3 ms·

> most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a prob

> most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a problem with the type of app or our expectation of it. 99% of what I view on the web doesn't have to be absolutely up to date. I can tolerate some latency. If we dropped the whole request-response thing in favor of pub-sub, and just had the servers wake up for one minute every hour to propagate state changes, we'd only need to pay for 1/60th of the uptime that we currently are--the cicada approach. I realize that this would be very inconvenient for advertisers who are trying to create a controlled experience re: which material I see when. They would absolutely hate it if the default mode of consumption happened in an offline-friendly way. But given that I don't give a damn about what they want, I think it would be ok.

CrampusDestrus 3y ago
You could have an extremely optimized text-only platform that would cost pennies to run and scale, but who would join?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I would. Especially if the switching costs between paying those pennies and running my own node on a raspberry pi were low. And as the situation re: the normal approach continues to deteriorate, others might too. If you really need something larger, the text could be an IPFS CID. Sure, you have to pin the data, so maybe that's a few more pennies, but IPFS has nice scalability features that would keep this overhead fairly low.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Yeah, I guess that reiterates the "who would join" point. I've tried to get my friends to join me on SSB. No luck. We may have to wait for the solar flare that knocks out the internet. Then point-to-point stuff like SSB will be the only thing that's working... between the seventeen people that were using it in the first place.

CrampusDestrus 3y ago

You could have an extremely optimized text-only platform that would cost pennies to run and scale, but who would join?

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I would. Especially if the switching costs between paying those pennies and running my own node on a raspberry pi were low. And as the situation re: the normal approach continues to deteriorate, others might too. If you really need something larger, the text could be an IPFS CID. Sure, you have to pin the data, so maybe that's a few more pennies, but IPFS has nice scalability features that would keep this overhead fairly low.
- rglullis 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Yeah, I guess that reiterates the "who would join" point. I've tried to get my friends to join me on SSB. No luck. We may have to wait for the solar flare that knocks out the internet. Then point-to-point stuff like SSB will be the only thing that's working... between the seventeen people that were using it in the first place.