The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

I'm interested about the public benefit corporation part here. Did the PBC status wind up changing anything at all here? How does a PBC sell itself or get acquired? How is a PBC supposed to terminate or wind down? If they violate their charter as Ello may have, who exactly enforces it or file a lawsuit, and what is their compensation?

I remember when something-something twitter tried to migrate to Threads for like a week.

And to Mastodon before that.

Remember when tech Reddit tried to migrate to Lemmy?

A hardcore handful of people migrate await from the Death Star and stay migrated (maybe a couple hundred medium accounts, and 1 or 2 bigger ones), but everybody else trickles back onto the Death Star eventually.

The only thing that works to get people permanently migrated away is complete enshitification of the existing platform (i.e. Digg effect). Partial enshitification isn't enough.

I've got 5 on it, DM for Venmo when you get your shirt or 10 weeks have elapsed since purchase.

Taking investor money means users will required to pay, one way or another.

Without an explicitly capped profit, I can't see how this doesn't eventually lead to exploitation of the users.

I would like to see a donation/optional subscription model with tiered features as is seen in Patreon/Kickstarter etc. with the distinction that the tiers are community wide instead of being bound to the individuals donating.

Display an income bar. If it drops to zero the servers turn off. If it drops below 1 nobody can post. If it is above 1 you have Direct messaging, above 2 you have more features, etc. Keep the communication clear as to what is being provided and how it is being paid for.

Most people won't pay, but if nobody pays there is no service. Its survival would depend upon providing a service that satisfies enough people to sustain the support. This certainly wouldn't be as lucrative as a exploit the users model, but the idea is not to make a fortune, but to simply run a sustainable enterprise.

I'm amazed by the number of people who trust websites like this with their memories/diaries etc. I mean, I understand why, there's an expectation when you start with these sites they'll be around forever - most people don't have the time, the knowledge or the desire to "do it themselves" - When livejournal was all the rage I decided to do it myself with Postnuke, then (and still!) Drupal. Going on 24 years now. That said, LiveJournal is still going, but owned by a Russian company I think, and it could turn off tomorrow.

I guess the flipside is, if I die tomorrow and then there's a PHP error on my website, no one's ever going to know how to fix it. So my memories and diary entries die as well. My "fix" for that is to export the ~2400 diary entires every few months into one massive PDF file.

Edit: I understand why this is being downvoted, I just want to clarify that I didn't mean the opening sentence to read as if people who trust 3rd party websites to their hosting were silly/dumb, though I realise now that's how it scans. What I should have said was "It's very unfortunate and a sad state of the current Internet that people trust websites like this..."