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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

zdnet.com

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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#121

Post by booleandilemma »

zozbot234 wrote: post #105
wtmt wrote: post #62

I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD): * Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that a…

> showed the price to jump the waitlist ... as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.

Yeah, my parents are totally going to do that.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#123

Post by pmoriarty »

erulabs wrote: post #40
michaelmrose wrote: post #22

I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents. You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.

That’s essentially what a Mastadon instance is. If it’s hosted at home or on someone’s cloud account - the difference is only in connectivity speed. I’m extremely hopefully, perhaps naively, that a new internet isn’t going to be based on blockchain or owning data or any foundational change - it will be based on the ability for people to host their own server-side software again. The App Stores democratized client sid…

"What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center"

Ease of deployment is one thing, but managing and troubleshooting these deployments is another. Ordinary people generally don't want to do any of these things.

There are some people who have both the technical aptitude and desire to do these things, but they'll likely always be a small minority. An even smaller minority will be willing to do these things long-term without getting paid.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#124

Post by wtmt »

basch wrote: post #99
wtmt wrote: post #62

I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD): * Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that a…

Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another. The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me fr…

I agree with you on the Amazon Prime membership triggering impulse purchases, stickiness with the one day or two day deliveries and of course, shipping built into the products' prices. But Amazon Prime video here (in India) has a lot of local content and gets many new movies quickly onto it. My assessment is that Prime Video is probably a bigger attraction for people here (perhaps with Prime Music) than two day shipping alone (which is not very widely available on many products).

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#125

Post by krick »

randomb_1979 wrote: post #61

Governments around the world should demand Facebook either place a permanent ad banner promoting WT:Social front and center on their website for everyone from that country, or they can pay $x00 million in fines per month. If Facebook chooses to pay the fine, half the fine should then be donated to WT:Social to keep their site running and the rest can be distributed back to the taxpayers. :-)

That's quite a manifesto you just wrote here, but

1. It won't happen.

2. More importantly: imagine it happens. Who would actually make a switch?

I mean, really, who chooses to use FB, because he likes FB? I don't think I know a single example. For the last year or so it even (finally!) became trendy among non-techy people to hate FB, but so what? People stay because their social circles stay. In fact, it's been quite a while since I don't actually feel pressured to use FB by induviduals, but rather the stuff like climbing club using FB as a platform to announce events and gather groups to go camping and stuff.

WT:Social might become of use as a very niche social network for news, but no way it can be seriously viewed as FB's rival. And even if they could, they are fighting for the yesterday's market, meanwhile Facebook builds the future, where their helpless users will willingly spend their lives in Oculus helmets socializing with their FB "friends" on VR beaches. Or whatever.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#126

Post by chipotle_coyote »

I love the idea of an alternate social network, and I'm fine with the idea of charging users. But in an era where free alternatives are bountiful (even if most of them are "free as in puppy"), where a full paid blog hosting service like Micro.blog -- which includes a social network timeline built on IndieWeb principles -- is only $5 a month, where "subscription fatigue" is entering the lexicon... this is just a bonkers amount of money to ask.

If I were serious about building some kind of social network at this point and thought it would need a revenue stream to be sustainable, I'd try to:

- find not just a niche but functionality that differentiates it from existing services in some way (if your service can be described as "Facebook for X," you've already lost, because the Facebook for all values of X already exists and is called "Facebook")

- build on open protocols, IndieWeb style (including ActivityPub, although the first point suggests the service better not be "Mastodon for X," either)

- if it makes sense, have a free tier that gives people some clue what they're signing up for, although not so much that it discourages them from actually, you know, signing up

- charge a low enough rate that signing up doesn't feel like a huge commitment: say, $2 a month or $16 a year

I'm surprised nobody has tried the low-cost route yet. Yes, I get it, those rates aren't going to be bringing you VC money and bazillion-dollar unicorn growth, but a relatively small number of paying users could create a sustainable, even profitable, small business for a few employees.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#127

Post by the_duke »

ishanjain28 wrote: post #25

This just makes me think why do I need a social network. I never did anything remotely useful on Facebook/Instagram(Although, Twitter is useful). Why would I want to use this?

This very site is a specialized social network...

Reddit is a big social network with many specialized groups.

The (sparse) descriptions of wt.social sound more like a variant of Reddit than anything else.

But the presentation is horrible.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#128

Post by shantly »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #18
mholt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is a social network

Reminds me of people bragging they don't watch any television yet watch hours of Netflix/Youtube/etc every night.

"I don't even have a TV!"

Watches TV on Phone/Tablet/Laptop

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#129

Post by throwaway35784 »

wtmt wrote: post #62

I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD): * Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that a…

Why is there even a wait list at all? This feels sketchy from first use. And to not be up front about the cost before getting my personal information is, I feel, dishonest.

How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation?

This is not the way to do it.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#130

Post by billfruit »

basch wrote: post #99
wtmt wrote: post #62

I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD): * Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that a…

Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another. The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me fr…

100$s? Amazon prime membership is 1000rs per year, which is less than 14$ a year.
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