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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

This is a good idea – but impossible.

Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models.

How do you compete with that?

The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause.

But that doesn’t happen. There’s not enough engineers that would volunteer their time for this. In fact, most engineers either don’t care at all about this stuff, or they drank the kool aid and believe Google and Facebook are doing good.

As long as there’s so many developers that want to work at Facebook, as long as Google has more resources than you, you won’t be able to outcompete them on technology.

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> Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models.

and many of them are bent towards developing internal garbage, or services that you just don't need if you're not hoping to create huge monoliths. or, as others have pointed out, making the same service over and over.

> How do you compete with that?

having different goals reduces the extent to which you're competing, and different goals leads to different (possibly easier to satisfy) constraints.

This same argument has been made countless times. "Linux has no chance in the corporate world. HP has thousands of paid devs working on HP-UX."

It turned out there were a greater number of devs NOT at HP... and today, there are more devs NOT at Facebook.

But Linux only worked because there's many companies contributing to it.

So which company would have the resources and reasons for contributing to an entirely open social network, with no way to monetize it?

> But Linux only worked because there's many companies contributing to it.

Who says this won't happen as well to an open collaboration platform? Who says companies wouldn't benefit from it, or that they need to monetize it directly? Companies contributed to Linux because they got benefits by participating in the operating system. Open source works like that; adding to a common resource is beneficial for oneself and the community at the same time.

Similarly, an open platform like matrix.org can provide huge benefits for internal communication in a company; and making public the tweaks that you create internally is a great way to influence the direction of the software, as well as making it easier to integrate the improvements made by others. This is how Linux grew to what it is today, after all.

Of course it could happen.

But we've had open source alternatives for many of these things for many years, and no company has gone to support any of them.

There's no company backing mastodon, and very little support for similar tools.

Of course it could happen. But it's not happening.

Right, but my point is that the reason for not happening is not a lack of monetization strategies, but one of critical mass.

If a free software collaboration platform gains traction in the enterprise, it could be pushed as a safe alternative in the next data scandal, and maybe enough people could switch to it to become a viable public resource like Linux and Apache have been since the turn of the century. It's a plausible scenario, even if it's not guaranteed to happen soon.

Linux became popular because it was free as in beer, because it was essentially a clone of pre-existing systems that lots of programmers happened to like (the commercial UNIXes) and because those competing systems were fairly stagnant.

So far open source communities haven't really tried to clone Facebook to the level of detail required to make people feel at home, and you're already competing against 'free'. So that avenue isn't available either.

I suspect it isn't possible to compete with Facebook because for most people it isn't broken.

A free OS for PCs is a good idea -- but impossible. Microsoft and Apple have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Microsoft and Apple have research labs where they can subject their OS to hundreds of thousands of user-hours of testing for usability, scalability, and robustness.

How do you compete with that?

With tenthousands of corporate developers from RedHat, Google, IBM?

Do you seriously think Torvalds, Stallmann and a few dozen enthusiasts could maintain all of the Linux ecosystem?

Red Hat and Google got into their advantageous positions by building their businesses on top of Linux in the first place, back when people were saying it would never compete with Microsoft or big-iron Unix.

Linux?

I believe the parent was intentionally mirroring the grandparent comment to make the argument that Linux is a good counterexample.

Not only that, but I was almost directly quoting the arguments that were routinely used against Linux back in the 90s.

I believe he was being sarcastic

What blows my mind is how much money Facebook gets from ads. I've never clicked a Facebook ad except by accident. And yet they get paid more for my presence than I'd ever be willing to pay for a social network.

That's the real rub for me. I mean, we imagine the ideal "decentrialized but user-friendly web". Like, there's an online open architecture of servers where you have a cryptographically-controlled "account" for your family and you can easily buy plug-ins to add features to this account. Like an app store but for webapps all linked to your private migrateable data store. And you can sync that data down to some kind of ubiquitous home box appliance as a local back-up/cache, or move it over to another host because it's an open architecture.

Presumably, if you wanted to enroll your family into a social network that's not based on selling you, you'd have to pay for it. So how much is a social network worth? I sure wouldn't pay $50/year for that program for my family.

That's potentially the loophole that could work: The end user gets paid the ad money, and has direct access to the datastore that the advertisers are using in order to edit out bad or undesirable data.

Most people don't worry about ML models or anything like that. They just want something that works, and works well. And, at least in the case of FB, something that their friends/relatives are also available on. You don't need open source devs working on the technical side; you need open source work done on the interface side. You need things that non-technically inclined people can pick up and use.

Devs are not the problem, especially not the amount of them. Google has so many devs, sure, maybe that's why we now have 7 messaging app from them...

The tools for the open web are present, just check https//indieweb.org

Comformist, lazy people, our own friends, are the problem. I'd love to see how to make them care.

I'd start by not calling your own friends "conformist" and "lazy". And instead, try to understand where they come from.

We won't solve problems by shouting at each other.

I lost contact with many people because none of them respected me constantly asking to keep in touch outside of facebook - email, for example.

I don't have lighter words, even if I consider them friends.

Moving on from grammar and culture (in my read, I wasn't offensive, merely stated a fact), what actual solutions, proposals, ideas, can you contribute?

This idea that "merely stating a fact" means you can't be offensive is part of the problem. Your original statement was pretty insulting and offensive, no matter how true you believe it was. If you want to change things, culture is a huge part of achieving that, and being able to express these concerns without being insulting to other people like that is a huge part of it.

I've tried to run platforms for people, Movim, Diaspora, Buddycloud, a lot of things, nobody was interested, because it's simpler to stay on facebook, because it's convenient, and because running a website is a lot of work - these are actual responses I got.

They are lazy, that's the sad truth.

How did you sell those platforms to them? How did you explain that they're better than Facebook? And, given that all the people they want to talk to are already on Facebook, why should they go off to this thing they've never heard of, that they're going to have to administer, which doesn't have any of the people they want to talk to.

It's not that any of them are lazy. They simply have other priorities for what to do with their time, and other priorities for how a social network should work. To them, those alternatives don't provide the value that Facebook provides to them.

If you want to convince others to not use Facebook, I highly suggest you not fall into the trap of deciding that people who don't share your priorities are "lazy".

Culture is the issue. The long standing Internet tradition of "I didn't intend to be offensive, so it's fine that I was, and I should continue to be" is at the root of the entire problem.

Most people don't care for that kind of environment. And so we splinter, and wall off. We're using technological restrictions as a substitute for cultural norms. And so, my original statement still stands - if you want to change the situations, change what your norms are, and influence global norms that way.

So... how and what do you propose to reach people who keep using walled gardens, despite what's known about them, and that they even have people trying to get them to used something else?

I don't think he was shouting.

What words do you use to categorize/describe your lazy conformist friends?

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