4 ms·

As a user of this service: You built a service, I started to use it, I was happy to pay for it. Now you sold all the data your business had about me and the se

As a user of this service: You built a service, I started to use it, I was happy to pay for it. Now you sold all the data your business had about me and the service, so I need to check the new EULA etc, and need to reevaluate if I want to use this service futher along the way. Also my experience with apps/services/etc sold by their original creator(s), that they are shuting down in a year or two and I'm so tired of this trend. So yeah, happy about your success, unhappy about another service which probably goes down the drain and I need to find something else to use, which probably not really has the same featureset. Edit: My point is, I would have been using this service and paying for it in the next few years, without the need of new features or so, so you only need to do maintenance of the infrastructure and keeping up with the security updates for mostly passive income. Probably this is the same for other users of the service. I think this should be considered, when you thinking about selling your passive income sideproject.

quickthrower2 6y ago
Sounds like you should stick to FLOSS then. Anything you buy as SaaS can be canned, sold on or just become crap.
- lubonay 6y ago
  And even if it doesn't get sold/canned/broken, they can still change the EULA for any arbitrary reason.
- Traster 6y ago
  Your solution to being unhappy about potential losing a useful service is just to never use the service in the first place? How is that productive? Just because someone is upset about a service potentially going away doesn't mean they regret ever having used it.
- loriverkutya 6y ago
  FLOSS sadly does not solve my problem fully. I'm happy to pay for somebody to maintain the infrastructure and keep the service I'm using up to date on security issues. However if the maintainer happen to stop maintaining the service, I could setup the infrastructure and maintain it by myself with some learning, but that would take up more time I need to earn the money I'm paying to somebody else, who already done the groundwork and has the knowledge about the service. Also the service is worth $5-10 per month, but does not have enough value to worth the hassle of setting up the whole self hosted infra behind it and maintain it by myself. I'm not sure why, but people recommending FLOSS as a solution tends to forget about the additional cost to setup and maintain infrastructure and software and a simple build pipeline (even if it's just a bash script, rsyncing the code to a server) when mentioning you could self-host it if they shutdown the service. This is the "slightly annoying not to have this service, but not annoying enough to bother to replicate it even if I could" situation for me.
  - iso1210 6y ago
    Free software isn't about money, it's about freedom. You value the freedom enough to complain when it's trodden on, but not enough to do the work required to continue to be free. Freedom has a price.
    - comboy 6y ago
      No. When you have to maintain the infrastructure you're a slave. Freedom is when I pay somebody to do it for me and move it elsewhere if I don't like it. I'm also tired of the trend of recommending FOSS when somebody is looking for a service. For personal solutions it works only if you are valuing your time really low or if you are having a lot of fun playing with it. Frankly, if you think setting up your own FOSS is often a good solution you haven't listened to your advice enough times. It works if you have a few things. But if you try to do it with everything you will just give up after a few years and 50 things set up this way, or you will spend considerate amount of time on maintenance (which is fine as long that's what you want to do with your life).
      - ffdjjjffjj 6y ago
        Don’t you think it’s a little hyperbolic to compare the ownership of human beings to running some software on your computer?
        comboy 6y ago
        I agree, but it seems most practical to reply using the same framework that parent is using.
      - 1123581321 6y ago
        They were recommended FLOSS because they were histrionic about data ownership in a situation where the data was already out the door. It’s a way of presenting them with the fact that nothing reasonable can make them happy.
        6y ago
- coldtea 6y ago
  Similarly to anything you use that is FLOSS, which could have few devs and languish, teams with bizarro changes of direction, and so on. You just get the assurance that in the off chance somebody (including you) cares enough to maintain it, has the time, and is competent, they have have the license to do so. But that's not that big a deal, except if its a project with many diverse backers and large diverse community (e.g. something like MySQL or SQLite or even Webkit will survive and be forked if needed - something like the average 1-3 main dev project not so much).
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    This is a big ol thread but I think it is worth touching on software design. If an app can be a desktop app written in say JS (Java c# or similar term back-compat language) and not need “infra”. Or if it can be a Unix until that does one thing well. Then that is more likely to be a thing that can be forked and untouched for years and just work. Granted anything that interacts with web services may have bit rot. However solid principles may allow those parts of code to be surfaced out to plugins etc. Anyway let’s put it this way. I use YNAB 4 desktop budgeting software. No longer supported, not even FOSS and I’m not worried I can run that thing for the rest of my life, with little hassle, as long as I can run the last version of Windows that supports it in a VM.
- jfoster 6y ago
  I think this is a really interesting point, because I don't think FLOSS is quite the answer, either. If you just want a dependable service that's going to stay around, and you're willing to pay for it, what do you do? As you say, anything that is SaaS could be canned/sold/etc. Anything that's FLOSS won't be as much of a service as you wanted, presuming you wanted to pay money on an ongoing basis to have a problem solved in a convenient way.
marckohlbrugge 6y ago
Those are definitely some fair points. While I appreciate you being a paying customer, unfortunately you're in minority. When Facebook changed their API earlier this year and forced me to rewrite a part of the codebase I seriously considered just closing down the site. The service generates $140 in monthly revenue which is nothing compared to my other products. So my time is best spent elsewhere. So when the buyer approached it wasn't just a way for me to cash out on the business (and make more money than if I just kept it in maintenance mode), but also a way to increase the chance of Tweet Photo sticking around long-term. The new owner has both the resources and incentive to keep Tweet Photo running. As they are financially invested, plus they have a large userbase they plan on cross-promoting it to. Which means Tweet Photo will start generating more revenue, becomes more valuable, and in the end will have more reasons to be maintained and developed. With regards to the EULA: Tweet Photo is a bit of an outlier in that it has to adhere to both Twitter's and Facebook's terms of service, so there's some protection in that. If the new owner were to violate those terms the whole service could be closed down.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dajohnson89 6y ago
  i think op is more worried about his data's privacy than whether the app complies with facebook's TOS.
  - marckohlbrugge 6y ago
    Sure, but my point is that Tweet Photo's EULA is by definition restricted to what Twitter and Facebook terms allow.
mro_name 6y ago
while I feel your pain, in this particular case – a service connecting twitter and instagram, right?, you already gave in to facebook. How much worse could you be sold anyway, than what you did already? So there's 2 global scale monopolies in the toolchain already and you're bothered the 3rd player might not be indie?
the_gipsy 6y ago
Explore - expand - exploit The cycle of (enterprise) life
duxup 6y ago
Isn't the "data your business hand about me" cat already out of the bag if the business connected to Facebook and Instagram? They're using Facebook's APIs...
save_ferris 6y ago
> Now you sold all the data your business had about me and the service, so I need to check the new EULA etc, and need to reevaluate if I want to use this service futher along the way. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I pretty much assume that any service I buy into will one day be acquired and the data transferred to someone else. I understand this user's frustration, but how many times are we going to see acquisitions involving user data happen before we all come to the consensus that this is what people who monetize products do? I think it's really naive in 2020 for someone to sign up for a tweet photo service like this to get upset that the product gets acquired and their data handed over. Let's be honest here, this service takes data from one massive aggregator of user data and posts it to another massive aggregator of user data. Are you really that concerned that someone other than Zuckerberg or Dorsey has your public instagram data now? It's not like either of those companies have glowing reputations around user privacy either.

quickthrower2 6y ago

Sounds like you should stick to FLOSS then. Anything you buy as SaaS can be canned, sold on or just become crap.

lubonay 6y ago
And even if it doesn't get sold/canned/broken, they can still change the EULA for any arbitrary reason.
Traster 6y ago
Your solution to being unhappy about potential losing a useful service is just to never use the service in the first place? How is that productive? Just because someone is upset about a service potentially going away doesn't mean they regret ever having used it.
loriverkutya 6y ago
FLOSS sadly does not solve my problem fully. I'm happy to pay for somebody to maintain the infrastructure and keep the service I'm using up to date on security issues. However if the maintainer happen to stop maintaining the service, I could setup the infrastructure and maintain it by myself with some learning, but that would take up more time I need to earn the money I'm paying to somebody else, who already done the groundwork and has the knowledge about the service. Also the service is worth $5-10 per month, but does not have enough value to worth the hassle of setting up the whole self hosted infra behind it and maintain it by myself. I'm not sure why, but people recommending FLOSS as a solution tends to forget about the additional cost to setup and maintain infrastructure and software and a simple build pipeline (even if it's just a bash script, rsyncing the code to a server) when mentioning you could self-host it if they shutdown the service. This is the "slightly annoying not to have this service, but not annoying enough to bother to replicate it even if I could" situation for me.
- iso1210 6y ago
  Free software isn't about money, it's about freedom. You value the freedom enough to complain when it's trodden on, but not enough to do the work required to continue to be free. Freedom has a price.
  - comboy 6y ago
    No. When you have to maintain the infrastructure you're a slave. Freedom is when I pay somebody to do it for me and move it elsewhere if I don't like it. I'm also tired of the trend of recommending FOSS when somebody is looking for a service. For personal solutions it works only if you are valuing your time really low or if you are having a lot of fun playing with it. Frankly, if you think setting up your own FOSS is often a good solution you haven't listened to your advice enough times. It works if you have a few things. But if you try to do it with everything you will just give up after a few years and 50 things set up this way, or you will spend considerate amount of time on maintenance (which is fine as long that's what you want to do with your life).
    - ffdjjjffjj 6y ago
      Don’t you think it’s a little hyperbolic to compare the ownership of human beings to running some software on your computer?
      - comboy 6y ago
        I agree, but it seems most practical to reply using the same framework that parent is using.
    - 1123581321 6y ago
      They were recommended FLOSS because they were histrionic about data ownership in a situation where the data was already out the door. It’s a way of presenting them with the fact that nothing reasonable can make them happy.
      - 6y ago
coldtea 6y ago
Similarly to anything you use that is FLOSS, which could have few devs and languish, teams with bizarro changes of direction, and so on. You just get the assurance that in the off chance somebody (including you) cares enough to maintain it, has the time, and is competent, they have have the license to do so. But that's not that big a deal, except if its a project with many diverse backers and large diverse community (e.g. something like MySQL or SQLite or even Webkit will survive and be forked if needed - something like the average 1-3 main dev project not so much).
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  This is a big ol thread but I think it is worth touching on software design. If an app can be a desktop app written in say JS (Java c# or similar term back-compat language) and not need “infra”. Or if it can be a Unix until that does one thing well. Then that is more likely to be a thing that can be forked and untouched for years and just work. Granted anything that interacts with web services may have bit rot. However solid principles may allow those parts of code to be surfaced out to plugins etc. Anyway let’s put it this way. I use YNAB 4 desktop budgeting software. No longer supported, not even FOSS and I’m not worried I can run that thing for the rest of my life, with little hassle, as long as I can run the last version of Windows that supports it in a VM.
jfoster 6y ago
I think this is a really interesting point, because I don't think FLOSS is quite the answer, either. If you just want a dependable service that's going to stay around, and you're willing to pay for it, what do you do? As you say, anything that is SaaS could be canned/sold/etc. Anything that's FLOSS won't be as much of a service as you wanted, presuming you wanted to pay money on an ongoing basis to have a problem solved in a convenient way.

marckohlbrugge 6y ago

Those are definitely some fair points. While I appreciate you being a paying customer, unfortunately you're in minority. When Facebook changed their API earlier this year and forced me to rewrite a part of the codebase I seriously considered just closing down the site. The service generates $140 in monthly revenue which is nothing compared to my other products. So my time is best spent elsewhere. So when the buyer approached it wasn't just a way for me to cash out on the business (and make more money than if I just kept it in maintenance mode), but also a way to increase the chance of Tweet Photo sticking around long-term. The new owner has both the resources and incentive to keep Tweet Photo running. As they are financially invested, plus they have a large userbase they plan on cross-promoting it to. Which means Tweet Photo will start generating more revenue, becomes more valuable, and in the end will have more reasons to be maintained and developed. With regards to the EULA: Tweet Photo is a bit of an outlier in that it has to adhere to both Twitter's and Facebook's terms of service, so there's some protection in that. If the new owner were to violate those terms the whole service could be closed down.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dajohnson89 6y ago
i think op is more worried about his data's privacy than whether the app complies with facebook's TOS.
- marckohlbrugge 6y ago
  Sure, but my point is that Tweet Photo's EULA is by definition restricted to what Twitter and Facebook terms allow.

mro_name 6y ago

while I feel your pain, in this particular case – a service connecting twitter and instagram, right?, you already gave in to facebook. How much worse could you be sold anyway, than what you did already? So there's 2 global scale monopolies in the toolchain already and you're bothered the 3rd player might not be indie?

the_gipsy 6y ago

Explore - expand - exploit The cycle of (enterprise) life

duxup 6y ago

Isn't the "data your business hand about me" cat already out of the bag if the business connected to Facebook and Instagram? They're using Facebook's APIs...

save_ferris 6y ago

> Now you sold all the data your business had about me and the service, so I need to check the new EULA etc, and need to reevaluate if I want to use this service futher along the way. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I pretty much assume that any service I buy into will one day be acquired and the data transferred to someone else. I understand this user's frustration, but how many times are we going to see acquisitions involving user data happen before we all come to the consensus that this is what people who monetize products do? I think it's really naive in 2020 for someone to sign up for a tweet photo service like this to get upset that the product gets acquired and their data handed over. Let's be honest here, this service takes data from one massive aggregator of user data and posts it to another massive aggregator of user data. Are you really that concerned that someone other than Zuckerberg or Dorsey has your public instagram data now? It's not like either of those companies have glowing reputations around user privacy either.