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App.net is shutting down

blog.app.net

11–20 of 191 posts

Re: App.net is shutting down

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or put another way, "people don't want to pay for most things"

Some variant of Sturgeon's Law?

Not necessarily. I'd make some comment about people's price elasticities (or maybe "people overvalue free"), but I'm not exactly sure what it would be.

Re: App.net is shutting down

#14

This is a refreshingly honest shutdown notice. Congratulations to Dalton and co for trying something hard and worthwhile, and wrapping it up responsibly when it didn't pan out.

My sentiment exactly. And I agree with Dalton it was worth trying to see if it could fly.

It raises a lot of interesting questions about the sustainability of the "app economy" for me.

Re: App.net is shutting down

#15

This is a refreshingly honest shutdown notice. Congratulations to Dalton and co for trying something hard and worthwhile, and wrapping it up responsibly when it didn't pan out.

Not just honest, but a morally upstanding one.

Not sure what more you can do when the business isn't going well. 2+ years of maintenance, open sourcing, 2 months notice, data export, no additional billings.

Respect to Dalton and the team.

Re: App.net is shutting down

#16
post #10

This is an unfortunate, but not unexpected, end of an era. App.net was created at a time when discontent was high with how Twitter was treating its users and 3rd party app developers. Even though App.net wasn't hugely successful, its existence provided a needed check against Twitter exercising user-hostile control over their platform. However, it has not been a viable platform (one that people actually used) for many…

Did Twitter actually do anything in response to App.net?

Re: App.net is shutting down

#17

This is a refreshingly honest shutdown notice. Congratulations to Dalton and co for trying something hard and worthwhile, and wrapping it up responsibly when it didn't pan out.

My sentiment exactly. And I agree with Dalton it was worth trying to see if it could fly. It raises a lot of interesting questions about the sustainability of the "app economy" for me.

I appreciate both of your sentiments, thank you.

I continue to be at least somewhat optimistic that non ad-supported models are worth trying. It seems like Patreon is doing really well and is perhaps something we can all learn from.

Re: App.net is shutting down

#18
App.net and Medium have the same issue (why advertising is more lucrative than selling blogging software directly to content creators):

Let's say for every one content creator that are on average 100 eyeballs on the content they create (1:100). Almost universally, the 100 eyeballs can be translated to more economic value than the 1, and hence why the advertising model is so lucrative.

Re: App.net is shutting down

#19
post #2

Unfortunate. Goes to show that you really can't break even without ads or selling/analysing data with a centralised social network.

or put another way, "people don't want to pay for most things"

Personally, I always wanted to see a site that has ads and is free to read, but charges a small fee to create an account - just to see if it would help reduce trolling and sock puppets.

Re: App.net is shutting down

#20
This seems like a good juncture to point out that GNU Social, OStatus, and the Fediverse still exist.

It still has some believers. Someone wrote a new implementation in Ruby called Mastodon recently, which has a nice interface.

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