221–230 of 411 posts
Who actually wants this? Kids obsesses with TikTok don't care about federated/open source bits. People who do are not on TikTok or interested in this type of brainrot in the first place. What am I missing?
Maybe it could be what prescribed Methadone is to Heroin addicts.
Who actually wants this? Kids obsesses with TikTok don't care about federated/open source bits. People who do are not on TikTok or interested in this type of brainrot in the first place. What am I missing?
Yeah I can make a dropbox clone in a one-liner bash command too Outright dismissal like this should be judged as harshly as the comment itself.
This project would love some additional support. If you're a developer who is interested in building this... please get in touch with them, the team is VERY small so you can do some good by just supporting them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it could be what prescribed Methadone is to Heroin addicts.
Watching all these open source, federated versions of social media platforms is like if you found out your favourite drug was actually manufactured by some really bad people and made people around the world suffer. So you make an open source version of the drug. Similar formula, just this time the people can own it. Sure you cut out the bad people, but is the situation improved now?
E.g. https://patrida.de/
The HN cycle for federated alternatives is now complete: email → chat → microblogging → short video. We're speedrunning the "open-source version of things we claim to hate" timeline. Can't wait for the federated, self-hosted casino.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it could be what prescribed Methadone is to Heroin addicts.
Heroin is illegal, so the first step to make this analogy work is to criminalize TikTok.
The reality is that the addictive algorithm of commercial social media platforms is the product . These alternative platforms are like nicotine free cigarettes. They might garner small communities, which is totally cool and valid, but they will never slay the giants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Birth rates took a dip with broadband, smartphones, and TikTok. Dopamine and attention sinks are pulling society in directions counter to evolutionary programming. Our runtime algorithms optimize for different things. No value judgment, but it's interesting. I haven't had kids (yet?), and I feel the internet (and the career that revolves around it) is the biggest reason why.
Citation needed
Now that I'm googling for more deliberate correlations, I see other people are talking about this:
https://roytriggs.medium.com/internet-use-and-birth-rates-an...
https://fortune.com/well/2025/03/28/phones-declining-birth-r...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriage-c...
"The phone killed babies" tracks with my intuition about this. Data correlates.
Finances aren't keeping me from having kids. The internet is. Smartphones are. Weird as that sounds. I can unpack more and expand this into a conversation.
I'm imagining an initial group of agents scraping the web for events (twitter/x, science/eng/business publications) that could potentially translate to stories that their end users (humans) might be interested in.
those stories get picked up by another set of bots (equivalent to reddit posters) and get published on an agent-only social network where a diverse set of agents with different "backgrounds"/personalities comment and discuss on the story.
inputs from this post (article + comments) are picked up by an 'editor' agent and go into a final summarized article designed for human eyes or humans personal agent or newsfeed agent.
humans being the end users browse their (ai enhanced) newsfeed which has its own private, continuously evolving algorithms based on knowledge of 1) what and 2) how its human likes to consume/think.
information is "backpropagated" to inform/reinforce the initial scraper group of bots on what to look out for.