5 ms·

I am shocked that Discord is not on this list. I would bet my mortgage that Discord would sell their chats as a dataset to train on if the price was right.

EGreg 3y ago
I often get downvoted for suggesting this, but why not simply host all your chats, videoconferencing etc. on your own website? Make it a gated community and only post little teasers to the likes of Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and Twitter and Facebook. Let them come to YOUR site to participate and abide by YOUR terms. Why make a Facebook Group or a Discord server? Why do so many of us, including the biggest influencers in the world, spend so much money only to post all of our content on the Big Tech’s sites and infrastructure? You give all your social capital to them too, and they turn around and sell it back to you (access to your own followers) and can deplatform you. They encourage you to pay them to attract eyeballs away from other videos, and vice versa, in a zero-sum game on their own platform. They now increasingly even control our conversations and our democracy. Why not have these conversations on our own forums, powered by our own software, the way we do on HN? We gave away all our social capital and our content, to these platforms. And then they turn around and train big data on it internally, and scrape it for their AIs. People have complained for years yet do nothing about it: https://readwrite.com/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-posts-are-driving-away-brands/ https://readwrite.com/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-posts-a... I ask again: why not simply host it ourselves?
- astrange 3y ago
  Self-hosting is too hard to do unless you're free to fight spam 24/7.
  - herbst 3y ago
    It depends. To get on the level of spam protection discord has you can just use open source filters.
    - astrange 3y ago
      There's a few other reasons - Midjourney uses Discord because it's a free CDN but also because they take care of legal stuff (CSAM and copyright notices.)
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  The intersection of people who can host it themselves vs those who host chats, video conferences, etc events is very very small. Once they start trying to figure out the SSH host keys and TLS firewalls, they will become very quickly overwhelmed and out of their depth. They would likely turn to an expert at this point, but it has become far cheaper and easier to just turn to a third-party service to handle this. The very service you ask them to dismiss for the troubles of hosting themselves. On the other end of the spectrum, I have dedicated systems to hosting my own chats, emails, source code, and more. My user count is super low. Seems that not everyone wants to come to my copy-cat Gitea server when "all the cool kids" are on GitHub
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Forget the SSH keys and TLS firewalls. What open source software would you actually use, to start to match Facebook Groups or Discord Forums in features?
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      Forget about open source facebook replacements. What Instagram influencer knows how to clone a repo?
    - grepfru_it 3y ago
      Flarum and (Mattermost or RocketChat)
- tsukikage 3y ago
  Because we're not content with just a private little soapbox in our private little space talking to the few hipsters we can convince to drop by; we are vain and want to talk to the crowds, and the crowds are all over /there/.
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  > I ask again: why not simply host it ourselves? Cost, ongoing maintenance, convenience, existing apps are good enough, existing infrastructure is good enough, I could probably go on for a while.
- operator-name 3y ago
  Self hosting is hard. Self hosting with channels, voice chats and permissions is harder. Discord also had one unified account to join different channels, private message, etc.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Because they act as a portal and distribution service. The same reason freelance journalists don’t print their own newspapers but instead publish via either a syndicate or directly through papers. The paper has the brand, distribution, ability to monetize and pay journalists for their content, layout staff, etc. Similarly say YouTube is YouTube in the same way the NYT is the NYT - people go to YouTube for content, it provides hosting and distribution as well as ways to promote your content, monetize it, they provide a UX and technical infrastructure, etc. There is nothing stopping anyone in any RFC or other technical standard from hosting their own content on equal footing with YouTube. People do host stuff on their own machines and sites. You’re just not directly aware of it because it’s basically impossible to find relative to the ease of content discovery on YouTube. No one is getting rich or even paying their bills because on self hosted because beyond having no funnel monetization of content is actually kinda hard. Case in point, politics aside, Parler and Truth Social were basically formed based off similar thoughts. Why do we let these big companies make content moderation policies? I’d like a place where I can be abusive and racist or whatever without fear of censorship. I’m after all entitled to hold those views and say them. But, it turns out, it’s hard to provide the quality of service of say Facebook on the premise of absolute freedom - especially when it’s so toxic most people are turned off. This gets to the point: you can host yourself, but if you want to build a “free YouTube” you probably need to ask why did YouTube, a for profit entity, take the positions it has in the market? Because the market rewards them for making a family friendly middle ground platform that provides easy access to personalized content and a simple experience for content creators to distribute and monetize their content. Do that on your own systems, and you’ll probably do alright - except one thing. They have the most users. Acquiring users, or in news papers, subscribers, is not easy or cheap. So, that’s why things are the way they are. But you’re absolutely able to self host. Just don’t expect everyone to show up at your random website.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Absolutely able to self-host? What open source software would I use to match the features of, say, Facebook Groups or a Discord Channel?
- eropple 3y ago
  As it happens, I am in the process of building something pretty close to what you describe. Here is an extremely partial list of reasons people don't do it. - Written content: because network effects are real. Also because building a blog in 2023 that doesn't have awful look-and-feel or seem like a spam site is remarkably hard. Substack is full of chuds, but you can firewall off from them most of the time and at least you can write things instead of writing code to write things. WordPress is maybe the least bad option today if you want interactivity (which I would assume you do, what with the "community" bit and all), and getting things like SSO (for playing nice with all those other things in that gated community) costs money for dubiously-supported plugins that claim to do things they might not actually do. Ghost has a ton of weird limitations that are often claimed to be by design, so unless you want a plain white (or, if you're bold, black) site that's Just Text and maybe a few images, it's not great either. Static sites--community, no bueno. - Podcasts: this one is not "because network effects are real", this one's just "because open-source podcast hosting software basically doesn't exist and what does is bad at doing the job." Meanwhile, anchor.fm is free. - Chats: because network effects are real. And because the options are mostly unpleasant. IRC is difficult and mobile-unfriendly. Mattermost is buggy. Zulip is pretty good, but now you're a sysadmin and most people on Discord just want to shitpost about Pokemon. (I am not doing this, either, because there are limited hours in the day.) - Videoconferencing: because network effects are real. (You may be detecting a theme here!) And because self-hosting Jitsi is an enormous pain in the rear. And, again, now you're a sysadmin, and most people on Discord just want to shitpost about Pokemon. (Might do this one, just for latency's sake when recording stuff. Haven't decided yet. It is hard. It is also pretty expensive to run.) - Video content: because network effects are real. Also because I don't own a CDN, and because YouTube is $free dollars per minute watched. Even my former employer, whose stack I quite like, is not $free dollars per minute watched--nor should they be! They're targeting businesses. (Needless to say: definitely not doing this one.) Gated communities are great, but somebody needs to make achievable these things for normal people, and they're probably going to want money for it. And while I've written plenty of open source software, the stuff I'm building won't really be portable to somebody else because I'm not making decisions for others' consumption. I'm making decisions for exactly my (relatively high) tolerance for system administration and exactly my (relatively high) ability to fix things when they break. I'm going to open-source parts of it, but I can only open-source parts, and they'll still depend on my CMS of choice, etc. etc. unless I spend time not building my thing and instead building abstraction/indirection layers for hypothetical other people. If you want people to do similar, maybe it should be you who goes and builds the path to doing it?
- tivert 3y ago
  > Why do so many of us, including the biggest influencers in the world, spend so much money only to post all of our content on the Big Tech’s sites and infrastructure? You give all your social capital to them too, and they turn around and sell it back to you (access to your own followers) and can deplatform you. They encourage you to pay them to attract eyeballs away from other videos, and vice versa, in a zero-sum game on their own platform. Because we're lazy and Big Tech solves the immediate, short term problem.
- postdb 3y ago
  Glad someone mentioned this!!! It is one of good reason to self-host! And only send sneak peek to social media sites. Stallman has a recommendation similar to that on what to post to FB. Only use social media as a notification/publishing/advertising system, post important stuff on your own site.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Can you link to the Stallman suggestion you referenced please?
    - tiberious726 3y ago
      Agreed, I'm shocked he suggested interacting with Facebook at all. Their site uses proprietary JavaScript
      - postdb 3y ago
        Of course, I should clarify, it is his recommendation if organisations who need a facebook presence, as many small businesses or event organizers struggle to not have a FB/instagram presence.
        EGreg 3y ago
        Can you Link to where he says this recommendation ?
        postdb 3y ago
        I linked in the sib comment. here it is again: https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html Keep in mind, since then FB has disabled the tor for mobile link that Stallman recommended.
    - postdb 3y ago
      https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > I ask again: why not simply host it ourselves? Because the average person and the average HN user are different sets of people. The typical person who wants to start a forum on, say, trout fishing or stamp collecting has only a vague notion of a server is, much less how to set one up and maintain it. Even if they did, they'd have little or no interest in doing those things. It's far easier for them to just make a Facebook group or whatever.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    But if the HN crowd runs their own servers, then the non-HN crowd could use them. Everybody wins.
    - jameshart 3y ago
      The HN crowd, by definition are a crowd of people who post content on servers run by a tech company, rather than their own hosted system.

EGreg 3y ago

I often get downvoted for suggesting this, but why not simply host all your chats, videoconferencing etc. on your own website? Make it a gated community and only post little teasers to the likes of Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and Twitter and Facebook. Let them come to YOUR site to participate and abide by YOUR terms. Why make a Facebook Group or a Discord server? Why do so many of us, including the biggest influencers in the world, spend so much money only to post all of our content on the Big Tech’s sites and infrastructure? You give all your social capital to them too, and they turn around and sell it back to you (access to your own followers) and can deplatform you. They encourage you to pay them to attract eyeballs away from other videos, and vice versa, in a zero-sum game on their own platform. They now increasingly even control our conversations and our democracy. Why not have these conversations on our own forums, powered by our own software, the way we do on HN? We gave away all our social capital and our content, to these platforms. And then they turn around and train big data on it internally, and scrape it for their AIs. People have complained for years yet do nothing about it: https://readwrite.com/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-posts-are-driving-away-brands/ https://readwrite.com/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-posts-a... I ask again: why not simply host it ourselves?

astrange 3y ago
Self-hosting is too hard to do unless you're free to fight spam 24/7.
- herbst 3y ago
  It depends. To get on the level of spam protection discord has you can just use open source filters.
  - astrange 3y ago
    There's a few other reasons - Midjourney uses Discord because it's a free CDN but also because they take care of legal stuff (CSAM and copyright notices.)
grepfru_it 3y ago
The intersection of people who can host it themselves vs those who host chats, video conferences, etc events is very very small. Once they start trying to figure out the SSH host keys and TLS firewalls, they will become very quickly overwhelmed and out of their depth. They would likely turn to an expert at this point, but it has become far cheaper and easier to just turn to a third-party service to handle this. The very service you ask them to dismiss for the troubles of hosting themselves. On the other end of the spectrum, I have dedicated systems to hosting my own chats, emails, source code, and more. My user count is super low. Seems that not everyone wants to come to my copy-cat Gitea server when "all the cool kids" are on GitHub
- EGreg 3y ago
  Forget the SSH keys and TLS firewalls. What open source software would you actually use, to start to match Facebook Groups or Discord Forums in features?
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Forget about open source facebook replacements. What Instagram influencer knows how to clone a repo?
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    Flarum and (Mattermost or RocketChat)
tsukikage 3y ago
Because we're not content with just a private little soapbox in our private little space talking to the few hipsters we can convince to drop by; we are vain and want to talk to the crowds, and the crowds are all over /there/.
dpkirchner 3y ago
> I ask again: why not simply host it ourselves? Cost, ongoing maintenance, convenience, existing apps are good enough, existing infrastructure is good enough, I could probably go on for a while.
operator-name 3y ago
Self hosting is hard. Self hosting with channels, voice chats and permissions is harder. Discord also had one unified account to join different channels, private message, etc.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Because they act as a portal and distribution service. The same reason freelance journalists don’t print their own newspapers but instead publish via either a syndicate or directly through papers. The paper has the brand, distribution, ability to monetize and pay journalists for their content, layout staff, etc. Similarly say YouTube is YouTube in the same way the NYT is the NYT - people go to YouTube for content, it provides hosting and distribution as well as ways to promote your content, monetize it, they provide a UX and technical infrastructure, etc. There is nothing stopping anyone in any RFC or other technical standard from hosting their own content on equal footing with YouTube. People do host stuff on their own machines and sites. You’re just not directly aware of it because it’s basically impossible to find relative to the ease of content discovery on YouTube. No one is getting rich or even paying their bills because on self hosted because beyond having no funnel monetization of content is actually kinda hard. Case in point, politics aside, Parler and Truth Social were basically formed based off similar thoughts. Why do we let these big companies make content moderation policies? I’d like a place where I can be abusive and racist or whatever without fear of censorship. I’m after all entitled to hold those views and say them. But, it turns out, it’s hard to provide the quality of service of say Facebook on the premise of absolute freedom - especially when it’s so toxic most people are turned off. This gets to the point: you can host yourself, but if you want to build a “free YouTube” you probably need to ask why did YouTube, a for profit entity, take the positions it has in the market? Because the market rewards them for making a family friendly middle ground platform that provides easy access to personalized content and a simple experience for content creators to distribute and monetize their content. Do that on your own systems, and you’ll probably do alright - except one thing. They have the most users. Acquiring users, or in news papers, subscribers, is not easy or cheap. So, that’s why things are the way they are. But you’re absolutely able to self host. Just don’t expect everyone to show up at your random website.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Absolutely able to self-host? What open source software would I use to match the features of, say, Facebook Groups or a Discord Channel?
eropple 3y ago
As it happens, I am in the process of building something pretty close to what you describe. Here is an extremely partial list of reasons people don't do it. - Written content: because network effects are real. Also because building a blog in 2023 that doesn't have awful look-and-feel or seem like a spam site is remarkably hard. Substack is full of chuds, but you can firewall off from them most of the time and at least you can write things instead of writing code to write things. WordPress is maybe the least bad option today if you want interactivity (which I would assume you do, what with the "community" bit and all), and getting things like SSO (for playing nice with all those other things in that gated community) costs money for dubiously-supported plugins that claim to do things they might not actually do. Ghost has a ton of weird limitations that are often claimed to be by design, so unless you want a plain white (or, if you're bold, black) site that's Just Text and maybe a few images, it's not great either. Static sites--community, no bueno. - Podcasts: this one is not "because network effects are real", this one's just "because open-source podcast hosting software basically doesn't exist and what does is bad at doing the job." Meanwhile, anchor.fm is free. - Chats: because network effects are real. And because the options are mostly unpleasant. IRC is difficult and mobile-unfriendly. Mattermost is buggy. Zulip is pretty good, but now you're a sysadmin and most people on Discord just want to shitpost about Pokemon. (I am not doing this, either, because there are limited hours in the day.) - Videoconferencing: because network effects are real. (You may be detecting a theme here!) And because self-hosting Jitsi is an enormous pain in the rear. And, again, now you're a sysadmin, and most people on Discord just want to shitpost about Pokemon. (Might do this one, just for latency's sake when recording stuff. Haven't decided yet. It is hard. It is also pretty expensive to run.) - Video content: because network effects are real. Also because I don't own a CDN, and because YouTube is $free dollars per minute watched. Even my former employer, whose stack I quite like, is not $free dollars per minute watched--nor should they be! They're targeting businesses. (Needless to say: definitely not doing this one.) Gated communities are great, but somebody needs to make achievable these things for normal people, and they're probably going to want money for it. And while I've written plenty of open source software, the stuff I'm building won't really be portable to somebody else because I'm not making decisions for others' consumption. I'm making decisions for exactly my (relatively high) tolerance for system administration and exactly my (relatively high) ability to fix things when they break. I'm going to open-source parts of it, but I can only open-source parts, and they'll still depend on my CMS of choice, etc. etc. unless I spend time not building my thing and instead building abstraction/indirection layers for hypothetical other people. If you want people to do similar, maybe it should be you who goes and builds the path to doing it?
tivert 3y ago
> Why do so many of us, including the biggest influencers in the world, spend so much money only to post all of our content on the Big Tech’s sites and infrastructure? You give all your social capital to them too, and they turn around and sell it back to you (access to your own followers) and can deplatform you. They encourage you to pay them to attract eyeballs away from other videos, and vice versa, in a zero-sum game on their own platform. Because we're lazy and Big Tech solves the immediate, short term problem.
postdb 3y ago
Glad someone mentioned this!!! It is one of good reason to self-host! And only send sneak peek to social media sites. Stallman has a recommendation similar to that on what to post to FB. Only use social media as a notification/publishing/advertising system, post important stuff on your own site.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Can you link to the Stallman suggestion you referenced please?
  - tiberious726 3y ago
    Agreed, I'm shocked he suggested interacting with Facebook at all. Their site uses proprietary JavaScript
    - postdb 3y ago
      Of course, I should clarify, it is his recommendation if organisations who need a facebook presence, as many small businesses or event organizers struggle to not have a FB/instagram presence.
      - EGreg 3y ago
        Can you Link to where he says this recommendation ?
        postdb 3y ago
        I linked in the sib comment. here it is again: https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html Keep in mind, since then FB has disabled the tor for mobile link that Stallman recommended.
  - postdb 3y ago
    https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html
Turing_Machine 3y ago
> I ask again: why not simply host it ourselves? Because the average person and the average HN user are different sets of people. The typical person who wants to start a forum on, say, trout fishing or stamp collecting has only a vague notion of a server is, much less how to set one up and maintain it. Even if they did, they'd have little or no interest in doing those things. It's far easier for them to just make a Facebook group or whatever.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  But if the HN crowd runs their own servers, then the non-HN crowd could use them. Everybody wins.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    The HN crowd, by definition are a crowd of people who post content on servers run by a tech company, rather than their own hosted system.