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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

>We believe this moment, when people are so dissatisfied with the platforms that have dominated for the past decade-and-a-half, presents a unique opportunity to build a digital public sphere where people and communities with different preferences and purposes can participate accordingly.

I mean a lot of public utilities and services communicate with twitter, instagam or facebook. So essentially giving these free services an audience. With these services ratcheting down their free access to the public (instagram for example, shows a limited number of things before you have to sign in) it would make sense to move to more open services (Mastodon?) Of course then they'd have to pay but I can't imagine that would be a problem.

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Hosting an RSS feed wouldn't cost much, just saying...

Agreed. RSS is very underutilized. Do browsers even read it anymore? I should get a feed reader...

https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/World.xml https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index

I went back and it looks like in the article/pdf they're proposing using their (Umass Amherst's) "smalltown" software.

https://publicinfrastructure.org/2022/09/28/welcome-to-small...

which is a Mastodon Fork:

https://github.com/chandrn7/smalltown

I use standalone feed readers; some people use aggregators that have their own web interfaces.

RSS is my primary way of following the web these days (well has been for a couple of decades). If there's no RSS feed I simply don't follow a site; there usually is.

Not much really isn't the same thing as free.

The problem is how to find people to follow. Twitter, as a centralized service with a search feature solves that problem in a way that individual sites with RSS feeds can't. Someone I've never interacted with can add a hashtag to their post on Twitter, and I can search for that hashtag, and find their post. If I've never interacted with someone, how do I know to go to their webpage and connect to their RSS feed?

This. The problem is not how many legs the internet stool has, it's the problem of discovery in the "dark forest".

You want people to be able to find you, for your outbound communications (self-promotion), and you want people to be able to cold-contact you in circumstances that are useful to you. But if you're not very careful your inbound communications get completely overwhelmed by spam and/or abuse.

Discovery is work. Spamblocking is work. Abuse deletion is work. None of which people want to do themselves, so they delegate it to platforms which do it for them.

For some reason Mastodon refuses to offer full text search

Instagram allows the public to make accounts for free.

Creating an account is not free. It costs 1-2 minutes of your time (assuming no errors, I just tried it and never got the phone number confirmation code, in this case I paid with my time and got nothing, this risk also has a price) and that a record will exist between your name and a list of all the images you’ve viewed and liked, millisecond accurate measurements of when you opened the app for and how long etc. for the next century, probably more. I don’t know how to price such a record not existing and different people price it differently but it does have a price.

>It costs 1-2 minutes of your time

Sure, but this is a 1 time cost and most people already have an account. I'm sure it also takes several minutes to set up your internet or phone too.

>and never got the phone number confirmation code

Are you potentially using a phone number from a service like twilio instead of your actual phone number? VoIP and related numbers are usually banned because they are mostly used by malicious users.

Keeping track of the posts you've like is a feature of the app. Personalization is also another feature of the app. Tracking the time you have the app open is why you can see your screen time and how you can set screen time limits. These are features which users find value.

If you don't want this data to last a century you can just delete your account and your data will be deleted too.

Is a working phone number required to create an account there? I seem to recall one having to be provided the last time I tried to create an account there.

I don't consider any web site or service that requires a phone number to be provided in order to create an account to be "free", both in terms of cost and liberty.

>Is a working phone number required to create an account there?

No, you can sign up with just an email address assuming you don't look like a bot.

Recently singed a family member up, and set up a couple of accounts to follow, ect. It worked for less than a day before the account was "locked", and the only way to unlock was to add a phone number.

As far as I'm considered, Instagram absolutely needs a phone number. Officially they don't need one at sign up - but they won't allow you to use that account for long before you need a phone number anyway.

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