Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Always Own Your Platform (2019)

alwaysownyourplatform.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 190 posts

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#131

Post by winternett »

sanderjd wrote: post #124
cmg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really hard to be better than Twitter. It is, but right now people don't care as much about privacy as features and community. It's not what people who focus on openness or privacy want, but it's the reality. Where are the celebrities and brands? Where are the conversations happening? Where are my friends ? This is the challenge.

Yes ... but that's never going to change, so what's the proposal here?

The key in my perspective is to not scale too far.

Twitter, Reddit, and many other mega-platforms began the process of sucking (exactly) when their user bases got too big. operational costs also soared as they over scaled to stay dominant, while they began to fear changes in functionality because of a circular cycle of fearing user backlash.

No one platform can service massive levels and disciplines of users well, yet everyone keeps getting greedy, and always loses sight of that fact. Costs of competition at monopoly level create a paralyzing fear of losing a grip on users... That fear makes those platforms resort to corrupt methods to retain and addict their users to their product, and makes execs and investors unable to see outside of the vapor cloud they create...

Also, never go IPO if you want to keep your product's soul... Cash out early like Tom from Myspace, and let someone else crash and burn the idea as a CEO... :P

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#132

Post by asddubs »

rubyskills wrote: post #54
jlfyhilfyu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the damage is severe, I don't think it's permanent. Mastodon is far from a powerhouse, but is chugging along happily with a slowly growing user base. Matrix arrived just in time to help prevent Slack and Discord from becoming the defacto real-time communication systems for open source projects. Even SA is starting to heal now that it's out from under lowtax and his bullshit.

It's funny because you could argue that slack and discord replaced IRC. I wonder if we will have cycles or if commercial hosted solutions will always win this arms race.

unless you happen to own freenode/libera.chat, you don't own your own platform on IRC either. same for mastodon, unless you happen to own the mastodon instance you're on, you don't own it.

And the old web had plenty of platforms too, tripod and geocities were platforms as well. You could take it a step further still and say that unless you have a server that's sitting in your own basement, you don't own your own platform, since any hosting provider could decide to pull down your site as well.

it gets real lonely if everyone does own their own platform, and it certainly wasn't the case in the old web either (though it was definitely more common to own more of your own platform). Still, I don't really think this is the defining feature of the old web. I think the level of commerce is much more important, something like ao3 feels old web, and that's because it's a user-centric platform, rather than business-centric

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#133

Post by jlledo »

winternett wrote: post #131
sanderjd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes ... but that's never going to change, so what's the proposal here?

The key in my perspective is to not scale too far. Twitter, Reddit, and many other mega-platforms began the process of sucking (exactly) when their user bases got too big. operational costs also soared as they over scaled to stay dominant, while they began to fear changes in functionality because of a circular cycle of fearing user backlash. No one platform can service massive levels and disciplines of users well, ye…

How exactly do you think they started to suck? Also, what’s stopping platforms from servicing large numbers of users? Honest questions, I’m just curious.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#134

Post by winternett »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #75
Method-X wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most regular non-tech people this is true. I think it’s best to control your own platform but you can still leverage Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc to grow your brand and make sure they’re onboarded to your own platform of sorts.

Videos on YouTube will get 800x more views than views on yourownvideowebsite.com (assuming you aren’t a major Hollywood studio). Donald Trump went from 90 million followers on Twitter to 3.2 million followers on his own Twitter clone, and he has such a loyal following that people literally committed treason for him. Network effects are impossible to ignore

Trump was a TV celebrity well before Twitter... That's not a good example.

These days YouTube does nothing to promote posters that aren't rich and/or famous already.

Having my own site and embedding my YT content is the only thing that helps me to be visible amongst a sea of celebrities who are already popular and promoted for free on the front pages of social sites like Twitter and YouTube.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#135

Post by winternett »

rd07 wrote: post #87
heywoodlh wrote: post #23

> Distribute [your content] via methods you control. I'm being nitpicky but it feels off to me to call people out on owning their own platform but then use Cloudflare's CDN instead of running their own. And if they did run their own CDN, they would probably have to use AWS or another worldwide cloud provider and not own the hardware. And if I were Richard Stallman I would probably come down on you for using proprieta…

I think hosting a website in a low powered computer like Raspberry Pi can be an alternative to really own our platform. Granted, it can't handle big traffic, but it is cheap enough to built and maintain yourself.

A light weight site run on a traditional web host is fine for most use cases early on in my opinion. The problem is so many people think of costly cloud hosting as the first move and burn up all their capital even before they reach 10k users.

That is why the dot com era was more fruitful. People started in their basement, and service outages were not a big deal... Heck, service outages were often the thing that spurred more interest in products and also spurred users to invest so that products could scale.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#136

Post by winternett »

benoliver999 wrote: post #8

Really hard for non-techies; even a hosted WordPress isn't easy to use. I've been asked a few times 'I want to write online, what do I do?' and it's hard to find easy to use answers that don't involve vendor lock-in. Or me having to provide support forever. SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there. Best I can do is try to find platforms with sane exit strategie…

Drupal has been solid. It needs a good developer who knows how to architect it properly so that it endures.

Wordpress has been overrun by paid modules, which contradicts most of the benefits of it being open source. It also has had far too many security breakdowns. Paid modules are also now developed on Wordpress to break on updates, the eco-system at Wordpress needs serious attention.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#137

Post by Shared404 »

generalk wrote: post #76
Arathorn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Element (on Matrix) may be superficially a clone of slack or discord, but it already does some things significantly better: * End-to-end encryption * Spaces as freeform hierarchies of rooms * Widgets, to embed arbitrary webapps into your chatrooms * Open standard API However, the point is more that Matrix can do way more than this given it’s a protocol: Element Call is already a better UX for conferencing than Hangou…

Definitely, better marketing around differentiation. I'm a huge dork for open standards, I frequently miss the days of Gaim/Pidgin and having Google Talk be Jabber/XMPP underneath, and being able to IM my friends wherever. Personally, I'm probably going to dork around with Matrix/Element because it sounds like my kind of thing. But I can't figure why I'd switch to it for work. I moved my company recently from Teams t…

Depending on if/how often you use your internal chat to communicate with external partners, Matrix's bridging could be a selling factor.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#138

Post by caoweiyuan »

On this website, it only says "please do it", but didn't mention too much on "how". Own your platform is ideal, but makes your platform discoverable, maintainable, and even profitable is hard but possible. It needs protocols (like RSS, but much better). That is what our dreamer developers should work on.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#139

Post by KronisLV »

vinceguidry wrote: post #123
bragr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are using Cloudflare's specialized security services, CDN is pretty interchangeable and easy to switch between. You can ever do dynamic DNS things to use multiple CDNs at the same time and shift different traffic segments onto different providers if you are into that sort of things, or tier one CDN behind another to act as a mid tier. I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on C…

In other words, CDN isn't a platform, it's a service. Consume services, but own your platform. Cloudflare's not going to shut your web presence down because you're "competing" with them or just plain doing something they don't like. YouTube or Apple absolutely will.

> Cloudflare's not going to shut your web presence down because you're "competing" with them or just plain doing something they don't like.

While I agree with this distinction, I'm not entirely sure that this is wholly accurate.

The situations in which Cloudflare might have to intervene with legal content are probably pretty limited (e.g. content that would be legal, yet very controversial, or expose something about the company or something like that), but it's still possible.

As a thought experiment, consider a situation in which a person might be using a Russian CDN and would be hosting content about Ukrainian refugees (no intentions of getting political here, it's just a good example) - now I'm pretty sure that Russia might just make it illegal, but even without it being explicitly legal, a few strings could be pulled and the service to that site shut down. What about a Chinese CDN that expresses views that are different than the ruling government would approve of.

Maybe there should be an asterisk there - depending on the nature of your content, have both the services you use and the platform that you own be somewhere, where it won't cause problems.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#140

Post by mrtksn »

lancesells wrote: post #56
jlfyhilfyu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the damage is severe, I don't think it's permanent. Mastodon is far from a powerhouse, but is chugging along happily with a slowly growing user base. Matrix arrived just in time to help prevent Slack and Discord from becoming the defacto real-time communication systems for open source projects. Even SA is starting to heal now that it's out from under lowtax and his bullshit.

I agree with you. But I do think Mastodon and Matrix / Element all have a marketing problem. It's seems to be "here's a clone of a service you use but you own your content". I'm not saying that they don't do things better but they don't market it that way. To beat Twitter be better than Twitter. Make something memorable and unique, give features that beat the stockholder driven choices of the other guys.

I've heard of Mastadon, even tried it but couldn't get any value of the contents on it. The last time I looked at it, most of the content was about Mastadon and welcome messages. I was expecting to see some crazy stuff like flat earthers or antivaxxers but even that was not available.

I'm also not sure that I used it correctly, maybe I needed to find servers or something.

Anyway, my point it is that the lack of discoverability is not just a marketing issue but it seems like baked in these platforms. Something is not there yet and that's why it's not growing like crazy.

Post reply on HN