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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

The main challenge to successful (i.e., market-dominating) cooperatively-owned platforms like the ones Cory wants is that usually there are no incentives that motivate individuals to dedicate their lives and souls in the creation, launching, running, and perpetual improvement of such platforms for the benefit of others.

The exceptions, including successful projects like GNU and Linux, tend to be led by rather unique individuals, like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvals, who are almost religiously zealous about their mission, and they maintain their commitment year after year, and decade after decade, without any personal profit motive.

Barring these exceptions, Capitalism seems to be the "least-worst solution" to this problem that human civilization has evolved over millennia, so far.

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Creating a federated platform is technically quite feasible. E-mail, the Web, Usenet (before it was overrun by spam anyway), IRC... plus these days, stuff like PeerTube and Mastodon. Sure, not every one of these is "successful", but the trend is there.

The trend is definitely not there. The trend is away from IRC towards Slack, away from open web to walled gardens (or trashpiles) of Facebook, away from Usenet towards unfederated forums like this one.

I agree but:

>[...] away from Usenet towards unfederated forums like this one.

We're actually one step beyond that already, the era of forums is behind us, now people open a Facebook page or Subreddit when they want to create a community around a given topic instead of powering up a new PHPBB instance like they might have 15 years ago. Forums like HN are getting increasingly niche.

I don't like this trend but I think it makes complete sense. Centralized solutions offer generally better user experience (you don't have to monitor 10 different websites or watch your emails for notifications, you don't have to create dozen of accounts etc...), they're easier to develop, easier to maintain and, perhaps critically, easier to monetize.

These days I only see the cryptocurrency communities betting on a decentralized future (instead of merely wishing for it without much hope like I do).

The trend is away from federated services.

Email, the Web, and Usenet were all created before the modal HN user was born. Of those three, Usenet is basically not a going concern (beyond paid binary newsgroups for piracy, honestly). The Web is increasingly siloed off. What federation there is exists largely thanks to commercial CDNs and peering, not user-facing federation that benefits user freedom.

I'm not sure IRC was ever motivated as a federated model. It's true users can run an IRC server, but the main advantage of IRS compared to previous attempts at multi-user chatting (whether asynchronous like BBSes or synchronous like early chat platforms) was that it allowed confederation of servers into server networks. But also my impression is certainly that IRC is moribund with many long-time users having pivoted to Slack or Discord, both centralized.

Rather, where federation is growing, it's largely recent, fringe experiments. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, let a thousand flowers bloom. Mastodon might end up working out for some definition of working out. I doubt PeerTube will.

But in any case, it's more accurate to say that some of the early internet was built on decentralized platforms, some of which were federated, and that recently some tech enthusiasts have recently written some interesting, maybe promising federated platforms. There is definitely not a trend toward federation.

Creating and maintaining something are entirely different problems. People need to be paid for electricity and internet costs. People need to eat.

Maybe a crypto solution with tokens as fee for manipulating the application.

EOS? Staking your tokens to the system provides you compute power on the network.

> no incentives that motivate individuals to dedicate their lives and souls in the creation, launching, running, and perpetual improvement of such platforms for the benefit of others.

Except this is not just a problem with the owners (and to some extent you are wrong, there are CEOs motivated by that, they still by and large fail).

Because ...

There are no workers motivated like that either. People do not want this.

In the vast majority of businesses, the CEO is the only one that cares about anything more than next month's pay check. Even if there are a few exceptions among the employees they remain big exceptions.

This sort of business can't work unless CEO and everybody else cares about the mission of the company. And there are no such people.

Particularly in Big Tech™, a lot of engineers tend to be motivated by the company mission. You don't build companies like Facebook without a cadre of true believers.

What do the FB "true believers" believe? Is the belief the same one now as it was five or ten years ago?

They believe everything and nothing. To them, It doesn't matter - they just need belief. They are sad, lonely, and afraid people who are rightly afraid, they just don't have the understanding that they're afraid because they're in an abusive relationship with themselves. Facebook gives them the belief that they're doing something important, part of something bigger.

I left Google when I became disillusioned (when my own depression became too overwhelming - I left rather than be put on a PIP). Facebook seemed like a place where I could regain my purpose, but instead the illusion was shattered. I've let myself be taken in by that illusion since, but the reality is that the people who offer that illusion are predators, and should be treated with the suspicion that that entails.

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