101–110 of 153 posts
I was very pleased to see how easy and quickly I could set up an account and attach the feed from my actual site. (I note that this is all free, which is nice). I find the $5 fee for someone to set up their own site to be perhaps reasonable on the face of it, but I fear that this won't work. I think those who care about decentralization and the decline of walled gardens are also technologically literate enough to kno…
There is a two sided market for microblogs like twitter:
* Broadcasters - An org or a prominent person who wishes to broadcast to a group of followers * Consumers - people who want to read the latest about x (where x is a hobby, a professional interest, a person, or a group of people)
Making money from consumer blogs is incredibly hard, unless you're free and infested with ads, which has its own downsides. I don't think you'd be able to build a sustainable business from that.
However those who do find it a useful medium for broadcasting to followers and actually use it professionally would be willing to pay (far more than $5 a month), if the service was tailored to their needs and had better curation controls etc, giving users control over their own feed and followers. This kind of service can forgo ads but it needs to find a market that wants to buy a broadcasting service, not attempt to market to normal consumers, who simply won't pay any amount for a blogging service. There are plenty of people using twitter to broadcast and research (for example journalists, businesses, ) - those are the people to target.
> Registration error. Email address must not include a "+" character. Why not? "+" is valid in email addresses.
> Registration error. Email address must not include a "+" character. Why not? "+" is valid in email addresses.
They want to spam you later (or sell your address to spammers) and have you not know where they got the address.
Email +suffixes are easy enough to strip off post-collection if you're aware of them. If they wanted to spam, they wouldn't have to disallow +'s in the validation regex. They must have some other reason for disallowing them, which may be as innocent as poor awareness of them.
Personally, I used Fastmail with my own domain and have abandoned using +suffixes because they're too unreliable. Fastmail has several options for single-use email addresses that should be difficult or impossible for recipients to decode to the main address.
Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days. Especially given that this project is what HN is supposed to be about - done by a lone hacker with help from volunteers, trying to create a different and hopefully better social media. Sure, it may or may not work, it has all sorts of pros and cons, but I’d vote for being open-minded and constructive rather than cynical from the get…
> Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days. Lot's of objectivity here, I'd say. You admit yourself that "it has all sorts of pros and cons", so why shouldn't the cons be discussed here? Constructive criticism is something positive.
Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days. Especially given that this project is what HN is supposed to be about - done by a lone hacker with help from volunteers, trying to create a different and hopefully better social media. Sure, it may or may not work, it has all sorts of pros and cons, but I’d vote for being open-minded and constructive rather than cynical from the get…
IMHO, one of the biggest issue with social media is with the "micro" story. Tweets'140 characters limit encouraged people to post more because they didn't have to think much about what they had to say. Re-tweets was just a convenient way of copy pasting. I don't see any of it disappear with micro.blog. Why not making macro.blog which forces you to write at least 300 words?
The short format also encouraged better structuring of arguments and discouraged long, hard to process paragraphs. Together with threading it's often using to fairly significant success. I don't think a person who can't be bothered to structure their writing for twitter would do much better on a blog. There is a significant difference in legibility, but it's not a clear win; I know both people who process well-writte…
This is a downside of "social" part of "social media". To avoid this you have to impose regulations and it will break the "social" part, making it a regular media. The perfect solution is yet to be found.
Oddly enough, the pay element is the only really attractive element right now. At least that way I know I know I will not have advertisements all over the place. Still $5 dollars seems steep. For that I could just host my own microblog theme on WordPress and make my own community.