That's one of the things that makes Ello's story a bit sad. It started out as a community of people that had this natural gravity, and the early community was admirably dedicated to the experiment.
> After leaving Ello in 2016, Budnitz returned to his Kidrobot roots with the launch of Superplastic in 2017, a vinyl figure company that expanded into NFTs and the metaverse in 2022, raising a total of $68M in seven rounds of funding, led by Amazon. Superplastic appears to have abandoned its NFT projects last year as the market cratered, and Budnitz stepped down from his CEO role in September, replaced by the former president of blockchain gaming company Dapper Labs. They are now focused on “synthetic celebrities” and AI influencers.
I am often jealous of the people who make huge sums of money grifting investors, but the thing is I care too much about what I do and I’d be bad at pretending I don’t.
The flip side is I instead love what I do and I’m very proud of my work, which I don’t think someone could really say if they’re shilling crap like plastic toys and NFTs. Or maybe they could say that, but I never could. Grifting is just not for me.
I used to work in public service (in chronological order, ranger, social security, LLC incorporation and radio spectrum licensing and management) before jumping into software with glee.
And I have the exact same thought about providing software for government and other large organisations.
The number of "solutions" my public service employers paid millions for, that didn't fucking work properly or reliably is mental.
I'm really not sure how contracts keep getting signed by big organisations that don't impose massive penalties on providers for failure, but it they do. Or the sister org that finally had enough and wanted to switch providers, and had to go to court in order to be even be able to pay a large amount for the IP rights to the source code of their system, because they'd signed a contract that let the provider retain IP, and the provider really liked that sweet sweet taxpayer money for buggy bollocks. So naturally, when they contracted HP to maintain the system they ensured that the contract retained IP ownership for their org.
Haha, no, I'm kidding, they let HP keep IP rights on changes HP made, and later on had to fight HP in the courts so they could pay HP for the source to switch providers again after getting sick of being charged $2K (USD) by HP to update the text of a single link on a website.
And I keep thinking that I'd very much like to be in the market of earning millions by providing broken software to people making big decisions who aren't competent enough to jump to private sector, broken software is easy.
But then the guilt of stealing taxpayer money kicks in (it's not legally stealing, but morally, it's stealing. As the saying kinda goes, any great criminal needs a great lawyer, a great accountant, and a corporation), as well as the guilt of professional ethics.
(What's the old joke about software ethics? An ethical programmer would never write a function called destroyBaghdad, they'd write a function called destroyCity and pass Baghdad as a parameter.)
But look at Birmingham Council in the UK, bankrupted by shit software and Oracle's fearsome legal team. The entire fucking disgrace that is Horizon (although being fair to Fujitsu, nearly all of the evil was on their customer's side, it was only aided and abetted by Fujitsu employees lying in court).
In my country, IBM sued our government (and won) because IBM wanted to be paid even more for not delivering a massively expensive and broken project to the Police (INCIS), more recently our Education dept spent $180 million on a payroll system called Novopay (they also paid the provider Talent2 to administer payroll with it) that was terribly broken and underpaid some teachers (and perhaps more egregiously, slightly overpaid some teachers, then the provider would eventually realise and demand the teacher repay the overpayment be returned in full in a short timeframe or debt collectors would be brought in, and threats of civil litigation or criminal complaints were used to pressure them) to the extent that teachers had to go on strike to get the government to take it seriously.
Eventually the government took back the admin side of it, and then gave Talent2 another $45 million to get the system working, and are still paying them to maintain it today.
The idea of being in a market where delivering badly broken software leads to you getting paid another 25% of the upfront cost to get it actually working, and you don't get fired, is wild.
I suppose there's a reason that Oracle and similar are described as law firms that incidentally write software, but damn, they make crypto grifters look like complete amateurs.
And I'll begrudgingly admit that Oracle et al are selling a product with actual utility at least, as opposed to NFTs which I'd call digital tulip bulbs, but that is mean to tulip bulbs because they can at least be used to grow flowers.
I've seen 0 use cases for NFTs / ICOs that aren't gambling/unhinged spec...
> VC money really seems like the beginning of the end.
For a lot of businesses, raising VC money is a mistake because rapid growth just isn't the right strategy. VC is expensive - you give up a lot of equity every round and are betting that your ever shrinking slice will be bigger because the whole pie grew faster. That is a very tough target to hit.
"But a little digging shows a much more predictable source: they took a $435,000 round of seed funding in January from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based VC firm that announced the deal in March."
People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont thing.
I once spitballed with a certain VC at FreshTracks Capital about an idea I had, which lead to him running off with it and burning millions of dollars making it into BRIDJ, which shut down a few years ago.
It was my favorite job I've ever had. It was intense in the best way. I didn't have much contact with Budnitz, but the other 6 founders showed such a strong passion for the community, it was impossible for me to not to come to work excited.
I'd say most of the negative stress I felt was from knowing that the user base was growing faster than we could fill in feature gaps that would keep folks engaged. I felt like we couldn't quite catch up, and by the time the money started running out and interest started to wane, it was too late.
A few learnings:
- 7 founders is a lot. I don't want that to sound like a criticism, it just means the company is going to feel a bit different vs a more classic 2 or 3 founder setup.
- Positive feedback loops within a tight team of highly skilled people has a huge impact on getting more stuff done. That's how I would characterize the engineering team, and it was one of the highest-performing teams I've ever been a part of.
- Don't build a startup on a custom, in-house UI framework ;)
This. Time is precious, many good options already exist, and it's hard to do well, particularly in such a way that it doesn't cause unnecessary friction later. Unless your business _is_ building a UI framework, it's probably not integral to the business, thus acts as a pretty big distraction that isn't easy to pivot into a business itself.
Even the supposedly indie anti-social social media outright violated their own manifesto. Is it any surprise that we're skeptical of the big promises of a bright future that corporations make all the time?
I'm curious to know if anyone has evidence of a post similar to this but for a company with a (so far) happy ending.
I'm interested about the public benefit corporation part here. Did the PBC status wind up changing anything at all here? How does a PBC sell itself or get acquired? How is a PBC supposed to terminate or wind down? If they violate their charter as Ello may have, who exactly enforces it or file a lawsuit, and what is their compensation?
Nobody should trust my opinion, I am not an attorney, let alone one specialized in this area.
In my understanding, a PBC is effectively the same as a for-profit company with regards to these sorts of things. Unlike a non-profit, a PBC has stock, which it can sell, so that's how it would get acquired. I believe that there were even some PBC SPACs back when that was fashionable.
> If they violate their charter as Ello may have, who exactly enforces it or file a lawsuit, and what is their compensation?
The only real thing a PBC does is change "shall maximize shareholder value" to "shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation." See here for Delaware: https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/
So it would look like any other shareholder grievance against management in form.
> Benefit corporations are neither nonprofits nor hybrid nonprofits. Benefit corporations are for-profit corporations that need to consider stakeholders, morals, or missions in addition to making a profit for their shareholders. Nonprofits can't be benefit corporations, but they may create one. Due to the public benefit purpose provisions, expanded fiduciary duties of administrators, and extra shareholder rights created within the model benefit corporation laws, this structure may be helpful to operate and scale the earned-income activities of a nonprofit.
This document only talks about PBCs, so it wouldn’t be in this document. I am using that phrase because that’s how people refer to fiduciary duty (and similar things) when speaking generally. Obviously there is a lot of complexity in the rules around corporate governance.
People do talk about the fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value when speaking generally. They are wrong.
There are only two fiduciary duties in this context: the duty of loyalty and the duty of care. A director of a corporation owes no fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.
Sure. I find it easier to use the same words everyone else uses in informal contexts even though there is obvious complexity and is not fully accurate.
I think the point is the term is not so much 'not fully accurate' as 'actively incorrect' and should avoid being repeated as it leads to a false perception of how corporations actually work (or at least, it leads to an inaccurate idea of the origin of their behaviours).
In a slightly broader manner, free software forking has been working out reasonably well: When the original branch goes off the rails, others can take over from a previous "known manageable" point. Forking leads to fractioning the user base but kinda, that's the point.
I started building an open source private blogging system[1] when my first kid was born, and it eventually evolved into the skeleton of a social network--but fully decentralized using RSS and self- (or paid-) hosting. I concluded the only way for a network to actually avoid selling out was for there to be nothing to sell. If I give away the software, and don't control the network then there is no need for users to trust me. It continues to be an interesting journey as a side-project (not raising money means I'm still working a day-job).
They avoid it getting so popular such that the audience does not grow faster than the ability to cater to the expectations from new users. Finding niches works out pretty well where they do and for longer periods of time with a lot less friction.
maybe there is a fitting product to be found. first thing that pops to mind is hardware. Something like a tiny home server that works out of the box. Could go the piratebox route (a single website wifi hotspot) could have it do something mesh networking. perhaps stick a webcam on it.
it is an interesting idea. Setup and migration should be very simple (install and done). Otherwise not many people will go that route.
With other federated services, it is usually almost the same as with a private platform. Most of the users will be on a single server.
You're welcome! Feel free to drop me a note on the contact form at havenweb.org--I'd love to hear more about what had you looking for something like this and (if you try it out) how you like it!
I'm a recovering founder after winding down my startup a couple months ago. I've been thinking about getting back on the saddle and in service of that, meeting with folks who could be potential co-founders.
One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation.
You _have_ to know that from the outset, else it's just trouble.
Bootstrapping social tech ain’t easy. Expectations that this tech is free, plus the immediate need for support and safety for general populations mean that it’s very different than say, B2B SaaS.
I thought this was a fantastic post. I think it really dovetailed with what I've been thinking a lot about recently regarding my disillusionment with tech (or, rather, with big tech companies).
I think everyone should understand (and, honestly, repeat daily) that in our modern capitalist system where never-ending growth is an expected requirement of any company that has ever taken outside funding, it is simply an impossibility for a company to have any kind of durable values that conflict with that growth-at-all-costs requirement. It's as much of an impossibility as the sun rising in the west, and we should stop any pretense that it's not. Enshittification is inevitable.
Nearly every tech company starts out similarly: an absolute laser focus on users and their needs, because that is how you first grow. At some point, though, all of that fruit is picked, and you then start going into features that are "user neutral" but that make money, until finally you chip away at features that look like they can be user neutral in the short term ("We A/B tested and nobody minded one more ad!"), but the long term effect is that you've completely destroyed your founding ethos.
For example, it's easy to pick on Google these days because it's, well, so easy. Their total about face from a company that was nearly universally loved by engineers to one that, if not loathed, is at best seen as the "next IBM" is so obvious. E.g. Google got huge originally with a world-first search engine by not "selling out", by not masquerading ads as organic search results. Now when I search for any remotely commercial term the entire first page is ads that are nearly indistinguishable from organic results.
It's not just Google, though. Apple loves to crow about user privacy, but it's hard to square this "value" with their insistence that anyone on iOS who uses iMessage to talk to anyone on Android gets 0 encryption (oh, and if even a single Android user is in a group chat, nobody gets encryption).
I don't think that makes any company "evil", but it does make it somewhat sociopathic in the sense that there can ever only be a single goal: growth at all costs. The sooner we all recognize it means we can treat all companies with an appropriate level of caution. One final note related to this, is that this is one reason I'm not really a fan of PBCs as mentioned in the article. PBCs are a smoke-screen. As the saying goes, "Follow the money". When push-comes-to-shove you'll also see PBCs compromise their "values" the second growth starts to be at risk.
Yes, this is a tech thing in particular. You don't see VC being raised for a plumbing company, they'll get an SBA loan or bootstrap. They don't need to grow 10x every year, if the owners can pay their bills and send their kids to college they're happy.
And plumbing is such a constitutionally important thing: having hot, running water and not having feces in your house is so much important than seeing what that guy from high school is up to.
I think the issue lays with how high-variance tech is due to the scale: either it is marginally profitable at a massive scale and is worth billions of dollars, or you have something that is unprofitable at any scale and is worthless. It's like there's all of the sudden (in the last 15 years) become an appetite for throwing fortunes onto a roulette table (which may be giving better odds than a lot of VCs).
One is that the marginal cost of software(1) drives this pattern of winners and losers. The first user of any software costs an enormous amount of money to actually write the software and deliver it to customers. The 100th user costs basically nothing once you have 99 others. And the millionth user (or billionth) user costs basically nothing as well(2). That in turn means that having a billion users is a lot more profitable than having a million users, which means that if you have a billion users you can afford to do things that the million user system can't- e.g. free webmail and a really good free internet browser, just to name two things picked completely at random and not having any particular company in mind.
The other point is explaining your comment about the "last 15 years": tech's dominance (really, growth's dominance) is really an artifact of zero-lower-bounds interest rates from the 2008 financial crisis. If interest rates are zero (for discounted future cash flow computations) then I am indifferent about a dollar today versus a dollar in 2075. So someone who can argue that they have a 5% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2075 is worth a lot (0.05 * 1T=50 billion) when interest rates are zero, but if interest rates are high (or even, honestly, normal- like 2-3%) then that money is discounted heavily and the growth story doesn't matter as much because dollars today are worth a lot more than dollars in 2075. So if interest rates are zero, future growth will dominate the stock market (which was why 'tech' did well) but when interest rates are more normal, different companies can dominate the stock market (where the fundamental valuation of a company is, roughly, the expected value of future cash-flows discounted to the present).
1: Delivered by the internet- physical media distorts this a bit and behaves more like normal retail goods.
2: Exceptions for certain points in the growth curve where some key system falls over and needs to be rapidly replaced, e.g. storage or compute or whatever, but outside of those it's very cheap growth. Plumber company growth is limited by the number of trained plumbers you can hire- you can only have 1 plumber make so many house calls in one day- but software just replicates at zero out to infinity (again modulo some key systems which can't handle the load).
Apologies if this is too tangential, but I wonder if we would see fewer of these "we failed, sell the bones out to any charlatan you can find" sales if the US had a better support system for people that ensures they're not out of healthcare or housing if they take some time off from working.
If I invested a bunch of time, effort, and vision into something and had nothing to show for it while nearing failure... I'd be very tempted to sell just so I don't have to go straight from failure to job hunt. This situation seems outrageously stressful to me... I literally don't even know what I'd do if I broke my arm or came down with some serious illness while in the inbetween state.
I remember when tech twitter (or at least Node.js twitter) tried to migrate to Ello for like a week.
A pretty good portion of my social network moved, myself included. But it fizzled out really quickly and we all ended up back on Twitter.
Every once in a while I'd still get a notification from Ello that someone had followed me. It was always a porn bot, but the email notification was still nostalgic. A part of me is sad the site died.
I remember when something-something twitter tried to migrate to Threads for like a week.
And to Mastodon before that.
Remember when tech Reddit tried to migrate to Lemmy?
A hardcore handful of people migrate await from the Death Star and stay migrated (maybe a couple hundred medium accounts, and 1 or 2 bigger ones), but everybody else trickles back onto the Death Star eventually.
The only thing that works to get people permanently migrated away is complete enshitification of the existing platform (i.e. Digg effect). Partial enshitification isn't enough.
Twxttxr is getting pretty close now - maybe in some ways surpassing Digg in awfulness.
Specifically the massive level of pornbot traffic, and algorithm changes that seem to be intentionally surfacing posts to adversarial users who will then go on the attack.
am I the only one that has not seen porn bots or had replies from them on Twitter? I see this mentioned as a huge problem, but are users in general actually seeing this?
Mastodon and Lemmy do feel different to me, because of the decentralization.
They are providing a foundation that gets built upon with every migration wave, and I think it’s plausible that they will eventually break into the mainstream.
Put another way, the fediverse is the first alternative that doesn’t need to “succeed” in order for development to continue. It’s a bootstrapped model. And so it can grow quietly, work out the usability kinks over time, and be ready to absorb users whenever they get fed up with the centralized platforms.
"The only thing that works to get people permanently migrated away is complete enshitification of the existing platform (i.e. Digg effect). Partial enshitification isn't enough."
The Digg effect only worked because the majority of users were tech savvy and hated advertisements. The average user just accepts ads for the most part.
Most people don't care about the freedom of the platform, who's running the platform, or the technology behind it. They only care about: Can I easily create an account? Are all my friends, family, people I want to talk to there?
If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
The internet culture birthed from the early days of the internet "Everything is free", seems to have captured a whole generation who simply have no concept of cost and value.
Vid.me is another start-up that comes to mind: Youtube sucks, has too many ads, and sells your data. We won't have ads, won't sell your data, and will host all your content.
It made it four years before investor cash dried up and they said goodbye.
That's exactly it. I'm not sure what about software in particular makes people think that it can exist without funding. People have no problem paying for a physical product, but virtual products are hard to justify for some reason.
A large part is that the marginal cost per copy approaches zero. It was hard enough to charge for software when it came in a box on a store shelf, now it has to be wrapped in a service.
> If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
That's a fun quip (and often correct) but the world needs a way to run this kind of project. Community? free? transparent? etc, etc.
And I think this issue is not just about "free systems", culture changes and day to day corruption creeps and destroys everything. Even die-hard for-profit institutions (where entire branches might go rogue on their own objectives.)
A sandwich costs $5 everywhere, and a car costs $30k everywhere, because that's just what those things cost to make.
It's relatively difficult to look at a web service and determine whether its running costs are normal guy hobby money, rich guy hobby money, or no seriously this won't last six months without VC money.
Decentralised and P2P systems run themselves, but it's hard for them to maintain a centre of gravity without offering something specific, and given that the network itself can't produce value out of thin air, it's probably not coincidental that the ones best able to maintain gravity are offering stuff stolen from elsewhere.
There are numerous cases in which paying customers are also the product, most notably any captive-market advertising situation: transit, air travel, hospitality, cable and streaming services, telecoms (wired or wireless), and more.
The truth is that a profit-maximising business will seek revenue opportunities where it can, and if that means selling both services, on a single-instance or subscription basis, and advertising, it will do both.
Advertising-only or advertising-dominated businesses have a strong tendency to degrade faster and far more prolifically than those with mixed-model funding (I still find The Economist's three-legged revenues stool fascinating: subscriptions, advertising, and Economist Intelligence Unit bespoke consulting and research services, each roughly 1/3 of total revenues).
Paying alone, however, is a far-from-sufficient condition.
Taking investor money means users will required to pay, one way or another.
Without an explicitly capped profit, I can't see how this doesn't eventually lead to exploitation of the users.
I would like to see a donation/optional subscription model with tiered features as is seen in Patreon/Kickstarter etc. with the distinction that the tiers are community wide instead of being bound to the individuals donating.
Display an income bar. If it drops to zero the servers turn off. If it drops below 1 nobody can post. If it is above 1 you have Direct messaging, above 2 you have more features, etc. Keep the communication clear as to what is being provided and how it is being paid for.
Most people won't pay, but if nobody pays there is no service. Its survival would depend upon providing a service that satisfies enough people to sustain the support. This certainly wouldn't be as lucrative as a exploit the users model, but the idea is not to make a fortune, but to simply run a sustainable enterprise.
Running a startup AT ALL is extremely stressful and precarious if you're paying anyone a salary. 90% of startups die in flames. Stress and danger are table stakes, I would think.
absolutely, i'm very familiar with that stress. but committing to a donation only business model for a product you're giving away for free is playing the startup game on ludicrous mode.
> I would like to see a donation/optional subscription model with tiered features as is seen in Patreon/Kickstarter etc. with the distinction that the tiers are community wide instead of being bound to the individuals donating.
Discord has a bit of this. Each 'server' can be 'boosted'. Boosted servers have access to more emoji slots, better audio/video quality for calls, and larger file upload limits.
>> I would like to see a donation/optional subscription model with tiered features as is seen in Patreon/Kickstarter etc. with the distinction that the tiers are community wide instead of being bound to the individuals donating.
Can you rephrase this as;
"I'd like to see a model where I can pay a lot, and thus allow 10 other users for free" ?
How about something along the lines of "it costs $10 per useful per month to make the platform sustainable. A subscription is $100. When you subscribe you pay to keep 9 other users on a free account."
In other words, my question is, are upu in the 10% paying for everyone, or are you in the 90% getting it for free?
> Display an income bar. If it drops to zero the servers turn off. If it drops below 1 nobody can post. If it is above 1 you have Direct messaging, above 2 you have more features, etc. Keep the communication clear as to what is being provided and how it is being paid for.
This is a fairly normal way to run old-style forum hosting - I remember forums that would display a bar for "this month's hosting costs" or a "hosting costs are paid until [date], donate now!"
> Without an explicitly capped profit, I can't see how this doesn't eventually lead to exploitation of the users.
I don't see what difference capped profit would make. Exploitation of users doesn't usually happen during the starry-eyed "this is going to be a billion-dollar company" stage, it happens in the "is there anything we can do to keep the lights on for another few months and maybe turn it around" stage.
IMO the problem isn't investment per se, it's debt, in a broad sense: spending money now that you're expected to repay in the future, and then struggling to repay it. There are bootstraped, sustainable organisations operating in this area similar to what you're asking for, e.g. Dreamwidth. But those are never going to be able to "blitzscale" or market themselves to the same extent; marketing almost by definition involves spending money now that you hope to recoup in the future, at which point you've already sown the seeds of your ruin if that future revenue doesn't materialize.
I'm amazed by the number of people who trust websites like this with their memories/diaries etc. I mean, I understand why, there's an expectation when you start with these sites they'll be around forever - most people don't have the time, the knowledge or the desire to "do it themselves" - When livejournal was all the rage I decided to do it myself with Postnuke, then (and still!) Drupal. Going on 24 years now.
That said, LiveJournal is still going, but owned by a Russian company I think, and it could turn off tomorrow.
I guess the flipside is, if I die tomorrow and then there's a PHP error on my website, no one's ever going to know how to fix it. So my memories and diary entries die as well. My "fix" for that is to export the ~2400 diary entires every few months into one massive PDF file.
Edit: I understand why this is being downvoted, I just want to clarify that I didn't mean the opening sentence to read as if people who trust 3rd party websites to their hosting were silly/dumb, though I realise now that's how it scans. What I should have said was "It's very unfortunate and a sad state of the current Internet that people trust websites like this..."
That is the main takeaway from all these. The lesson is not that venture capital ruined it. But that eventually, at some point, either the founder or circumstances change the thing. The one permanent here is that it's bit on a digital network. By definition not permanent. And so people run into this again and again and still don't believe that XYZ might be next.
But it is, XYZ is their business platform, their social media network, their journals, their photo hoster, their "lifetime membership", etc. I ran into this all the time with clients. They would worry about what happens to their consultant, but never to their infrastructure.
So for businesses: have a plan B, and have usable archives / backups. And for individuals, have a plan B, and have usable archives / backups.
I know that nobody is purporting to have the answer, and I am definitely not trying to suggest that there's anything wrong with the conclusions drawn here--quite the contrary, actually. But, if VC funding is clearly a bad way to go about things, then what is the best way to structure and fund an organization built around a network or service that is primarily in the game of serving user-generated content and providing social networking and chatting services?
VC funding has a lot of problems. Funding via advertising is similarly fraught with peril, maybe worse, especially the most lucrative stuff. You can fund things by selling premium content or features, but this too is rather tenuous: if you are say, SoundCloud, one of your primary customers is inevitably going to be artists, who themselves are by and large not rich.
Not to mention, no matter who you focus your monetization on, $1 is infinitely more than $0, and monetizing useful features or access to content will inevitably lower the overall value of your platform. This is presumably part of why advertising is so enticing: end users don't have to "pay" anything. Sure, advertising isn't literally free, but users do not have to set up a payment method and take money from their account and send it to yours, which is a massive difference, and massively increases accessibility.
Then there's stuff like crowdfunding. Platforms that let you do one-off funding campaigns like Kickstarter or Gofundme, or platforms that let you do monthly subscriptions in exchange for "rewards" like Patreon or FANBOX. There even is a platform that is partly funded by monthly subscription payments (Misskey.io) and although I'm sure it is a relatively small part of the funding (at least I would certainly assume so) it still seems to have been successful nonetheless.
And that's just funding. What about structure? Becoming a non-profit or public benefit corporation is seemingly not any kind of sure-fire way to avoid trouble, as can be seen here. While I don't know exactly how the legalese works around a lot of these topics, it feels like these measures simply don't do enough to prevent corruption or at the very least, undesired future changes in direction. You want a company to have autonomy to carry out its vision and try to survive in the process, but you don't want it to compromise its core values in the process. Is there anything you can do legally and/or socially to provide better assurances?
This is very frustrating because I think a lot of us see the sad state of the Internet and want to do something, but it's hard to work towards it because you can also see a graveyard of good intentions gone horribly awry. There's all kinds of attempts to work around it, but as a wise man once said, "Mo Money Mo Problems". It seems that the temptation to exploit things always manages to find a way around your safeguards to prevent things from being exploited. Just to beat a dead horse even more, remember the last time you were excited for a Google product announcement, like say, GMail? I'm not saying they were ever a charity or intending to be... but it's hard to not see the painful way in which values that were once hard-fought slowly fade away. Somehow, eventually, everything becomes rent-seeking, a game to see how much money you can get back from an investment. One would hope there is a way out that doesn't involve a very painful upheaval of society, but over time it's getting harder and harder to believe it.
Day to day corruption is a problem. And if we had a solution, it would be known (the concept of bug bounties goes in the right direction, perhaps). I think this is a fundamental problem and research opportunity with the legal forms for institutions and staff incentives.
Even "winding down" doesn't necessarily need to be a problem. It's all in the "how" it's done.
True. I’m working on a project to answer some of these questions and consider innovations that might have an alternative outcome. We hope to make it a collaborative project with wiki-like tendencies. To me, figuring out how to create technical social infrastructure that does not inherently have anti-social incentives is one of the most important problems of this moment.
Hah, same here. That line jumped out to me as a big toxic red flag.
The quotes further down from users who suddenly lost all of their content were sad to read. It sucks how often regular people get burned for taking tech companies at their word.
There was definitely a certain amount of "I told you so" vibes, but I don't blame the author. It appears that he was attacked by a lot of Ello founders and fans for raising some cautionary notes. And as it turns out, he was right and they were wrong.
We would all like to have a model where users don't get charged money, and yet are not the product. But I haven't seen a model that works to date. In some cases, I don't mind my personal date getting sold; in other cases I pay money because the service is valuable. But I certainly make backups since I don't assume that even when I pay $$$, that the company might not go poof in the night....
Sure you have. Amazon grew without giving stuff away for free. Customers paid (just below market rate) from day 1. This demonstrated the -convenience- of ecommerce. It had revenues from the first sale. Yes, it spent mountains of VC money on marketing and development, but -not- on just buying stuff for you so you think it'll be free forever.
Uber is the same, although it's less clear that users will pay gor what a ride really costs. (And their margin makes it attractive for competition)
In both cases though there us revenue from customers from day 1. You can wind prices up. It's really hard to "go from free to paid".
It's just that nobody wants to work on protocols anymore. Ever since the world's richest was suddently a computer guy, no one wants to work on anything without a business model that includes taking complete control over what is built. A product, if you will.
In the background, there's always some geeks slaving away with new protocols and federated models. That will not become mainstream, not in our current society. But societies change over time. There is always hope.
It's funny, the author went out of their way to give the company the benefit of the doubt...but they come across extremely arrogant and sometimes vitriolic. I wouldn't have been so positive
I'm a participant in a community that explicitly refuses money from outside its membership. If that means we can't grow fast, or have fancy digs, so be it.
The reason for that, is to avoid having influence from outside. Even "angel" investment can be problematic, as the "angel" has the ear of the leadership.
I have found that even well-meaning outsiders can have highly destructive influence, because they don't understand the culture and they aren't the ones on the hook, if things go pear-shaped, as opposed to the ones that have a real, personal, stake (like all those Ello users, who lost so much).
It’s very interesting and telling that most of the technology that connects us does not have us as a customer, or a financial beneficiary. One of the key aspects of technofeudalism is the extractive nature of most of our platforms.
Same, but I realize that nearly everyone I correspond with uses Gmail, so Google has all my emails regardless. (Ok, they don't get my transactional email, since those are usually sent through something like Sendgrid, but... yeah.)
> Same, but I realize that nearly everyone I correspond with uses Gmail, so Google has all my emails regardless.
I know some very privacy-focused person (a friend of mine) who will stop being willing to be in contact with you (or being your friend) if you use an email address at one of these big spying email providers to write him an email.
Imagine if the progenitors of email thought to require e-stamps, say a thousand emails for a buck. There's a parallel universe where 'Email co.' is a major tech player comparable to Google. Not sure it's a better universe, but bears consideration.
It is always so tragic to me that, for over a decade, I would have paid for Twitter. But by the time they rolled that out, enough had changed that there's no way I was going to pay for Twitter.
Sometimes -- those times when you're breaking entirely new ground with a thing, when you're starting with just a vague vision of where the thing might go -- slow is better. Slow gives you time to understand the effects of what you've already done and the possibilities that affords.
I guess it depends on whether you're looking to achieve something unique and truly new, or just "get rich fast".
if we lived in utopia the software could be open source, so that everyone who wants a feature can contribute. Best would be when it can easily be self hosted
and how much do you know about the internal workings of that community? how much do you know about it's "future"? how transparent is it about how much time top level management and leadership are investing and how they are compensated for it? how much do you know about the financial sponsors of the members of your community?
That's a name I haven't thought of for several years.
I wonder if Fediverse, Blue Sky, etc will catch, or if it'll end up in the same boat. Threads too (yes it's backed by Meta, but G+ had Google behind it ...)
The reason I feel confident in the Fediverse's longevity is that it's independently hosted. If BlueSky ran out of money tomorrow and shut down its servers, BlueSky is gone. If mastodon.social ran out of money and shut down its servers, the Fediverse would continue.
There would be pain if mastodon.social failed with zero notice. People would lose access to their accounts and would need to find a new server where they'd be starting over. Some may have backed up their contacts, but most wouldn't. If mastodon.social gave a couple months notice, people could migrate to other servers. given that mastodon.social is the largest server, there would be some growing pains as other servers worked to accommodate new users, but it's possible for the Fediverse to continue.
Note, I'm not saying that the Fediverse will be incredibly popular. I'm simply noting that there's an amount of resilience. Once Ello's owners ran out of interest or money, that was the end of Ello. Even if others had a huge interest in seeing it continue, there was nothing they could do. Even if the Fediverse doesn't "catch" by your definition of catching on, it has caught on for enough people who have moved there and will remain there.
That's why I feel happier in the Fediverse. It feels like something the community controls. Sure, I don't run my own server, but I possibly could in the future and there are enough people running servers that I don't feel beholden to any one entity. It just feels like something that can stick around - even if the cool kids aren't interested. Enough of us like it and we'll keep it going even if some of us become disinterested in it.
There's a couple of key differences between Google backing Google+ and Meta backing Threads.
1. Meta's entire business is social apps, and Google's is not. There are strategic differences in approach as a result.
2. Google+ was an attempt to disrupt Facebook's rise at the height of Facebook's popularity. People _liked_ FB then - so trying to get them to switch to another product was harder. Threads shipped during a time of volatility with Xitter and is poised to capture more of that audience as Xitter continues to decay.
In terms of how things will change in the space over time, Threads choice to support ActivityPub will probably mean good things for the Fediverse in general, at least in the short term (3E notwithstanding), and could ultimately serve to be the arbiter that kills BlueSky and the AT Protocol.
Additionally, Google never seemed to be able to answer why someone should use Google+ in lieu of Facebook except that it would be very nice for Google if people would.
Whereas threads has the obvious benefit of attempting to grow while Twitter is self destructing.
G+ also tried (was told to?) show relevance to other Google products by becoming a universal and mandated discussion thread mechanism. It wasn't ready. Got the totally expected blowback.
In contrast Meta isn't trying to Threadify everything. The addition of ActivityPub is an experiment that should be run in Threads.
Another thing is people weren't just meh about G+ but because of the 'you now must use real names across our properties, yes, including youtube' message people were actively hostile to it.
I always thought it would be cool if every NPR/PBS station also ran Fediverse nodes of mastodon or whatever the Fediverse version of Facebook is. Would provide a public-funded option with more transparency
Yeah, I like the federated idea, but I think it had its chance when Elon took over Twitter and they never managed to capture the exodus of users in any significant way. The barrier to entry was just too high (but they have taken great steps to reduce the complexity).
Well my experience with Mastodon has been that it's almost entirely tech people who are joining mastodon for the technical novelty. If every NPR/PBS station launched a social network concurrently, then people would quickly find other people on the platform to connect with
Wikipedia is special in that 1) it's very cacheable so the infrastructure costs are low and 2) it's not too expensive in terms of development since I assume people don't expect many features.
I mean Bluesky is founded by Jack Dorsey, who made a fortune for shareholders with his last social media company by conning an idiot into paying way above market value for it. Of course it'll be hard to make that particular lightning bolt strike twice, but it's not like he doesn't have a good track record.
>conning an idiot into paying way above market value for it.
That idiot, how you call him, bought the user base and the market position of Twitter. Either he has a plan to make it profitable or he doesn't care, as long as he doesn't loose too much money.
The fact that he immediately tried to back out of the deal, to the point of going to court about it, suggests to me your version of events is not correct and the "idiot got conned" interpretation is much closer to the truth.
I don't think Bluesky was launched with a manifesto, so the user expectations are different.
That, and the fact that the lifespans of new social networks appear to be getting shorter and shorter with each new generation. If Bluesky were to disappear in a few months, the general reaction might be "Oh no! Anyway, what's next?"
this post is a bit of a "nyah nyah I told you so", but since whoever was running Ello did not give any heads up to users a way to get at their content, they just allowed the thing to buzz into the ground and they shut off all communication, they deserve it.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadFederated, standard and decentralized network just live by themselves :)
The part that's hard is the people, not the technology. Centralization and federation have nothing to do with it.
The flip side is I instead love what I do and I’m very proud of my work, which I don’t think someone could really say if they’re shilling crap like plastic toys and NFTs. Or maybe they could say that, but I never could. Grifting is just not for me.
And I have the exact same thought about providing software for government and other large organisations.
The number of "solutions" my public service employers paid millions for, that didn't fucking work properly or reliably is mental.
I'm really not sure how contracts keep getting signed by big organisations that don't impose massive penalties on providers for failure, but it they do. Or the sister org that finally had enough and wanted to switch providers, and had to go to court in order to be even be able to pay a large amount for the IP rights to the source code of their system, because they'd signed a contract that let the provider retain IP, and the provider really liked that sweet sweet taxpayer money for buggy bollocks. So naturally, when they contracted HP to maintain the system they ensured that the contract retained IP ownership for their org.
Haha, no, I'm kidding, they let HP keep IP rights on changes HP made, and later on had to fight HP in the courts so they could pay HP for the source to switch providers again after getting sick of being charged $2K (USD) by HP to update the text of a single link on a website.
And I keep thinking that I'd very much like to be in the market of earning millions by providing broken software to people making big decisions who aren't competent enough to jump to private sector, broken software is easy.
But then the guilt of stealing taxpayer money kicks in (it's not legally stealing, but morally, it's stealing. As the saying kinda goes, any great criminal needs a great lawyer, a great accountant, and a corporation), as well as the guilt of professional ethics.
(What's the old joke about software ethics? An ethical programmer would never write a function called destroyBaghdad, they'd write a function called destroyCity and pass Baghdad as a parameter.)
But look at Birmingham Council in the UK, bankrupted by shit software and Oracle's fearsome legal team. The entire fucking disgrace that is Horizon (although being fair to Fujitsu, nearly all of the evil was on their customer's side, it was only aided and abetted by Fujitsu employees lying in court).
In my country, IBM sued our government (and won) because IBM wanted to be paid even more for not delivering a massively expensive and broken project to the Police (INCIS), more recently our Education dept spent $180 million on a payroll system called Novopay (they also paid the provider Talent2 to administer payroll with it) that was terribly broken and underpaid some teachers (and perhaps more egregiously, slightly overpaid some teachers, then the provider would eventually realise and demand the teacher repay the overpayment be returned in full in a short timeframe or debt collectors would be brought in, and threats of civil litigation or criminal complaints were used to pressure them) to the extent that teachers had to go on strike to get the government to take it seriously.
Eventually the government took back the admin side of it, and then gave Talent2 another $45 million to get the system working, and are still paying them to maintain it today.
The idea of being in a market where delivering badly broken software leads to you getting paid another 25% of the upfront cost to get it actually working, and you don't get fired, is wild.
I suppose there's a reason that Oracle and similar are described as law firms that incidentally write software, but damn, they make crypto grifters look like complete amateurs.
And I'll begrudgingly admit that Oracle et al are selling a product with actual utility at least, as opposed to NFTs which I'd call digital tulip bulbs, but that is mean to tulip bulbs because they can at least be used to grow flowers.
I've seen 0 use cases for NFTs / ICOs that aren't gambling/unhinged spec...
VC money really seems like the beginning of the end.
For a lot of businesses, raising VC money is a mistake because rapid growth just isn't the right strategy. VC is expensive - you give up a lot of equity every round and are betting that your ever shrinking slice will be bigger because the whole pie grew faster. That is a very tough target to hit.
People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont thing.
I once spitballed with a certain VC at FreshTracks Capital about an idea I had, which lead to him running off with it and burning millions of dollars making it into BRIDJ, which shut down a few years ago.
True, but a little misleading. The majority of the co-founders of Ello, plus nearly all of its staff, were based in Colorado.
Source: I worked for Ello.
I'd say most of the negative stress I felt was from knowing that the user base was growing faster than we could fill in feature gaps that would keep folks engaged. I felt like we couldn't quite catch up, and by the time the money started running out and interest started to wane, it was too late.
A few learnings:
- 7 founders is a lot. I don't want that to sound like a criticism, it just means the company is going to feel a bit different vs a more classic 2 or 3 founder setup.
- Positive feedback loops within a tight team of highly skilled people has a huge impact on getting more stuff done. That's how I would characterize the engineering team, and it was one of the highest-performing teams I've ever been a part of.
- Don't build a startup on a custom, in-house UI framework ;)
I have built many of them to good effect.
I'm curious to know if anyone has evidence of a post similar to this but for a company with a (so far) happy ending.
Itch.io continues to be great, for now
In my understanding, a PBC is effectively the same as a for-profit company with regards to these sorts of things. Unlike a non-profit, a PBC has stock, which it can sell, so that's how it would get acquired. I believe that there were even some PBC SPACs back when that was fashionable.
> If they violate their charter as Ello may have, who exactly enforces it or file a lawsuit, and what is their compensation?
The only real thing a PBC does is change "shall maximize shareholder value" to "shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation." See here for Delaware: https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/
So it would look like any other shareholder grievance against management in form.
> Benefit corporations are neither nonprofits nor hybrid nonprofits. Benefit corporations are for-profit corporations that need to consider stakeholders, morals, or missions in addition to making a profit for their shareholders. Nonprofits can't be benefit corporations, but they may create one. Due to the public benefit purpose provisions, expanded fiduciary duties of administrators, and extra shareholder rights created within the model benefit corporation laws, this structure may be helpful to operate and scale the earned-income activities of a nonprofit.
[0] https://www.upcounsel.com/public-benefit-corporation
There are only two fiduciary duties in this context: the duty of loyalty and the duty of care. A director of a corporation owes no fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
You need to think about the killer article or feature.
Well, no. I think the point is kind of that they don’t.
It's over a week since this article hit the HN front page so you may never see this comment, but thank you for this.
One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation.
You _have_ to know that from the outset, else it's just trouble.
Start with and focus on an audience that has different expectations than the general population.
The network never really caught on, but there was some good work being done there.
I think everyone should understand (and, honestly, repeat daily) that in our modern capitalist system where never-ending growth is an expected requirement of any company that has ever taken outside funding, it is simply an impossibility for a company to have any kind of durable values that conflict with that growth-at-all-costs requirement. It's as much of an impossibility as the sun rising in the west, and we should stop any pretense that it's not. Enshittification is inevitable.
Nearly every tech company starts out similarly: an absolute laser focus on users and their needs, because that is how you first grow. At some point, though, all of that fruit is picked, and you then start going into features that are "user neutral" but that make money, until finally you chip away at features that look like they can be user neutral in the short term ("We A/B tested and nobody minded one more ad!"), but the long term effect is that you've completely destroyed your founding ethos.
For example, it's easy to pick on Google these days because it's, well, so easy. Their total about face from a company that was nearly universally loved by engineers to one that, if not loathed, is at best seen as the "next IBM" is so obvious. E.g. Google got huge originally with a world-first search engine by not "selling out", by not masquerading ads as organic search results. Now when I search for any remotely commercial term the entire first page is ads that are nearly indistinguishable from organic results.
It's not just Google, though. Apple loves to crow about user privacy, but it's hard to square this "value" with their insistence that anyone on iOS who uses iMessage to talk to anyone on Android gets 0 encryption (oh, and if even a single Android user is in a group chat, nobody gets encryption).
I don't think that makes any company "evil", but it does make it somewhat sociopathic in the sense that there can ever only be a single goal: growth at all costs. The sooner we all recognize it means we can treat all companies with an appropriate level of caution. One final note related to this, is that this is one reason I'm not really a fan of PBCs as mentioned in the article. PBCs are a smoke-screen. As the saying goes, "Follow the money". When push-comes-to-shove you'll also see PBCs compromise their "values" the second growth starts to be at risk.
And plumbing is such a constitutionally important thing: having hot, running water and not having feces in your house is so much important than seeing what that guy from high school is up to.
I think the issue lays with how high-variance tech is due to the scale: either it is marginally profitable at a massive scale and is worth billions of dollars, or you have something that is unprofitable at any scale and is worthless. It's like there's all of the sudden (in the last 15 years) become an appetite for throwing fortunes onto a roulette table (which may be giving better odds than a lot of VCs).
One is that the marginal cost of software(1) drives this pattern of winners and losers. The first user of any software costs an enormous amount of money to actually write the software and deliver it to customers. The 100th user costs basically nothing once you have 99 others. And the millionth user (or billionth) user costs basically nothing as well(2). That in turn means that having a billion users is a lot more profitable than having a million users, which means that if you have a billion users you can afford to do things that the million user system can't- e.g. free webmail and a really good free internet browser, just to name two things picked completely at random and not having any particular company in mind.
The other point is explaining your comment about the "last 15 years": tech's dominance (really, growth's dominance) is really an artifact of zero-lower-bounds interest rates from the 2008 financial crisis. If interest rates are zero (for discounted future cash flow computations) then I am indifferent about a dollar today versus a dollar in 2075. So someone who can argue that they have a 5% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2075 is worth a lot (0.05 * 1T=50 billion) when interest rates are zero, but if interest rates are high (or even, honestly, normal- like 2-3%) then that money is discounted heavily and the growth story doesn't matter as much because dollars today are worth a lot more than dollars in 2075. So if interest rates are zero, future growth will dominate the stock market (which was why 'tech' did well) but when interest rates are more normal, different companies can dominate the stock market (where the fundamental valuation of a company is, roughly, the expected value of future cash-flows discounted to the present).
1: Delivered by the internet- physical media distorts this a bit and behaves more like normal retail goods.
2: Exceptions for certain points in the growth curve where some key system falls over and needs to be rapidly replaced, e.g. storage or compute or whatever, but outside of those it's very cheap growth. Plumber company growth is limited by the number of trained plumbers you can hire- you can only have 1 plumber make so many house calls in one day- but software just replicates at zero out to infinity (again modulo some key systems which can't handle the load).
If I invested a bunch of time, effort, and vision into something and had nothing to show for it while nearing failure... I'd be very tempted to sell just so I don't have to go straight from failure to job hunt. This situation seems outrageously stressful to me... I literally don't even know what I'd do if I broke my arm or came down with some serious illness while in the inbetween state.
A pretty good portion of my social network moved, myself included. But it fizzled out really quickly and we all ended up back on Twitter.
Every once in a while I'd still get a notification from Ello that someone had followed me. It was always a porn bot, but the email notification was still nostalgic. A part of me is sad the site died.
And to Mastodon before that.
Remember when tech Reddit tried to migrate to Lemmy?
A hardcore handful of people migrate await from the Death Star and stay migrated (maybe a couple hundred medium accounts, and 1 or 2 bigger ones), but everybody else trickles back onto the Death Star eventually.
The only thing that works to get people permanently migrated away is complete enshitification of the existing platform (i.e. Digg effect). Partial enshitification isn't enough.
Specifically the massive level of pornbot traffic, and algorithm changes that seem to be intentionally surfacing posts to adversarial users who will then go on the attack.
That they persist must mean that X wants them to persist.
They are providing a foundation that gets built upon with every migration wave, and I think it’s plausible that they will eventually break into the mainstream.
Put another way, the fediverse is the first alternative that doesn’t need to “succeed” in order for development to continue. It’s a bootstrapped model. And so it can grow quietly, work out the usability kinks over time, and be ready to absorb users whenever they get fed up with the centralized platforms.
The Digg effect only worked because the majority of users were tech savvy and hated advertisements. The average user just accepts ads for the most part.
Most people don't care about the freedom of the platform, who's running the platform, or the technology behind it. They only care about: Can I easily create an account? Are all my friends, family, people I want to talk to there?
If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
The internet culture birthed from the early days of the internet "Everything is free", seems to have captured a whole generation who simply have no concept of cost and value.
Vid.me is another start-up that comes to mind: Youtube sucks, has too many ads, and sells your data. We won't have ads, won't sell your data, and will host all your content.
It made it four years before investor cash dried up and they said goodbye.
That's a fun quip (and often correct) but the world needs a way to run this kind of project. Community? free? transparent? etc, etc.
And I think this issue is not just about "free systems", culture changes and day to day corruption creeps and destroys everything. Even die-hard for-profit institutions (where entire branches might go rogue on their own objectives.)
A sandwich costs $5 everywhere, and a car costs $30k everywhere, because that's just what those things cost to make.
It's relatively difficult to look at a web service and determine whether its running costs are normal guy hobby money, rich guy hobby money, or no seriously this won't last six months without VC money.
Decentralised and P2P systems run themselves, but it's hard for them to maintain a centre of gravity without offering something specific, and given that the network itself can't produce value out of thin air, it's probably not coincidental that the ones best able to maintain gravity are offering stuff stolen from elsewhere.
(YouTube, Uber, Airbnb, etc…)
The truth is that a profit-maximising business will seek revenue opportunities where it can, and if that means selling both services, on a single-instance or subscription basis, and advertising, it will do both.
Advertising-only or advertising-dominated businesses have a strong tendency to degrade faster and far more prolifically than those with mixed-model funding (I still find The Economist's three-legged revenues stool fascinating: subscriptions, advertising, and Economist Intelligence Unit bespoke consulting and research services, each roughly 1/3 of total revenues).
Paying alone, however, is a far-from-sufficient condition.
https://ello.threadless.com/designs/white-ello-shirt/mens/t-...
Without an explicitly capped profit, I can't see how this doesn't eventually lead to exploitation of the users.
I would like to see a donation/optional subscription model with tiered features as is seen in Patreon/Kickstarter etc. with the distinction that the tiers are community wide instead of being bound to the individuals donating.
Display an income bar. If it drops to zero the servers turn off. If it drops below 1 nobody can post. If it is above 1 you have Direct messaging, above 2 you have more features, etc. Keep the communication clear as to what is being provided and how it is being paid for.
Most people won't pay, but if nobody pays there is no service. Its survival would depend upon providing a service that satisfies enough people to sustain the support. This certainly wouldn't be as lucrative as a exploit the users model, but the idea is not to make a fortune, but to simply run a sustainable enterprise.
Capped profit is interesting since it doesn't limit the business model, just the likelihood of enshitification.
Discord has a bit of this. Each 'server' can be 'boosted'. Boosted servers have access to more emoji slots, better audio/video quality for calls, and larger file upload limits.
Can you rephrase this as;
"I'd like to see a model where I can pay a lot, and thus allow 10 other users for free" ?
How about something along the lines of "it costs $10 per useful per month to make the platform sustainable. A subscription is $100. When you subscribe you pay to keep 9 other users on a free account."
In other words, my question is, are upu in the 10% paying for everyone, or are you in the 90% getting it for free?
This is a fairly normal way to run old-style forum hosting - I remember forums that would display a bar for "this month's hosting costs" or a "hosting costs are paid until [date], donate now!"
> Without an explicitly capped profit, I can't see how this doesn't eventually lead to exploitation of the users.
I don't see what difference capped profit would make. Exploitation of users doesn't usually happen during the starry-eyed "this is going to be a billion-dollar company" stage, it happens in the "is there anything we can do to keep the lights on for another few months and maybe turn it around" stage.
IMO the problem isn't investment per se, it's debt, in a broad sense: spending money now that you're expected to repay in the future, and then struggling to repay it. There are bootstraped, sustainable organisations operating in this area similar to what you're asking for, e.g. Dreamwidth. But those are never going to be able to "blitzscale" or market themselves to the same extent; marketing almost by definition involves spending money now that you hope to recoup in the future, at which point you've already sown the seeds of your ruin if that future revenue doesn't materialize.
I guess the flipside is, if I die tomorrow and then there's a PHP error on my website, no one's ever going to know how to fix it. So my memories and diary entries die as well. My "fix" for that is to export the ~2400 diary entires every few months into one massive PDF file.
Edit: I understand why this is being downvoted, I just want to clarify that I didn't mean the opening sentence to read as if people who trust 3rd party websites to their hosting were silly/dumb, though I realise now that's how it scans. What I should have said was "It's very unfortunate and a sad state of the current Internet that people trust websites like this..."
But it is, XYZ is their business platform, their social media network, their journals, their photo hoster, their "lifetime membership", etc. I ran into this all the time with clients. They would worry about what happens to their consultant, but never to their infrastructure.
So for businesses: have a plan B, and have usable archives / backups. And for individuals, have a plan B, and have usable archives / backups.
VC funding has a lot of problems. Funding via advertising is similarly fraught with peril, maybe worse, especially the most lucrative stuff. You can fund things by selling premium content or features, but this too is rather tenuous: if you are say, SoundCloud, one of your primary customers is inevitably going to be artists, who themselves are by and large not rich.
Not to mention, no matter who you focus your monetization on, $1 is infinitely more than $0, and monetizing useful features or access to content will inevitably lower the overall value of your platform. This is presumably part of why advertising is so enticing: end users don't have to "pay" anything. Sure, advertising isn't literally free, but users do not have to set up a payment method and take money from their account and send it to yours, which is a massive difference, and massively increases accessibility.
Then there's stuff like crowdfunding. Platforms that let you do one-off funding campaigns like Kickstarter or Gofundme, or platforms that let you do monthly subscriptions in exchange for "rewards" like Patreon or FANBOX. There even is a platform that is partly funded by monthly subscription payments (Misskey.io) and although I'm sure it is a relatively small part of the funding (at least I would certainly assume so) it still seems to have been successful nonetheless.
And that's just funding. What about structure? Becoming a non-profit or public benefit corporation is seemingly not any kind of sure-fire way to avoid trouble, as can be seen here. While I don't know exactly how the legalese works around a lot of these topics, it feels like these measures simply don't do enough to prevent corruption or at the very least, undesired future changes in direction. You want a company to have autonomy to carry out its vision and try to survive in the process, but you don't want it to compromise its core values in the process. Is there anything you can do legally and/or socially to provide better assurances?
This is very frustrating because I think a lot of us see the sad state of the Internet and want to do something, but it's hard to work towards it because you can also see a graveyard of good intentions gone horribly awry. There's all kinds of attempts to work around it, but as a wise man once said, "Mo Money Mo Problems". It seems that the temptation to exploit things always manages to find a way around your safeguards to prevent things from being exploited. Just to beat a dead horse even more, remember the last time you were excited for a Google product announcement, like say, GMail? I'm not saying they were ever a charity or intending to be... but it's hard to not see the painful way in which values that were once hard-fought slowly fade away. Somehow, eventually, everything becomes rent-seeking, a game to see how much money you can get back from an investment. One would hope there is a way out that doesn't involve a very painful upheaval of society, but over time it's getting harder and harder to believe it.
Even "winding down" doesn't necessarily need to be a problem. It's all in the "how" it's done.
Being an idealist is fine, but being a dick is not. This article took on some personal schadenfreude after I read this line.
The quotes further down from users who suddenly lost all of their content were sad to read. It sucks how often regular people get burned for taking tech companies at their word.
We would all like to have a model where users don't get charged money, and yet are not the product. But I haven't seen a model that works to date. In some cases, I don't mind my personal date getting sold; in other cases I pay money because the service is valuable. But I certainly make backups since I don't assume that even when I pay $$$, that the company might not go poof in the night....
I agree. He was responding to perfectly justified -- and accurate -- criticism by saying how sad it is to be a person with such views of the world.
The CEO he was quoting is the subject of my schadenfreude.
Sure you have. Amazon grew without giving stuff away for free. Customers paid (just below market rate) from day 1. This demonstrated the -convenience- of ecommerce. It had revenues from the first sale. Yes, it spent mountains of VC money on marketing and development, but -not- on just buying stuff for you so you think it'll be free forever.
Uber is the same, although it's less clear that users will pay gor what a ride really costs. (And their margin makes it attractive for competition)
In both cases though there us revenue from customers from day 1. You can wind prices up. It's really hard to "go from free to paid".
IRC. NNTP. SMTP. XMPP. HTTP.
It's just that nobody wants to work on protocols anymore. Ever since the world's richest was suddently a computer guy, no one wants to work on anything without a business model that includes taking complete control over what is built. A product, if you will.
In the background, there's always some geeks slaving away with new protocols and federated models. That will not become mainstream, not in our current society. But societies change over time. There is always hope.
Protocols, not products, people!
The reason for that, is to avoid having influence from outside. Even "angel" investment can be problematic, as the "angel" has the ear of the leadership.
I have found that even well-meaning outsiders can have highly destructive influence, because they don't understand the culture and they aren't the ones on the hook, if things go pear-shaped, as opposed to the ones that have a real, personal, stake (like all those Ello users, who lost so much).
I'm just thankful that mobile phone networks haven't switched to a "free with ads interspersed into your texts" model yet.
(Of course there are still ads in my texts, but at least those are officially spam rather than network endorsed.)
I know some very privacy-focused person (a friend of mine) who will stop being willing to be in contact with you (or being your friend) if you use an email address at one of these big spying email providers to write him an email.
So, it is just a matter of being consequential.
It was an X.400-based nightmare, and never took off.
Market timing is hard.
Literally in a span of months SMS usage went the way of the dinosaur.
Everyone says they are on board with supporting the little guys, until they hit bugs and start complaining.
I guess it depends on whether you're looking to achieve something unique and truly new, or just "get rich fast".
But that's a story for a different venue...
I wonder if Fediverse, Blue Sky, etc will catch, or if it'll end up in the same boat. Threads too (yes it's backed by Meta, but G+ had Google behind it ...)
There would be pain if mastodon.social failed with zero notice. People would lose access to their accounts and would need to find a new server where they'd be starting over. Some may have backed up their contacts, but most wouldn't. If mastodon.social gave a couple months notice, people could migrate to other servers. given that mastodon.social is the largest server, there would be some growing pains as other servers worked to accommodate new users, but it's possible for the Fediverse to continue.
Note, I'm not saying that the Fediverse will be incredibly popular. I'm simply noting that there's an amount of resilience. Once Ello's owners ran out of interest or money, that was the end of Ello. Even if others had a huge interest in seeing it continue, there was nothing they could do. Even if the Fediverse doesn't "catch" by your definition of catching on, it has caught on for enough people who have moved there and will remain there.
That's why I feel happier in the Fediverse. It feels like something the community controls. Sure, I don't run my own server, but I possibly could in the future and there are enough people running servers that I don't feel beholden to any one entity. It just feels like something that can stick around - even if the cool kids aren't interested. Enough of us like it and we'll keep it going even if some of us become disinterested in it.
1. Meta's entire business is social apps, and Google's is not. There are strategic differences in approach as a result. 2. Google+ was an attempt to disrupt Facebook's rise at the height of Facebook's popularity. People _liked_ FB then - so trying to get them to switch to another product was harder. Threads shipped during a time of volatility with Xitter and is poised to capture more of that audience as Xitter continues to decay.
In terms of how things will change in the space over time, Threads choice to support ActivityPub will probably mean good things for the Fediverse in general, at least in the short term (3E notwithstanding), and could ultimately serve to be the arbiter that kills BlueSky and the AT Protocol.
Whereas threads has the obvious benefit of attempting to grow while Twitter is self destructing.
In contrast Meta isn't trying to Threadify everything. The addition of ActivityPub is an experiment that should be run in Threads.
(Even if that's not the case...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WT_Social
https://wt.social/
- possibly Theodor Reik [1]
I expect Bluesky to make their own mistakes.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana
That idiot, how you call him, bought the user base and the market position of Twitter. Either he has a plan to make it profitable or he doesn't care, as long as he doesn't loose too much money.
That, and the fact that the lifespans of new social networks appear to be getting shorter and shorter with each new generation. If Bluesky were to disappear in a few months, the general reaction might be "Oh no! Anyway, what's next?"