Medium, that's a name I haven't seen in a while.
Always Own Your Platform (2019)
61–70 of 190 posts
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#62There are several tiers here:
1. Those who have the money to spend on building a web app with their own payment processor, etc. to sell their content or services.
2. Those that use Shopify to do the payment processing and GUI tools to build the website.
3. Those who simply create an entry on Instagram or Google maps and upload a bunch of photos and their phone number
4. Those who don't even bother with the above
So it is clearly a trade off where you can outsource the hosting of what you want to present at various levels. I feel the number of people at each tier is exponentially larger than the tier above. So no, owning the platform is not going to be main stream, ever.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#63We've reached a point where you have choices about platforms and have the ability to export the data you input into a platform, back out. Maybe not in a format that's ideal, but it doesn't require the vendor's permission to extract your data out anymore.
We can thank a mix of European legislative changes which pushed global policy changes, some sane Large Enterprise software procurement teams (only took 20 years) who normalized asking for it, and scrappy startups with hard-line policies in the Valley who made it trendy to implement these features.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#64With regards to RSS, I'm building a new RSS reader focussed on using RSS without being overwhelmed. That's achieved by giving priority to sources and categories, and having a limit on the number of items per source.
If that sounds interesting to you, please give it try https://lenns.io. You can import/export your subscriptions so you can come and go whenever you want.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#65From 2006 to 2014 I owned my own platform. Several actually. But I turned them down after it became a lot of work to maintain. At the time, it wasn't so obvious the web was dying, but in hindsight I probably helped kill it. In the beginning the web was so new, and growing so fast, with new things, amazing sites, and more people getting online. Like all things in life, competition arises, and better sites started gett…
For most regular non-tech people this is true. I think it’s best to control your own platform but you can still leverage Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc to grow your brand and make sure they’re onboarded to your own platform of sorts.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#66> Distribute [your content] via methods you control. I'm being nitpicky but it feels off to me to call people out on owning their own platform but then use Cloudflare's CDN instead of running their own. And if they did run their own CDN, they would probably have to use AWS or another worldwide cloud provider and not own the hardware. And if I were Richard Stallman I would probably come down on you for using proprieta…
Unless you are using Cloudflare's specialized security services, CDN is pretty interchangeable and easy to switch between. You can ever do dynamic DNS things to use multiple CDNs at the same time and shift different traffic segments onto different providers if you are into that sort of things, or tier one CDN behind another to act as a mid tier. I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on C…
> I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs
+1,000,000 here. CDNs are exactly a mechanism for distributing content around the world in order to serve users locally. It's exactly decentralization! And, as you point out, the industry harbors healthy competition.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#67Previous (2019): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20145704
Off topic: this was posted and reposted four times in 2019 in a burst of three in March and two in June. The only one which hit was June 10, 2019. Well, as they say, second to last try is the charm.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the damage is severe, I don't think it's permanent. Mastodon is far from a powerhouse, but is chugging along happily with a slowly growing user base. Matrix arrived just in time to help prevent Slack and Discord from becoming the defacto real-time communication systems for open source projects. Even SA is starting to heal now that it's out from under lowtax and his bullshit.
I agree with you. But I do think Mastodon and Matrix / Element all have a marketing problem. It's seems to be "here's a clone of a service you use but you own your content". I'm not saying that they don't do things better but they don't market it that way. To beat Twitter be better than Twitter. Make something memorable and unique, give features that beat the stockholder driven choices of the other guys.
> But I do think Mastodon and Matrix / Element all have a marketing problem. It's seems to be "here's a clone of a service you use but you own your content".
Well, Slack and Discord have the ability to throw around money to solve that problem. Open source projects mostly don't.
So, open source projects have to hit some nerve and then slowly grow into useful and then a dominant project. See: the trajectory of Blender.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the damage is severe, I don't think it's permanent. Mastodon is far from a powerhouse, but is chugging along happily with a slowly growing user base. Matrix arrived just in time to help prevent Slack and Discord from becoming the defacto real-time communication systems for open source projects. Even SA is starting to heal now that it's out from under lowtax and his bullshit.
It's funny because you could argue that slack and discord replaced IRC. I wonder if we will have cycles or if commercial hosted solutions will always win this arms race.
one could argue irc has improved by the platformists abandoning it.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the damage is severe, I don't think it's permanent. Mastodon is far from a powerhouse, but is chugging along happily with a slowly growing user base. Matrix arrived just in time to help prevent Slack and Discord from becoming the defacto real-time communication systems for open source projects. Even SA is starting to heal now that it's out from under lowtax and his bullshit.
I agree with you. But I do think Mastodon and Matrix / Element all have a marketing problem. It's seems to be "here's a clone of a service you use but you own your content". I'm not saying that they don't do things better but they don't market it that way. To beat Twitter be better than Twitter. Make something memorable and unique, give features that beat the stockholder driven choices of the other guys.
Element (on Matrix) may be superficially a clone of slack or discord, but it already does some things significantly better:
* End-to-end encryption
* Spaces as freeform hierarchies of rooms
* Widgets, to embed arbitrary webapps into your chatrooms
* Open standard API
However, the point is more that Matrix can do way more than this given it’s a protocol: Element Call is already a better UX for conferencing than Hangouts or Zoom; thirdroom.io is a super promising virtual world system built on Matrix, etc.
We probably do need to market it better though!