While 160,000 is a very small number compared to Facebook's user base, it's two orders of magnitude more than what the "thousands"in the title made me imagine. A more generous title would have used something like "a sixth of a million".
Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
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Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#132Is that headline damning with faint praise? Mere "thousands" doesn't seem like enough to get critical mass on a social network. For comparison Google+ had something on the order of 300 million users and failed to get traction.
The size of the network didn’t doom Google+. It was the product management
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#133To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...
Yes. At least Jimbo is trying. He might fail, but at least he tried. Network effect is a bitch, as others already noted.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#134The pricing to me seems horribly expensive especially as they are fighting a competitor that is ‘free’ and has way better network effects?
I'd like a non-evil social network, but there is already too many "only £10 a month" for the sake of arranging my pixels in amusing ways.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many users do you think HN has? No matter how many, I think I would call HN mostly a success (currently/temporary?). Seems that to have a good social network, it's less about quantity of content and more about quality. Most of Twitter is shit, but it contains some average content too, and a small amount of gold nuggets. HN feels to have much better signal/noise ratio and judging by myself and others who hang arou…
Is HS a social network? I think of it more like a forum. On HN I don't really care exactly who I interact with. It's just as good to me without my family and friends being users (better, in fact :). Real social networks aren't like that.
Yes I think it is a social network. They come in many shapes and forms. I think a forum is a social network too.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#136While 160,000 is a very small number compared to Facebook's user base, it's two orders of magnitude more than what the "thousands"in the title made me imagine. A more generous title would have used something like "a sixth of a million".
I agree. The title should have said "more than half a million people". then it would have sounded better.
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#137While 160,000 is a very small number compared to Facebook's user base, it's two orders of magnitude more than what the "thousands"in the title made me imagine. A more generous title would have used something like "a sixth of a million".
I agree. The title should have said "more than half a million people". then it would have sounded better.
It's not true though..? 160k is not more than half a million
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#138The pricing to me seems horribly expensive especially as they are fighting a competitor that is ‘free’ and has way better network effects?
I think there’s an uptick at the moment of paid online services. We’re getting four models:
1. Free commercial services supported by advertising.
2. Ad-free commercial services supported by subscriptions.
3. Open-source distributed services.
Arguably there’s a fourth category: free, ad-free commercial services supported by VC money to grow until reaches critical mass and pivots into a paid/advertising model.
The second option caters to a smaller crowd who are willing to pay for a better experience, but a “smaller crowd” defies conventional wisdom about social network effects. It’s an interesting experiment though. There are now dozens of news aggregators, streaming media services, gaming platforms, etc., competing for our monthly disposable income, so it may be a tough sell.
The NYT covered the shift towards subscription services recently: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/13/magazine/inte...
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#139Well can't say I'm not curious, but €90 a year is a lot of money. To pay that for just another service for procrastination? Maybe I'll pass. Although I definitely support the idea.
it's the old saying: "if you're not paying for using a product or you're not being paid to use a product, that means that you're the product". Deciding to pass on a service that asks you money to offer you a service is completely fine, as long as you don't later complain about "privacy issues" and "massive surveillance".
> that means that you're the product
paying in kind is still a valid form of payment
Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
#140Well can't say I'm not curious, but €90 a year is a lot of money. To pay that for just another service for procrastination? Maybe I'll pass. Although I definitely support the idea.
it's the old saying: "if you're not paying for using a product or you're not being paid to use a product, that means that you're the product". Deciding to pass on a service that asks you money to offer you a service is completely fine, as long as you don't later complain about "privacy issues" and "massive surveillance".
Most Mastodon instances cover bills with a handful of supporters on Patreon. Centralizing is what racks up the big dollar figures. Even mastodon.social only cost about $280/month to run as of mid 2018.
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Runni...
It's not necessary for everyone to pay if the topology is right. They could have joined the growing ActivityPub fediverse and set up a managed hosting thing the way one of the major Mastodon contributors did.
The centralized sites spend much of their money on marketing and making ad deals. You don't need that if the social network is a standard feature you bolt your software on to and don't depend on ads.