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> Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP All available for free in low-friction ways (and still only geek-popular), and easy to self-host if you care about privacy and ownership

by akho 4y ago

> Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP All available for free in low-friction ways (and still only geek-popular), and easy to self-host if you care about privacy and ownership. It’s a really strange spot for a personal use focused SaaS. Focusing on companies may indeed work better.

rglullis 4y ago
Yeah, you are absolutely right. In my defense, these were just the start. The longer roadmap included Pixelfed and Peertube (for photo and video sharing), and SIP + the possibility of buying DIDs (phone numbers), effectively allowing users to ditch their mobile voice plans. I was also hoping there would be some middle-ground between self-hosters and the free instances. The free instances from Mastodon are still very fickle with their moderation, self-hosting requires dealing with the cost of hosting, domain names, administration time, etc. I thought that there would be more people willing to pay $10-15 year to have a worry-free solution. The idea started when I was working at Deutsche Telekom on their attempt at building their own messaging platform + MVNO (called immmr) and they killed it after spending two years and 30€ million working on it. I was convinced at the time that the reason they failed was because they wanted to do everything in space at once, and their main criteria for success was "we need to be #1 or #2 in our secondary markets within the first quarter of launching this". Obviously the launch kept being delayed, the feature list kept getting slashed and their client was full of bugs on critical features. Their stated goal at the time was more about having an alternative to stop the tech companies from eating their margins with OTT services. I was convinced (still am honestly) that if they just focused on providing the basic services (messaging and audio/video calls) via Matrix and if they committed to help with the development of the open source client, they could get a more interesting offering, more time to grow organically and eventually still reach the stated goal. I even wrote a "Ask HN" post back then [0] because I wanted to find a way to validate the hypothesis, but there was no response. When immmr folded, I decided to try with the MVP, and this is where we are now. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221
- akho 4y ago
  > some middle-ground between self-hosters and the free instances There is definitely a lot of space between the extremes of corporate everything and your own compiled-from-source home. I want to think that there is a market for a “self-hosting appliance” — a small pre-configured box that you can connect to your router and set up (in a few clicks) to run a bunch of services with SSO and a Cloudflare Tunnel-like access path. The NAS companies sort of do this, but my Synology likes its own custom things too much and Docker is difficult (no easy SSO or tunneling, for one thing). I’m not optimistic enough to quit my day ob to build that, though.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Are you familiar with https://dappnode.io https://dappnode.io? It is a debian-based distro with an "docker app-store", a VPN server (ovpn or wireguard) and a "portal" system that can basically open a proxy to the public internet. They are more focused on the crypto space, to make it easier to run Blockchain nodes, but the architecture can work for anything that can be packaged for docker.

by akho 4y ago

rglullis 4y ago

Yeah, you are absolutely right. In my defense, these were just the start. The longer roadmap included Pixelfed and Peertube (for photo and video sharing), and SIP + the possibility of buying DIDs (phone numbers), effectively allowing users to ditch their mobile voice plans. I was also hoping there would be some middle-ground between self-hosters and the free instances. The free instances from Mastodon are still very fickle with their moderation, self-hosting requires dealing with the cost of hosting, domain names, administration time, etc. I thought that there would be more people willing to pay $10-15 year to have a worry-free solution. The idea started when I was working at Deutsche Telekom on their attempt at building their own messaging platform + MVNO (called immmr) and they killed it after spending two years and 30€ million working on it. I was convinced at the time that the reason they failed was because they wanted to do everything in space at once, and their main criteria for success was "we need to be #1 or #2 in our secondary markets within the first quarter of launching this". Obviously the launch kept being delayed, the feature list kept getting slashed and their client was full of bugs on critical features. Their stated goal at the time was more about having an alternative to stop the tech companies from eating their margins with OTT services. I was convinced (still am honestly) that if they just focused on providing the basic services (messaging and audio/video calls) via Matrix and if they committed to help with the development of the open source client, they could get a more interesting offering, more time to grow organically and eventually still reach the stated goal. I even wrote a "Ask HN" post back then [0] because I wanted to find a way to validate the hypothesis, but there was no response. When immmr folded, I decided to try with the MVP, and this is where we are now. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221

akho 4y ago
> some middle-ground between self-hosters and the free instances There is definitely a lot of space between the extremes of corporate everything and your own compiled-from-source home. I want to think that there is a market for a “self-hosting appliance” — a small pre-configured box that you can connect to your router and set up (in a few clicks) to run a bunch of services with SSO and a Cloudflare Tunnel-like access path. The NAS companies sort of do this, but my Synology likes its own custom things too much and Docker is difficult (no easy SSO or tunneling, for one thing). I’m not optimistic enough to quit my day ob to build that, though.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Are you familiar with https://dappnode.io https://dappnode.io? It is a debian-based distro with an "docker app-store", a VPN server (ovpn or wireguard) and a "portal" system that can basically open a proxy to the public internet. They are more focused on the crypto space, to make it easier to run Blockchain nodes, but the architecture can work for anything that can be packaged for docker.