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The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

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Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#141

Post by paulddraper »

edm0nd wrote: post #113
paulddraper wrote: post #98

> I figured I’d publish a short list of things Ello will never do: > ... > 2. Tolerate hate. Ello has many tools, some visible and others not, that help keep this network positive. Geez, it's hard to take anything said as authentic with a statement like that. How can you talk about things without "hate"? "I hate shoveling snow." "I hate terrorists." "I hate this political candidate." "I hate Taylor Swift music."

It's universally known that that means things like racist imagery/text content, not content like "I hate cake" or Tswift.

It's universally know that this means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, whenever the speaker wants to mean it.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#142

Post by paulddraper »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #121

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.

> social networking is just a bad business model

I think Meta is doing pretty well...

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#143

Post by paulddraper »

otteromkram wrote: post #115

I don't see why Ello didn't just turn into a Pinterest + Etsy + DeviantArt hybrid. Let artists show off work, let them seem their art/products, take a percentage of the sale as profit. Maybe that's a bad business model for a social-media-first platform.

Yeah, I don't get it.

Be a marketplace, and charge commission.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#144

Post by aleph_minus_one »

skybrian wrote: post #135
sirspacey wrote: post #132

Excellent, balanced post. We’re at the end of a grand experiment of “you can take VC money and deliver a tech with new values, one that people want.” The only people still claiming you can just haven’t run out of their last funding round… yet. We have 20 years of evidence on what tech businesses can be built on the Internet that make money. It’s narrow and mostly can’t solve the problems that remain. The escape hatch…

The founders themselves could also lose interest over the years if the website isn't as popular as they hoped, and it's still a slog.

> The founders themselves could also lose interest over the years if the website isn't as popular as they hoped, and it's still a slog.

Rather: the founders are lying and deceiving if they talk about their great vision and its importance for mankind, if in reality they are just looking for popularity, and are eschewing the slog.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#145

Post by warkdarrior »

Kye wrote: post #122
d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #121

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.

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.

Who is funding Mastodon servers?

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#146

Post by aleph_minus_one »

laurex wrote: post #59
dopeboy wrote: post #11

I'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…

Bootstrapping social tech ain’t easy. Expectations that this tech is free, plus the immediate need for support and safety for general populations mean that it’s very different than say, B2B SaaS.

> Bootstrapping social tech ain’t easy. Expectations that this tech is free, plus the immediate need for support and safety for general populations

Start with and focus on an audience that has different expectations than the general population.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#147

Post by aleph_minus_one »

kelnos wrote: post #123
NoraCodes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> Same, but I realize that nearly everyone I correspond with uses Gmail, so Google has all my emails regardless.

I know some very privacy-focused person (a friend of mine) who will stop being willing to be in contact with you (or being your friend) if you use an email address at one of these big spying email providers to write him an email.

So, it is just a matter of being consequential.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#148

Post by jrm4 »

Kye wrote: post #122
d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #121

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.

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.

Right. This thread should be talking about Mastodon FAR earlier. I do not care AT ALL that VCs can't figure out how to make money from social media directly; if anything, I expect that. It shows that there's nothing particularly intelligent (and maybe perhaps even useful) about VC money.

There are other models. Lots of them. We've seen a ton of them work to various degrees.

Now, Mastodon is probably the right model for social media. I wish folks here could get their collective heads out of VC-money-land and realize this (presuming one thinks that there is utility in social media, which I do.)

And much like the internet itself, there's even money here as well.

Ask Eli Lilly. If they had signed on to something like Mastodon, where they could be their OWN source of truth, perhaps they wouldn't have had their "Insulin is free" moment.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#149

Post by rabuse »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #121

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.

Except that a lot of these companies have multi-billion dollar valuations currently...

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#150

Post by Analemma_ »

Kye wrote: post #65

Makes me think about how Bluesky is also a Public Benefit Corporation and took $8m in funding.

I mean Bluesky is founded by Jack Dorsey, who made a fortune for shareholders with his last social media company by conning an idiot into paying way above market value for it. Of course it'll be hard to make that particular lightning bolt strike twice, but it's not like he doesn't have a good track record.
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