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> "not growing fast enough" So you were growing, but not enough to keep investors happy, who would eventually throttle the product for every bit of return once

> "not growing fast enough" So you were growing, but not enough to keep investors happy, who would eventually throttle the product for every bit of return once it had even a smidgen of community momentum around it, and turn it into the same ad-filled mess that are the current alternatives. Where are the not-for-profits in this space?

tombert 3y ago
I have never heard of Post.news and I don’t want to make an account, but Propublica is a nonprofit news entity isn’t it?
sebastiennight 3y ago
Do you know about the Fediverse? The best-known web client/app on there is Mastodon. And it fits the bill of what you seem to be looking for.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  Neither of those things are a nonprofit. I wonder if you read the comment at all?
  - rpgbr 3y ago
    Mastodon is a non-profit: https://joinmastodon.org/about https://joinmastodon.org/about
  - sebastiennight 3y ago
    First, as a quick meta-response about the tone of your comment, please read HN guidelines[0]: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Edit out swipes. And regarding the GP comment, which says: >So you were growing, but not enough to keep investors happy, who would eventually throttle the product for every bit of return once it had even a smidgen of community momentum around it, and turn it into the same ad-filled mess that are the current alternatives. Where are the not-for-profits in this space? I'm assuming GP means he's looking for something: - Not optimizing for ROI after getting community momentum - Not ad-driven or ad-filled - Run by a non-profit In which case, yes, a very large portion of the Fediverse fits all three. I have never seen a single ad-supported instance of Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla, Funkwhale, Misskey or PeerTube. They might exist, and there are some big servers that have used/forked Mastodon for commercial purposes (eg Gab, Truth Social...) but they are not considered to be part of the Fediverse and are scarcely "federated" with anyone. Interestingly enough, "ad revenue" is not even listed as one of the revenue drivers for Fediverse/Mastodon communities in their docs. [1] You might also be interested to know that Mastodon was officially incorporated as a gGmbH (a German form of non-profit LLC) in 2021. [2] And the largest Fediverse server, mastodon.social, is itself operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit. [3] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1]: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/#monetization https://docs.joinmastodon.org/#monetization [2]: https://joinmastodon.org/fr/about https://joinmastodon.org/fr/about [3]: https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore
    - krainboltgreene 3y ago
      I wasn't being snarky and I read the HN guidelines nearly two decades before you joined HN.
b112 3y ago
I don't know, but I do know pre-AWS, pre-node architecture. Running a site is mega-cheap, if hosted on your cable modem. Doubly so if you rent a racked server. And a racked server + CDN can be done for mega-cheap. It's not about underlying costs, unless of course you AWS. But on the not-for-profits side, it's hard to find that in a lot of spaces. While perhaps a weird alternative, where are the not-for-profit restaurants? Again, that may seem like a strange comparison, but... we have soup kitchens. Food banks. We have "donated" things, with volunteers. But we don't have "restaurant experience" for free. How would a non-profit restaurant work? If we look at grocers, the only sort of "merged" retailer is Costco. It's owned by institutional investors, but it does derive most of its profits from those who shop there, via memberships. This keeps (supposedly) the target on the shopper, not on using the shopper as a product. Yet it's hard to get people to pay for news, to pay for anything. A reader of this may say "But I...", and if you do... you're a rarity, and not really relevant to the overall logic -- people don't want to pay for things on the internet. Someone here once commented that AP and other news aggregators could just be deployed by Google. Well, great. More 'using the client as the product' Google foolery. It would, however, be trivial to setup a site to do just that. Direct, non-hyped headlines. Only news. No ads, no tracking, no 1-pixels, and in fact, no javascript. (Just being hardcore here). The real issue comes down to comments. Over and over, again and again, I see volunteers saying comments are the thorn. Policing them. Even if everyone on the planet was a Pleasant Person, there's SPAM. Ad-ware, astroturfing, and so on. I think any sort of not-for-profit won't be done at scale, ever, if it includes comments. At least not under todays model. Volunteers can't handle the load. However, I do know people that operate mailing lists, for bike clubs, for athletic clubs, mailing lists as we've had for 30+ years on the internet, and which flowed from BBS systems. These are operated with often 200 members on a list. No one cares about profit, or about growth of the list, or about debate. They're about the topic. Again, I think as soon as you get into "Lots of people all talking together", it means "OMG, I can post something an 1M people will see it!", and then comes in the horrid behaviour. The politics. The ads. The spam. The commercial pitches. The posturing. I don't think non-profit at scale can be done due to this. But I could be wrong.
- datascienced 3y ago
  The analogy might be akin to a non profit Toastmasters club that charges members a small amount to hire a room. Restaurants are in the small business part of the scale Non Profit->Small Business->Growth Business->VC Backed Growth Business->Unicorn Where nefarious treatment of customers correlates to the X axis.

tombert 3y ago

I have never heard of Post.news and I don’t want to make an account, but Propublica is a nonprofit news entity isn’t it?

sebastiennight 3y ago

Do you know about the Fediverse? The best-known web client/app on there is Mastodon. And it fits the bill of what you seem to be looking for.

krainboltgreene 3y ago
Neither of those things are a nonprofit. I wonder if you read the comment at all?
- rpgbr 3y ago
  Mastodon is a non-profit: https://joinmastodon.org/about https://joinmastodon.org/about
- sebastiennight 3y ago
  First, as a quick meta-response about the tone of your comment, please read HN guidelines[0]: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Edit out swipes. And regarding the GP comment, which says: >So you were growing, but not enough to keep investors happy, who would eventually throttle the product for every bit of return once it had even a smidgen of community momentum around it, and turn it into the same ad-filled mess that are the current alternatives. Where are the not-for-profits in this space? I'm assuming GP means he's looking for something: - Not optimizing for ROI after getting community momentum - Not ad-driven or ad-filled - Run by a non-profit In which case, yes, a very large portion of the Fediverse fits all three. I have never seen a single ad-supported instance of Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla, Funkwhale, Misskey or PeerTube. They might exist, and there are some big servers that have used/forked Mastodon for commercial purposes (eg Gab, Truth Social...) but they are not considered to be part of the Fediverse and are scarcely "federated" with anyone. Interestingly enough, "ad revenue" is not even listed as one of the revenue drivers for Fediverse/Mastodon communities in their docs. [1] You might also be interested to know that Mastodon was officially incorporated as a gGmbH (a German form of non-profit LLC) in 2021. [2] And the largest Fediverse server, mastodon.social, is itself operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit. [3] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1]: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/#monetization https://docs.joinmastodon.org/#monetization [2]: https://joinmastodon.org/fr/about https://joinmastodon.org/fr/about [3]: https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore
  - krainboltgreene 3y ago
    I wasn't being snarky and I read the HN guidelines nearly two decades before you joined HN.

b112 3y ago

I don't know, but I do know pre-AWS, pre-node architecture. Running a site is mega-cheap, if hosted on your cable modem. Doubly so if you rent a racked server. And a racked server + CDN can be done for mega-cheap. It's not about underlying costs, unless of course you AWS. But on the not-for-profits side, it's hard to find that in a lot of spaces. While perhaps a weird alternative, where are the not-for-profit restaurants? Again, that may seem like a strange comparison, but... we have soup kitchens. Food banks. We have "donated" things, with volunteers. But we don't have "restaurant experience" for free. How would a non-profit restaurant work? If we look at grocers, the only sort of "merged" retailer is Costco. It's owned by institutional investors, but it does derive most of its profits from those who shop there, via memberships. This keeps (supposedly) the target on the shopper, not on using the shopper as a product. Yet it's hard to get people to pay for news, to pay for anything. A reader of this may say "But I...", and if you do... you're a rarity, and not really relevant to the overall logic -- people don't want to pay for things on the internet. Someone here once commented that AP and other news aggregators could just be deployed by Google. Well, great. More 'using the client as the product' Google foolery. It would, however, be trivial to setup a site to do just that. Direct, non-hyped headlines. Only news. No ads, no tracking, no 1-pixels, and in fact, no javascript. (Just being hardcore here). The real issue comes down to comments. Over and over, again and again, I see volunteers saying comments are the thorn. Policing them. Even if everyone on the planet was a Pleasant Person, there's SPAM. Ad-ware, astroturfing, and so on. I think any sort of not-for-profit won't be done at scale, ever, if it includes comments. At least not under todays model. Volunteers can't handle the load. However, I do know people that operate mailing lists, for bike clubs, for athletic clubs, mailing lists as we've had for 30+ years on the internet, and which flowed from BBS systems. These are operated with often 200 members on a list. No one cares about profit, or about growth of the list, or about debate. They're about the topic. Again, I think as soon as you get into "Lots of people all talking together", it means "OMG, I can post something an 1M people will see it!", and then comes in the horrid behaviour. The politics. The ads. The spam. The commercial pitches. The posturing. I don't think non-profit at scale can be done due to this. But I could be wrong.

datascienced 3y ago
The analogy might be akin to a non profit Toastmasters club that charges members a small amount to hire a room. Restaurants are in the small business part of the scale Non Profit->Small Business->Growth Business->VC Backed Growth Business->Unicorn Where nefarious treatment of customers correlates to the X axis.