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Comment by knowledge-clay | Hacker News Reader

The solution to a lot of problems is simply to not scale platforms past something like 1000 users. At that level, you can have a community that is guided by individual people and their relationships, rather than anonymized and centralized. And the infrastructure is much simpler to set up and maintain: we just need more tools tailored to being easy to set up and administer at this scale.

m15o has built a ton of examples along these lines. There are other communities and tools too, loosely referred to as the "small web"/"smol web"

https://lipu.li/?u=m15o&p=projects

https://runyourown.social/

https://github.com/cblgh/cerca

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There was an Ask HN (or similar) a while ago where someone was saying that they run a Discord server for active and committed independent game developers, and they were asking if anyone was interested in joining (I can't remember exactly). They wouldn't let just anyone in, to get in you had to schedule an interview with the moderators and show that you were a committed game developer. They were a tight community who shared experiences and helped each other. It sounds great.

The problem for me (and you) is that I'm not in it. The problem for a high school student who just wants to learn is that he's not allowed in either. The problem for most of the world is that the great insights within this community are forever hidden.

Perhaps small communities could nominate generally useful conversations and have them released as blog posts. At least then people could watch from the outside, while the community still remains small and private (not everything would be published).

communities can be both exclusive and publicly readable! I know many such examples

Most of these platforms are highly opinionated—-colors, buttons, text to dissuade or attract users of one specific kind.

So make it viewable and read only.

> Perhaps small communities could nominate generally useful conversations and have them released as blog posts

This, maybe less formally but no less in practice, was unironically the killer social feature of Google Reader.

The problem with small communities is that you don't necessarily have enough competent and available people to run the system reliably. Or worse, the people in charge leave, sometimes taking the servers with them, and no one else knows how to maintain it.

That's why Reddit and Discord are so successful. You can create your small community for close to zero cost and zero technical expertise, no one is going to pull the plug on the server because the one guy responsible for it didn't pay the bill, if the server in question is not an old PC in somebody's basement with no backup.

Even with good tools, building a community server still relies on an individual or a small subgroup to make an investment in money and time for the entire community, and if they stop doing so and no one wants to take over, the server is gone. On a platform like Discord, as long as there is any one person in there, it will continue running, the platform keeps the community accessible and does basic administration like spam filtering for free, even when there is no one to care, it can do that because it pays itself on user access, though premium membership and ads.

> The problem with small communities is that you don't necessarily have enough competent and available people to run the system reliably. Or worse, the people in charge leave, sometimes taking the servers with them, and no one else knows how to maintain it.

Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge these are problems. But I have so little faith in big platforms these days that I don’t really see an alternative.

It may solve some problems, but it also cuts off the possibility of a GREAT deal of good. I get that it's hip to bash social media et al and its problems, but I believe that it's been instrumental in exposing and combatting a WIDE range of endemic problems in the world, e.g. police brutality.

"Big" spaces are important too. Maybe more important if we're trying to avert global disaster.

The problem is that then platforms come along and vacuum everything else up.

Reddit and discord sucked in and destroyed a whole lot of phpbb.

Sure, they vacuum things up, but people have agency. They choose to use platforms. They can choose to use different ones. I can't influence every person's choices, but I can choose how I invest my time and social energy, and present an alternative for people who are alienated with existing platforms (a very large and growing population)

The problem is, a lot of the platforms that I've liked over the years have been vacuumed up. I still try to use different ones, but it's a lot harder.

Personally most my moves away from online platforms over the last 3 decades years have been been because community owners have massively fucked up.

I think Digg did it worst.

I miss BBSes, Usenet, EFnet, Puzzle Pirates, and a few web forums.

They all kind of exist, but they were mostly supplanted by bigger, more centralized things. All of them had a part in their own demise, too.

Then in turn those bigger, more centralized things have tended to screw things up.

This is a little atomistic view, but essentially in the correct direction. I would also add we need to nurture anti-centralization and anti-corporate sentiments that are still springing up in younger people especially, in their own way. If alternatives could bestow perceived social prestige for at least parts of the population, this would help preserve islands of free discourse for the future.

To be sure, this doesn't mean proclaiming decentralization to be cool necessarily (...fellow kids), but trying to be open-minded and friendly to the public, which I consider to be the actual better part of the ethos of the early Internet era. Being tech literate is "esoteric" by itself, and some complexities and social contracts cannot be really taken away from that, not without going back under the centralized yoke. But even moreso we should be trying to make it a little better by our attitude.

Even if a regulation of protocols for utilities will come, assuming it will be good, we need society to remain willing to preserve it.

But phpbb had its own issues. Many were run by hobbyists who eventually stopped paying the bills or updating the site, and then some bot steals the data or breaks the database.

It's like cloud-hosting email: everyone wants to not host their own email server, but then you're at the mercy of the service provider. For most people its worth it... until it isn't.

Here we are, all pretty happy on our anonymized and centralized HN.

With far more than 1000 users.

Stop using github!

I would really like to see collaborative software development done via a usenet newsgroup. The git send-email program could be updated to send cover letters and in line patches to a newsgroup, and people could reply to those messages and review each patch.

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