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I ran a popular wiki for a decade and did exactly that, complete with API. Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior because all the content on

I ran a popular wiki for a decade and did exactly that, complete with API. Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior because all the content on it was created by its users.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
How do we educate the masses on avoiding insane digital landlords? Which is all the big players btw. And most small players too. It’s not just a big n corrupt edge case. I struggle with pitching the value of it in my products and would like to help peers
- rtsil 3y ago
  You can't because the digital landlords make everything free or almost free in the beginning, before raising it to stratospheric levels once the market is captive. Google did that with Maps. OpenAI is doing it with its API. And people like free or almost free things rather than reasonably-priced things.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    It's not always so capital intensive anymore to make things free, there are technical advancements that make that easier these days so I believe there is edge to be found. In particular I'm exploring offline-first apps in addition to decentralization/self hosting, because offline-oriented apps help avoid expensive servers. Users like the privacy benefits and I enjoy the benefits of minimizing UGC custody.
    - moneywoes 3y ago
      Help me understand, how would Reddit work offline?
      - wahnfrieden 3y ago
        it obviously wouldn't, don't play stupid / go away
- treyd 3y ago
  I don't know to what degree that this will be a watershed moment, but I'm hopeful that this is a high-profile enough of a wakeup call that some dedicated subset of power users puts their efforts into developing the ecosystem around federated alternatives that have the possibility of breaking free from extractive models of social media. Even if that's 100 people out of the millions potentially affected by the reddit changes, that could bring a lot of benefit.
creatonez 3y ago
MediaWiki has DataDump^1, and ArchiveTeam has a bot that can use it this extension as an API to mass-archive many wikis at once. Very useful since it gives an archive of article revisions and images in a machine-readable format that can be used to recreate the entire wiki, minus user accounts. ^1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png

I ran a popular wiki for a decade and did exactly that, complete with API. Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior because all the content on it was created by its users.

wahnfrieden 3y ago

How do we educate the masses on avoiding insane digital landlords? Which is all the big players btw. And most small players too. It’s not just a big n corrupt edge case. I struggle with pitching the value of it in my products and would like to help peers

rtsil 3y ago
You can't because the digital landlords make everything free or almost free in the beginning, before raising it to stratospheric levels once the market is captive. Google did that with Maps. OpenAI is doing it with its API. And people like free or almost free things rather than reasonably-priced things.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  It's not always so capital intensive anymore to make things free, there are technical advancements that make that easier these days so I believe there is edge to be found. In particular I'm exploring offline-first apps in addition to decentralization/self hosting, because offline-oriented apps help avoid expensive servers. Users like the privacy benefits and I enjoy the benefits of minimizing UGC custody.
  - moneywoes 3y ago
    Help me understand, how would Reddit work offline?
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      it obviously wouldn't, don't play stupid / go away
treyd 3y ago
I don't know to what degree that this will be a watershed moment, but I'm hopeful that this is a high-profile enough of a wakeup call that some dedicated subset of power users puts their efforts into developing the ecosystem around federated alternatives that have the possibility of breaking free from extractive models of social media. Even if that's 100 people out of the millions potentially affected by the reddit changes, that could bring a lot of benefit.

creatonez 3y ago

MediaWiki has DataDump^1, and ArchiveTeam has a bot that can use it this extension as an API to mass-archive many wikis at once. Very useful since it gives an archive of article revisions and images in a machine-readable format that can be used to recreate the entire wiki, minus user accounts. ^1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png