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I see the largest problem as that you're basically competing with the social networking giants, and without a profit model or some other significant source of f

by ve55 6y ago

I see the largest problem as that you're basically competing with the social networking giants, and without a profit model or some other significant source of funds, how can you expect to take enough of their users to garner your own network effects? I'm reminded of that one xkcd about competing standards (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png), where every platform wants to maximize their long-term user retention, so ends up being proprietary, and now we have thousands of different systems, apps, and websites, just for something as basic as chat. Not only is this inefficient and wasteful, I think it really hampers the Internet and developer creativity as a whole. It would be great if when you make a new app, you could just drag and drop 'chat' into it, and it would be the same chat protocols and systems that all the other apps use. If we can have donation-funded services as good as Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, maybe there is some way to do this eventually? One can only hope. Services like Mastodon and many others do at least seem impressive technically, even if they're lacking the userbase of their centralized alternatives.

aklemm 6y ago
The value of this model has to be apparent to the user, and I believe that can happen. When that happens, then there’s money to be made off of hosting these sites and for premium providers. The lack of profit motive hasn’t stopped the development of the technology; that’s gone very well as open source and standards development. There is profit to be made in packaging this up and selling to people who realize ~$100/yr is well worth it for a coherent, permanent, flexible home on the web without all the manipulation of the big platforms.
- ve55 6y ago
  That's a good point, and we can already see sizeable portions of normal users that voice concerns about Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. But how many of these users would really be willing (and able) to pay $100/year? I worry that any platform that succeeds enough will eventually fall into the same negative patterns that we dislike about the current prevailing platforms. Advertising will increase as advertisers realize there is money to be made, censorship will increase as governments realize freedom of speech has become an absolute and copyright laws are not being enforced, and so on in many other ways. The promise of decentralization is to solve these problems, but can they all truly be solved with code alone?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I think Matrix/Riot is an example of a successful approach, and when p2p matrix is ready the complexity should be largely invisible to the user (and it also won't require paying for any hosting since the server is embedded in the client).
- fossuser 6y ago
  Urbit attempts to solve this by making the default state a server on your own machines that’s p2p. If done right you get ad free applications where users own their own data by default without the complexity overhead of server management. The complexity can be invisible to the user (eventually) since the UI would basically just be using local applications that plug into your Urbit node.
msla 6y ago
> I see the largest problem as that you're basically competing with the social networking giants, and without a profit model or some other significant source of funds, how can you expect to take enough of their users to garner your own network effects? Content. They have every advantage... except this one blog you like because it is written by someone you like hearing from. Adam Cadre has good content, Rachel By The Bay has good content, Bruce Schneier has good content, and none of them post primarily on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter. So you go to their blogs, and read them, and go to blogs they link to, and so forth.

by ve55 6y ago

aklemm 6y ago

The value of this model has to be apparent to the user, and I believe that can happen. When that happens, then there’s money to be made off of hosting these sites and for premium providers. The lack of profit motive hasn’t stopped the development of the technology; that’s gone very well as open source and standards development. There is profit to be made in packaging this up and selling to people who realize ~$100/yr is well worth it for a coherent, permanent, flexible home on the web without all the manipulation of the big platforms.

ve55 6y ago
That's a good point, and we can already see sizeable portions of normal users that voice concerns about Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. But how many of these users would really be willing (and able) to pay $100/year? I worry that any platform that succeeds enough will eventually fall into the same negative patterns that we dislike about the current prevailing platforms. Advertising will increase as advertisers realize there is money to be made, censorship will increase as governments realize freedom of speech has become an absolute and copyright laws are not being enforced, and so on in many other ways. The promise of decentralization is to solve these problems, but can they all truly be solved with code alone?
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think Matrix/Riot is an example of a successful approach, and when p2p matrix is ready the complexity should be largely invisible to the user (and it also won't require paying for any hosting since the server is embedded in the client).
fossuser 6y ago
Urbit attempts to solve this by making the default state a server on your own machines that’s p2p. If done right you get ad free applications where users own their own data by default without the complexity overhead of server management. The complexity can be invisible to the user (eventually) since the UI would basically just be using local applications that plug into your Urbit node.

msla 6y ago

> I see the largest problem as that you're basically competing with the social networking giants, and without a profit model or some other significant source of funds, how can you expect to take enough of their users to garner your own network effects? Content. They have every advantage... except this one blog you like because it is written by someone you like hearing from. Adam Cadre has good content, Rachel By The Bay has good content, Bruce Schneier has good content, and none of them post primarily on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter. So you go to their blogs, and read them, and go to blogs they link to, and so forth.