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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

#181

Post by dang »

pmoriarty wrote: post #156

I always shake my head when Jimmy Wales is given so much credit for founding Wikipedia, while what he did was supply the money for it from the profit he made off his soft-core porn business, while Larry Sanger (who deserves most of the credit, including coming up with the name Wikipedia, with Wikipedia's most distinctive feature -- the so-called Neutral Point of View, and with managing the site itself) is virtually f…

Larry's been here a few times! https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lsanger

Just mentioning for curiosity's sake.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#182

Post by [deleted] »

soapboxrocket wrote: post #166
pmoriarty wrote: post #156

I always shake my head when Jimmy Wales is given so much credit for founding Wikipedia, while what he did was supply the money for it from the profit he made off his soft-core porn business, while Larry Sanger (who deserves most of the credit, including coming up with the name Wikipedia, with Wikipedia's most distinctive feature -- the so-called Neutral Point of View, and with managing the site itself) is virtually f…

This isn't really any different than most cases. Think Elon Musk started Tesla or SpaceX? Nope, he bought in just like Jimmy.

[deleted]

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#183

Post by zozbot234 »

sherr wrote: post #173
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.

There was some hype around something called "Freedom Box" [1] a while ago, but it seemed to have gone quiet. Things like this pop up every now and then, and then tend to disappear. [1] https://freedombox.org/

What? The Freedom Box project seems to still be going strong. The associated, pluggable hardware has "disappeared" mostly because it doesn't seem to do much over what a plain old single-board computer (SBC) or mini-PC can do already.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#185

Post by Digit-Al »

throwaway35784 wrote: post #129
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.

Why on earth does it feel sketchy to you. As far as I can tell this service will be devoid of adverts and tracking, which means that it will be entirely funded by subscribers. You can't really expect him to buy all the servers and bandwidth and provide it all to you for nothing out of his own pocket. That's just stupid. It seems to me the idea is that early access subscribers pay for the initial equipment. They then release an initial block of free accounts. As they get more paying subscribers they can invest in more infrastructure and release more free accounts.

If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope.

This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders".

Hope that clears it up.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#187

Post by dimino »

danans wrote: post #31

Just my guess, but I bet that from this point on, few people (in the developed world) will race to sign up for a new social network. Why? Given the societal and personal costs (and benefits) that we've seen with previous social networks, a lot of lay people are re-evaluating the utility that such services provide them. In many cases, the answer is to keep your current social network, but increasingly disengage from i…

I think faking growth until you achieve actual growth is the time-honored tradition of social media websites, and can flip a failure into a success by getting people to feel that, "Am I missing out?" feeling again.

I don't think WT:Social is doing that right now though, so not sure what their plan is to combat what you're talking about.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#188

Post by ryanmercer »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #161
ryanmercer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta be smart, I think Amazon technically paid me to have prime one year and this year I've negatived a good chunk of it. Any time they have the 1$ digital credit for delay shipping I select it which then subsidizes a good chunk of my eBook purchases. I think I've had 4$ in credit just this week and have another 1$ I'll get whenever the 5$ shoehorn I ordered yesterday ships.

This post shows how smart Amazon's Prime strategy is. We have someone probably spending thousands of dollars with Amazon (and Amazon taking a good chunk of that in commission) bragging about getting some free ebooks.

Spending money I'd spend at a brick and mortar store, that I'd have to drive to using oil life/tire life/gasoline/brake pad life/brake rotor life while also losing time.

Instead, I can think "oh hey I need to get a shoe horn, the heels on the uppers of the slip-ons I wear to church are getting funky" or "ah crap, I forgot to stop and get a new belt on the way home and this one is getting pretty loose on the last notch and I don't think this synthetic material is going to be happy if I punch a new hole" or "instead of driving to 6 stores hoping to find filters for my air purifier, I can buy 2 on Amazon right here on the toilet and be good for the next 2 years" and "my xlear nasal spray is about empty here at work and this heat is really drying my nose out, I'll just order another now instead of waiting until I go to the grocery Saturday" and "I need another USB C cable, this one is starting to get pretty stressed, I'll order one on Amazon instead of driving miles out of my way to go to Walmart or Best Buy hoping they have one".

Those are this week's purchases. All things I needed, all things I would have had to buy somewhere, all things I got a 1$ credit for which I will use towards eBooks I would have purchased either way.

Or last week when I ordered a tofu press, I have no idea where to buy a tofu press in the real world but wasting gobs of paper towels and using books just wasn't doing it for me.

It's not like I opened Amazon in a moment of boredom and said "let's see what I should waste money on today".

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#189

Post by Forbo »

mirimir wrote: post #150
tinyhouse wrote: post #97

Just signed up. I could search for topics but not join as it says I'm number 60K+ in the waiting list and need to pay. First impression it looks like Reddit. I'm very skeptical people will pay $100/year for this. Reporting the number of members is pretty useless since I'm pretty sure they are not talking about paying ones.

What are the payment options? Bitcoin maybe?

From what I saw, they're accepting cards and PayPal.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#190

Post by [deleted] »

booleandilemma wrote: post #121
zozbot234 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]
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