Comment by foresto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foresto | Hacker News Reader

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I would love this, or something like it, but I don't think it can happen until hosting is effectively free and managing it is dead easy.

Not everyone has access to a $100 server, reliable power, and unmetered internet, let alone the knowledge and time to be their own sysadmin.

What if organizations in a position to do so, from mobile phone operators to ISPs to public libraries, provided some basic level of content hosting with standardized content management APIs? People with the means and motivation could host their own, but most people wouldn't have to. Perhaps that could pave the way for universal front-end tools and independence from the social media giants?

Related: It looks like someone is trying to address the issue by layering a social media experience atop an existing distributed messaging system (Matrix): https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/

Federated protocols serve this purpose, and fediverse has clients with many of the features people use in social media.

Then for actual social networks, things like briar or manyverse are perfectly functional and only lack network effect.

The problem is the network effect IS the game. Without it, you can have a perfectly functional but essentially useless social media application. MeWe comes to mind for me. I thought it would be a perfect Facebook replacement. I thought wrong. With a user community in the mere hundreds of thousands (last I checked) virtually nobody you know is on MeWe, even though technically they have all the bells and whistles Facebook does, and they pledge not to sell your information.

Another private company is just going to do the same things, pledge or no.

For actually community owned protocols (an example is matrix or fediverse), someone has to go first. May as well be you.

Make an account, ask a community group to be contactable without signing over your private info, get a couple of friends to do the same.

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