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This is a refreshingly honest shutdown notice. Congratulations to Dalton and co for trying something hard and worthwhile, and wrapping it up responsibly when it didn't pan out.
This is an unfortunate, but not unexpected, end of an era. App.net was created at a time when discontent was high with how Twitter was treating its users and 3rd party app developers. Even though App.net wasn't hugely successful, its existence provided a needed check against Twitter exercising user-hostile control over their platform. However, it has not been a viable platform (one that people actually used) for many…
Did Twitter actually do anything in response to App.net?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
or put another way, "people don't want to pay for most things"
Personally, I always wanted to see a site that has ads and is free to read, but charges a small fee to create an account - just to see if it would help reduce trolling and sock puppets.
Anonymous users see ads. Authenticated users don't. It costs $5 for an account.
They have run funding drives but, to date, $5/user keeps the lights on and provides a small crew of moderators each a modest stipend.
Edit: spelling, grammar.
This seems like a good juncture to point out that GNU Social, OStatus, and the Fediverse still exist. It still has some believers. Someone wrote a new implementation in Ruby called Mastodon recently, which has a nice interface.
(I'm looking to self host.)
This is an unfortunate, but not unexpected, end of an era. App.net was created at a time when discontent was high with how Twitter was treating its users and 3rd party app developers. Even though App.net wasn't hugely successful, its existence provided a needed check against Twitter exercising user-hostile control over their platform. However, it has not been a viable platform (one that people actually used) for many…
Did Twitter actually do anything in response to App.net?
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2013/01/14/twitter-in-2012/
I think what everyone was worried about back then was that Twitter was changing the nature of what Twitter was. Twitter started placing limits on API tokens, introduced new UI in the form of cards, which could also be used for ads, etc. There was a sense that the freedom and openness of the Twitter platform was quickly diminishing.
Twitter's response was basically no response, but in a good way. They slowed down making those sorts of radical changes, and to this day you can still browse Twitter with a 3rd-party app like TweetBot and never see cards or ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
or put another way, "people don't want to pay for most things"
Personally, I always wanted to see a site that has ads and is free to read, but charges a small fee to create an account - just to see if it would help reduce trolling and sock puppets.
This seems like a good juncture to point out that GNU Social, OStatus, and the Fediverse still exist. It still has some believers. Someone wrote a new implementation in Ruby called Mastodon recently, which has a nice interface.
Do you know of a good tutorial on how to quickly get set up on one of these? I would gladly join but have never really been able to figure out how . (I'm looking to self host.)
Why is it so hard to create a Twitter alternative that's popular and effective? Does the world tend to gravitate towards single standards for these things, like Facebook, HTTP or email?
App.net and Medium have the same issue (why advertising is more lucrative than selling blogging software directly to content creators): Let's say for every one content creator that are on average 100 eyeballs on the content they create (1:100). Almost universally, the 100 eyeballs can be translated to more economic value than the 1, and hence why the advertising model is so lucrative.