We tried to run a social media site and it was awful

I should be able to follow @ClarkKent@mastodon.daily-planet.info - that'll tell me that the account is who it says it is.

But mastodon.daily-planet.info absolutely shouldn't have a public registration.

Running a social network isn't for the faint-hearted. But running a publishing platform should be as simple as running a website.

If everyone was as risk-averse as the FT comes off in this article, we would not have any creations of note.

Quote: "It is therefore with relief and regret that we announce the shutdown of Alphaville.club, this blog’s completely unofficial home on the Fediverse. Our reasons are listed below in full but, to summarise, Mastodon has proved more hassle than its worth."

At least with Nostr (compared to Mastodon) this won't be a problem anymore, at least some decent implementation of the declaration of independence of Cyberspace.

that made me laugh out loud

Though we all love archive.ph, FT Alphaville isn't behind a paywall. Email registration -- on the far right of the barrier page -- gives unlimited access.

I set up the server during the peak exodus from Twitter. We use Twitter a lot, both to get stories out and to listen to readers, so the risk of it dying was very real. We made the decision to get a minimal-viable-product up asap, to give our Twitter refugee readers somewhere to go.

Urgency to act meant avoiding committees and working the difficult stuff out later. But Twitter survived, 'Don user engagement was meh, and the difficult stuff became not worth it.

The 160gb thing isn't just a Johnny Mnemonic reference. I'm a lazy coder who relies on cludges, so my 'Don deployment was a mess of duplication and surplus. About three weeks after launch the server hit 100% storage and crashed. I had the option of fixing the code or buying more space. Because I'm lazy I took the second option. A week later it hit 100% and crashed again.

Though it was obvious the setup was broken, the long-term strategy of repair always lost out to the short-term fix of buying more space.

We talked about keeping the server going but restricting it to staff only. Ultimately though, it still involved jumping through many hoops to make everything compliant, and while we all like the Fediverse to varying degrees it hasn't yet become essential to our work. We just couldn't justify the time required.

Maybe the FT can be convinced into doing something official eventually. I'm certainly not against it, so long as I'm not involved in the IT or legal side.

They really do have some of the ingredients, but they are missing key ones. I'd say the biggest limitation to building a social platform from even as rarefied a captive demographic as their esteemed readership is that when your livelihood is based on relationships and narrative over concrete physical skills, the stakes on being controversial are too high.

If you are a financial advisor and you are controversial in public and lose, among peers whose stock in trade is being aligned to the highest powers available, you lose your credibility and place in your pecking order. Whereas, if someone decides I'm on the wrong side of a narrative, I can still write code, build something, or make it work.

Opinions are what we have when we're not actually doing the thing we have the opinion about, so it's my indulgence to be provocative about how well the world is being run - because I'm not the one doing it. All the world is indeed a stage, and getting all the best lines is almost fair compensation for having to put up with its managers. The issue of our time is that the people running the world think people like me have a bit too much freedom to mock their degenerate incompetence, and they think controlling public forums is going to be easier than doing a more credible job.

There is an iron law about the trade off between autonomy and power, where power is to act through others, and autonomy is to act without others. Quality discourse (social media content), and news stories, require some kind of friction or conflict to make them interesting and compelling. This disqualifies powerful people from participating as themselves because the risk of alienating the people through whom they act is too high. (Musk is the exception that makes the rule.)

The "social" in social media means that it's for kids and plebes like us who can afford to have drunk pictures of themselves on the internet because we aren't engaged in the all-against-all political power struggle that defines elite competition - the world most FT/Economist readers inhabit. My opinions have nothing to do with my ability to fix computers, where for the typical FT reader, their opinions signal their alignment, status, and reputation. They can't risk their reputations on making the kind of piquant online comment that makes this all so good.

I'm glad they learned you can't just "start your own" social media platform, but that wasn't the real obstacle for them. It's that, they'll never (shit)post like common people.

Every rule (if you already have them) will be broken, and you will soon find yourself surrounded by a shitton of moral and legal dilemmas. Not to mention the insane amount of work and attention that has to be dedicated to it. It's a thankless job that never ends. Also, brace for people who have a different cultural, moral or legal understanding who want to argue against your (imperfect) decisions. It's a lot of responsibility and potential liability.

    gotosocial: du -h | tail -1
    3.8G    .

Bullshit! I could do that, and I'm broke!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62688532

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

Democracy is a bit of a prisoner's dilemma.

There will always be people who want to take away your freedom of speech; especially other countries. Any exception to freedom of speech basically can never be weaponized. "Hate Speech" is readily and easily weaponized against your political opponents.

Everyone gets the right to speak or nobody does. Which is what we have right now. I realize where this post shall go.

A democracy where you cannot speak to your political opponents is a democracy doomed to collapse.