Has anyone ever considered that social networking is just a bad business model? It's something that everyone wants to use, expensive to run but nobody wants to pay for.
The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
121–130 of 264 posts
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#122Has anyone ever considered that social networking is just a bad business model? It's something that everyone wants to use, expensive to run but nobody wants to pay for.
Mastodon and ActivityPub prove another funding model can work even up to millions of active users. There are plenty of criticisms people have for them, but they're beside the point: it works.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and ̶G̶m̶a̶i̶l̶ email is such a successful example.
It is. I switched away from Gmail; many have.
Same, but I realize that nearly everyone I correspond with uses Gmail, so Google has all my emails regardless. (Ok, they don't get my transactional email, since those are usually sent through something like Sendgrid, but... yeah.)
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#124I'm not sure why this post focuses so much on the angel investment. There are probably 10 reasons why Ello failed, starting with the fact that bootstrapping social network userbases is hard, and ending with users won't pay for social networks. None of these are directly related to the fact they built the site with investor money and not volunteer hours.
They are imo directly related. Seven people working on ello means it's hard to understand, even on ramen salaries, how that costs less than $1m a year once you fully burden those salaries, buy office space, buy hosting, etc.
So they've set themselves up from the beginning to spend more money than they make, and everything downstream flowed from that choice.
If they had to be cash-flow breakeven from the get, they would have to have charged users. ie built a completely different product, with a different audience.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#125That's a name I haven't thought of for several years. I wonder if Fediverse, Blue Sky, etc will catch, or if it'll end up in the same boat. Threads too (yes it's backed by Meta, but G+ had Google behind it ...)
There's a couple of key differences between Google backing Google+ and Meta backing Threads. 1. Meta's entire business is social apps, and Google's is not. There are strategic differences in approach as a result. 2. Google+ was an attempt to disrupt Facebook's rise at the height of Facebook's popularity. People _liked_ FB then - so trying to get them to switch to another product was harder. Threads shipped during a t…
Additionally, Google never seemed to be able to answer why someone should use Google+ in lieu of Facebook except that it would be very nice for Google if people would.
Whereas threads has the obvious benefit of attempting to grow while Twitter is self destructing.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#126I'm a recovering founder after winding down my startup a couple months ago. I've been thinking about getting back on the saddle and in service of that, meeting with folks who could be potential co-founders. One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation. You _hav…
Which path do you want to go with in your next startup?
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#127That's a name I haven't thought of for several years. I wonder if Fediverse, Blue Sky, etc will catch, or if it'll end up in the same boat. Threads too (yes it's backed by Meta, but G+ had Google behind it ...)
There's a couple of key differences between Google backing Google+ and Meta backing Threads. 1. Meta's entire business is social apps, and Google's is not. There are strategic differences in approach as a result. 2. Google+ was an attempt to disrupt Facebook's rise at the height of Facebook's popularity. People _liked_ FB then - so trying to get them to switch to another product was harder. Threads shipped during a t…
G+ also tried (was told to?) show relevance to other Google products by becoming a universal and mandated discussion thread mechanism. It wasn't ready. Got the totally expected blowback.
In contrast Meta isn't trying to Threadify everything. The addition of ActivityPub is an experiment that should be run in Threads.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#128I started building an open source private blogging system[1] when my first kid was born, and it eventually evolved into the skeleton of a social network--but fully decentralized using RSS and self- (or paid-) hosting. I concluded the only way for a network to actually avoid selling out was for there to be nothing to sell. If I give away the software, and don't control the network then there is no need for users to tr…
maybe there is a fitting product to be found. first thing that pops to mind is hardware. Something like a tiny home server that works out of the box. Could go the piratebox route (a single website wifi hotspot) could have it do something mesh networking. perhaps stick a webcam on it.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#129I'd joined Ello early[1] on and watched its journey with interest, frustration, and ultimately sadness. That included an on-site visit in October 2015, which was genuinely enjoyable. I'd largely written off the site around 2018 when it was sold and information on either the status of the social benefit corporation (SBC) or new ownership was exceedingly scarce. Andy Baio's account corresponds strongly with my own.
The community was small (I'd estimated total accounts at perhaps 10--15 million, and actives at roughly 1% of that, generally confirmed during my visit), but vibrant in its own way, and as with numerous other social networks, I miss numerous connections I'd made there, though a small handful have resumed at the Fediverse. There really were some notable gems among the group I connected with, including Paul Mason (journalist, briefly), poet Trenton Lee Tiemeyer, authors Ksenia Anske and Bruce Sterling, SVG guru David Dailey, and others.
Most disquieting was how Ello died with neither notice to its members or commentary elsewhere. TFA here is among the very few accounts I've seen of its demise. (I've written a few times about it at the Fediverse myself.)
The other concern, going far beyond Ello, is how little protection or guarantee either its manifesto or SBC status ended up providing. Going forward, I'm going to give similar attestations vanishingly slight weight.
Having participated in online communities since the late 1980s (Usenet, mailing lists, Slashdot, Google+, Diaspora*, Reddit, Ello, the quite short-lived Imzy, amongst others), I'm reminded of the song "dumb ways to die": there are many ways for a social network to die, most of them depressingly uncreative.
The flip side is that it's also difficult for a social network to survive, let alone thrive, and survival. Commercial pressures from every thing I've seen worsen this, though even noncommercial / non-ad-supported sites may see failure modes.
Of the best communities I've encountered:
- Early Usenet, when access was strongly predicated on academic affiliation.
- 1990s-era mailing lists, most especially those focused around Unix / Linux and Free Software topics. (Broader-appeal mailing lists ... tended to function poorly.)
- Google+, in patches. The fact that the social network wasn't ad-dependent, and had strong representation from the tech community were strengths, and some of the best engaging online conversations I've had were from there. Diaspora*, though vastly smaller, saw a substantial portion of my G+ community engage there and had similar dynamics which also made for some good discussions, though not quite as often.
- The Fediverse. Not quite as rewarding as G+, but I strongly suspect it will prove far more enduring.
- Hacker News. As with G+, not directly intended as a revenue-generating platform. Not as good as it could be, but far better many other options, and astonishingly consistent over a very long lifetime (approaching 20 years), which would beat out Usenet by quite a margin.[2] I'd chalk up HN's durability to a few factors: unsexy tech and appearance, stellar moderation, solid design principles, and a viable founding cohort and active community. There are of course criticisms of the site and I've made a few myself, but relative to much the rest of the Net, still running strong.
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Notes:
1. The Internet Archive has some captures: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://ello.co/dredmorbius>
2. Usenet's birth date was ~1979. By 1999 it was well past its sell-by date, though not completely dead.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#130Makes me think about how Bluesky is also a Public Benefit Corporation and took $8m in funding.
Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it, or whatever the saying is.
"History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes"
- possibly Theodor Reik [1]
I expect Bluesky to make their own mistakes.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/