news updates from Twitter for the same reason why it's not a good idea to get a sushi from a gas station bathroom.

[jghn]

I use(d) Twitter as more of a meta-aggregator. It had actual social interactions combined with the sort of pointers out to news sites, tech blogs, etc. Perhaps I'm an outlier in how I use(d) it but I haven't come across anything that provided the same degree of convergence. This is precisely because it's mixing in short snippets from friends, acquaintances, and other people I find interesting.

> Instead, limit content on social sites to the subject of the platform

That's my point. I'm saying the thing I liked most about Twitter was that there wasn't a single "subject of the platform". Don't get me wrong, I also spend plenty of time in more specific corners of the internet, but I've yet to find something that quite replicates Twitter for me.

[registeredcorn]

That's fair. Personally, I like to keep things separated from one another for obvious reasons (controversial topics mixed with friends/family can lead to issues) but I can also see that others might prefer a single source.

[unity1001]

> 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.

[jqpabc123]

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.

[mopsi]

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.

[Kye]

Where are you hosting that still offers CPanel on a $5/month plan?

[jqpabc123]

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]

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.

[ttul]

Indeed. Ask anyone running the general discussion group for a small town. The difficulty of effective, fair, and efficient moderation cannot be overstated.

[jqpabc123]

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]

> 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]

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]

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.

[noasaservice]

> 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.

[e_i_pi_2]

> 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]

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.

[winternett]

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]

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.

[cmurf]

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.

[risyachka]

>> 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.

[boh]

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!

So just group chats.

[barbazoo]

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.

[seydor]

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

[EGreg]

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

[mtkhaos]

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

[drcongo]

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

[SanjayMehta]

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

[roydivision]

Only your email address is required, the rest of the information is optional.

[fullshark]

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

[nopenopenopeno]

>Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb

Exactly. Landlords should not exist.

[ransom1538]

"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]

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]

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.