4 ms·

I yearn for the days of yore when a few of us would co-lo some boxes at a small local ISP we were friendly with, where we'd get to take advantage of their alway

by ssl-3 9mo ago

I yearn for the days of yore when a few of us would co-lo some boxes at a small local ISP we were friendly with, where we'd get to take advantage of their always-on and (at the time) blazing-fast T1 connectivity. It was low-cost for everyone, and we'd host our own services for whatever was useful to us and our friend groups. On the other hand: It was kind of awful when even my dialup access would get screwed up because someone's IRC server got DDoS'd -- again -- and clogged up the pipes. --- These days, the local ISPs are mostly gone. But the pipes are bigger -- it's easy for many of us to get gigabit+ connections at home. Unfortunately, the botnets are also bigger. How do we get back to what we had?

elevation 9mo ago
Compete with facebook in an area you can actually win. Don't try to be all of a mobile messenger, news feed, telephony platform, marketplace, forum, async messaging... just do one of those things well for a group of users (potentially around a focus.) Piggy back off of an existing community that has already built trust -- for instance, build a forum for a local activity that often attracts 10+ years of participation and involves equipment. Your board will become the best place for users (who already trust one another) to swap used gear, discuss local venue closures, etc. Adopt moderation metrics that sustain your community (don't let bullies and spammers spoil everyone's experience.) In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice. And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it comes down to the fact that scaling such communication isn't free. We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?
  - krater23 9mo ago
    Sorry, but to host a small community on a v-server costs you today 3,50€ - 15€/month, when you can't pay that, you have other problems than the dying internet. It's not 1990 anymore...
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      Small community, yes. If you want to replace a site on the scale of Discord or Facebook? It does get really expensive. Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30 years of people used to free and open mass communication. How many will give that up for proper freedoms and protection from state actors? Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or timeline.
      - direwolf20 9mo ago
        I read the suggestion to replace your discord guild and not the entire Discord.
  - ssl-3 9mo ago
    What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained? Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation. But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table. So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was. What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago

by ssl-3 9mo ago

elevation 9mo ago

Compete with facebook in an area you can actually win. Don't try to be all of a mobile messenger, news feed, telephony platform, marketplace, forum, async messaging... just do one of those things well for a group of users (potentially around a focus.) Piggy back off of an existing community that has already built trust -- for instance, build a forum for a local activity that often attracts 10+ years of participation and involves equipment. Your board will become the best place for users (who already trust one another) to swap used gear, discuss local venue closures, etc. Adopt moderation metrics that sustain your community (don't let bullies and spammers spoil everyone's experience.) In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.

johnnyanmac 9mo ago
>In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice. And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it comes down to the fact that scaling such communication isn't free. We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?
- krater23 9mo ago
  Sorry, but to host a small community on a v-server costs you today 3,50€ - 15€/month, when you can't pay that, you have other problems than the dying internet. It's not 1990 anymore...
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    Small community, yes. If you want to replace a site on the scale of Discord or Facebook? It does get really expensive. Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30 years of people used to free and open mass communication. How many will give that up for proper freedoms and protection from state actors? Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or timeline.
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      I read the suggestion to replace your discord guild and not the entire Discord.
- ssl-3 9mo ago
  What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained? Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation. But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table. So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was. What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago