Hacker News Reader

Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

I've proposed a business model for a while for Twitter: take their software and whitelabel it for institutions, media, or whoever's big enough to own their own domain name and wants to have their own @namespace @example.com

this would be a good fit for large media sites (journalism twitter is huge), government, businesses. let them pay.

examples of this being expressed here by me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654

View on HN

You might be surprised to know the NSA has already cloned versions of Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter onto US classified networks so IC and DoD agents can use them to publish and exchange classified information the same way influencers use normal social media. I can't remember what they call the Tumblr clone, but the Twitter one is eChirp and the Facebook one is called Tapioca.

It's not like there's anything all that complicated about the basic tech model of "loosely synchronized, eventually consistent live data feed algorithmically sorted with the ability to follow and group sources." Where these services earn their valuations is in sheer scale of the user base combined with the backend telemetry and machine learning services that drive user profiling and personalized ads, but government institutional use would not want or need those features. As far as I know, eChirp and Tapioca are maintained by volunteers and functionally equivalent to Twitter and Facebook if you stripped out the features built for serving personalized ads and maximizing reader engagement.

I hope they're saying good things about me on there.

You are describing Mastodon [1]

[1]: https://joinmastodon.org

hah, yes in a way I am.

edit: Eugen, you can steal this business model from Twitter if they don't want to play in this space. Run Mastodon-as-a-service and sell it to institutional actors. I don't know who runs Masto.Host but they seem to be positioned to offer your software as a service to these groups.

There are other AP implementations that can be sold (as a service) to these large pocketed groups, not just your own software product.

another edit: this may leave a sour taste in your mouth but you now have a notable political user of your software, one that more than likely does not have the technical competence to be running it on their own. Someone could be making money off of them by providing a managed, white-labeled Mastodon instance (and then be responsible for scaling, security, availability, all the devops shit, etc). Not saying that should be you, but someone could.

This doesn’t make any sense. If people are willing to pay for a Twitter like service they are going to pay Twitter before they pay for mastodon instances

And companies already run their own Mastodon instances - the Japanese imageboard/artist website Pixiv runs a Mastodon instance called Pawoo. That's apparently how elephants and/or mammoths sound like in Japanese. :)

sounds like Pixiv has the ops expertise to potentially run Mastodon-as-a-Service to those who would pay to host a managed instance.

There's value in managed services (security, keeping updates applied, uptime, scaling, etc etc)

If there's someone at Pixiv reading this and looking to pivot, I won't feel bad if you take this idea and run with it.

That's great but I just don't see the value there

Governments don't get value from Twitter?

Journalists don't get value from Twitter?

Influencers and other business users don't get value from Twitter? Sports teams? Non-commercial entities?

I appreciate your insight but I disagree with your analysis.

That doesn't mean they'd get value by running their own namespace though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com