Comment by _ps6d | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ps6d | Hacker News Reader

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That's me, yes. And you're setting me up so perfectly here that I almost feel guilty about it:

A few months after I left reddit, I started a non-profit and have been building a new HN/reddit-like community site that can stick to the principles I believe are important (including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads). The announcement post is probably still the best explanation overall: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)

The site's been public to view (but still needs an invite to register) for a few months now, so anyone can have a look: https://tildes.net

Feel free to email me for an invite if anyone's interested, the address is in the blog post. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth under control while we keep building up a base site culture and features.

> including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads

What are your plans when user-supported revenue is not enough to keep the servers running?

The current level of donations is already over 5x what's needed to pay for the server expenses, and it can probably handle 100x the traffic.

"Sustainable" is a much easier goal than needing to be worth billions of dollars to make your investors happy.

I’m still surprised that I can’t donate my resources toward a distributed DB/web server for this kind of content. E.g. by subscribing, I automatically start serving content and/or augmenting other mirrors. As some channels I subscribe to become stale, I automatically start re-assigning my resources to keep it alive.

Basically a BitTorrent/Tor-like decentralized system for distribute DBs with a web front end.

The amount of server resources I consume from fora must be 1/10000th the excess CPU/HD/bandwidth capacity I have.

I’m sure some cryptocoin project is working on something like this.

Ha, I’m working on this. It’s called Aether: http://getaether.net. You contribute bandwidth / cpu / storage by being a peer on the network. It’s less Medium and more Slashdot / Reddit though.

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