Hacker News Reader

> and very few people actually want to pay for it.

I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe in.

Works for the public deserve public (distinct from government) funding. There are many things that say "if you don't give us money, we can't continue to exist."

"We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments."

Reddit's enshitification[1] is a function of needing to please investors. Many people are very happy with old.reddit.com, yet reddit paid for ux devs to implement dark patterns because that's what investors demanded.

I don't want to pay for signal, but I pay for it. I don't want to pay for Wikipedia, but I pay for it. I don't want to pay for my local radio stations, but I pay for them. I don't want to pay for my politicians to represent me, but I pay for that. I don't want to pay my taxes, but I've traveled enough to see what happens without government institutions.

I think people are willing to sacrifice money for purpose. Reddit and twitter were great free speech platforms before billionaire malfeasance. These platforms threatened authoritarians world wide. That is purpose I think people would financially sacrifice for in both external funding, and loss of income.

I think it is pretty clear that the next great social media platform will be a 501c3 and they will ask for money in the same way that radio stations do.

[1]https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

And now we get to actual solutions: public funding. But it's something a lot of people don't want to admit. We skirt around the issue, this relies on donations, that relies on the goodwill of the owner, all of it to ignore the fact that what we really want is public funding for crucial software such as forums/social networks (and hosting them).

Mr Biden please send me money to host a Lemmy instance.

> what we really want is public funding for crucial software such as forums/social networks (and hosting them).

Maybe some people want that. Your "we" is putting in a lot of work.

Pedantry doesn't get you anywhere, you should know this by now you're a grown man.

> "We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments."

It's almost as though the large-scale abandonment of old-skool small-scale, independent domain-specific web forums in favour of huge centralised platforms was a mistake...

(Just out of interest, can anyone give me an idea of the typical running costs of, say, a phpBB or vBulletin web forum with a couple of hundred users?)

Mostly it was just the cost of the domain since there was free hosting all over the place. You could also just run it in an old PC in your bedroom, not sure how much electricity that used as I was not paying electricity at the time :) but mostly the problem is simultaneous users, 100 users is ok as long as they are not all making requests at the same time. Anyways, with modern frameworks it would be practically free.

But the SEO and marketing costs to get any kind of traction these days are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the real reason we can’t have decentralized communities anymore, the big guys have formed oligopoly. They control the market and prevent any competition by owning user attention.

I don't know what the lower bound is, but a specific answer is "$97.67 per month" which is what I pay for a server in a rack in a data center that has been chugging along, with an occasional drive failure, for the past 15 years that hosts a forum, a bunch of low traffic websites, and an email server.

I also run a BBS on a Raspberry Pi that plays host to a few hundred DAU, that engage in chat, forums, a MUCK, and the occasional file transfer which runs on my home internet connection.

I am sure someone will jump right in and tell me that I am doing it wrong and I can host everything on an AWS micro VPS for $4/month, but the amount that I pay is for my server. I also suspect someone will jump right in and tell me I am not allowed to host a server on my home internet connection.

not sure if it’s clear yet tbh. capitalism is alive and well, and public goods funding will not scale internationally if it’s controlled by the us.

I am not sure why a non profit in the style of Wikipedia could not work.

Wikipedia seems to be scaling fine, even to other languages (correct me if I'm wrong).

This is fundamentally the problem. Far too much money is being extracted from the system by landlords and banks (via mortgages) for no productive labour rather than being spent on actual productive things like internet forums, the actual cost to produce food without subsidies etc.

When people have more money to spend because they’re not paying half their take home pay on rent or a mortgage, they’re generally more amenable to paying for things.

The other half of the solution, is that most tech companies have got to stop trying to become ridiculous never ending growth machines like Facebook, and just become boring utility companies. No one needs Facebook to do all the shit it does - it just needs to be a digital yellow pages. No one needs reddit to be flashy - it just needs to function as a forum. Keep the price low (e.g an hour of minimum wage in whatever country you’re accessing from for a month for a no ad version) and you will get people signing up.

The money is being extracted through limiting housing supply and lack of infrastructure investments that support high density (efficient) housing.

Increasing housing supply means decreasing homeowner capital and harming the major investment vehicle of a generation. That's politically untenable. Sadly, the pain will be felt by us and our children until we are able to exercise political power, which will require harming our parents retirements. Maybe the answer is renters unions, how many people can the police evict at once?

Young people don't understand their rent is high because they don't vote or exercise political power.

Unfortunately it's much easier home owner bloc to close ranks and oppose something than it is for young people to maybe, just maybe, get in a good candidate who would change something. Going to those crucial 2 pm on a Wednesday meetings is a lot harder when you're not retired.

This comment is spot on. 100% of the reason for high housing costs is western governments’ limits on supply. People need a place to live, that’s the reality. If supply is artificially suppressed, prices will keep rising as long as old housing ages (and what can stop aging?) and population continues to grow.

The reason isn't 'western governments', more the fundamental dynamics of stable neighbourhoods.

Go to any country in the world with an upper-middle class neighbourhood and ask them if it's alright to plop an extra condo or apartment building in the middle.

The only way you'll smoothly get permission is by providing huge, costly, benefits to the local households.

Otherwise it would involve a long drawn-out court battle, or some scheme with the local political potentates, pretty much everywhere where there are such neighbourhoods.

I think the idea of "stable neighborhoods" is complex and misses the point.

If supply goes up, existing homeowner value goes down, the amount landlords can ask goes down. I don't see any reason it is more complicated than that, the entrenched interest is obvious.

Doubling the housing in a neighborhood could halve peoples entire net worth.

Even if the proposal was a fancy luxury condo, with per unit prices averaging more expensive then the existing homes, it would still be heavily resisted because of the inconveniences associated with construction, higher pressure on local services, etc...

So even if the average home prices slightly increased it would still be the same dynamic.

> Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it.

Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users.

The problem is when people want to make a profit on their internet community. Then, no amount of community support is enough, because nobody wants to donate to your investors.

>Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users.

And that is somehow invalidating what I have said? Sure, if you have 10 users then your costs are going to be negligible and you can probably sustain it from your own pocket or donations.

But good luck running a larger/popular service like that. There are reasons why the more popular Mastodon servers had to stop accepting new users after the Twitter/Musk fiasco - it was simply not sustainable for the one-man operator crews.

Seems like a failure of architecture or deployment on mastodons part. If you want your service to be both self hostable and widespread you have to make the self hosting just work.

Perhaps you misundstand. The ones with <10 users cost a few bucks a month. The ones with thousands of users are sustainable through donations. There is no lack of sustainability here.

Because it's a federated system, there is no need for instances larger than that (and in my opinion, they are a net negative for the network).

The "fediverse" is a already absolutely overrun by bots and spam. Mastadon sites in particular. Nobody is running one of these things for longer than a few months until they just get tired of dealing with it.

The previous instance I was on was around since 2018. The one I'm on now has been around since 2019.

(author here)

your point is well taken. in the article, one of the main reasons i say that while it’s important to not get caught in the crypto jargon - it’s also important to not ignore the technology paradigm behind it.

giving people an incentive to run a server by the populace that uses it is a well defined and well known way to run decentralized services. staking and validating are concepts that have gotten very sophisticated - but the end result of it doesn’t need to be a “crypto token” bag holders madness. it can just be USD or USDC.

one can imagine a world where server hosts stake a sum of money, and may lose it if communities that start there run amok in some way. the users of the system also stake money for privileges (say, like discord nitro - for nicer emojis and reactions).

this pool of money - if it can run discord - can run decentralized services.

better still - it allows for a pool of money to give those who do community work and engagement a way to get incentives.

lastly - rather than ads, businesses could give end users the cost of their CAC that would otherwise go to instagram or reddit.

The core problem with decentralization is anonymity at scale.

Creating an account per decentralized unit is a high cost. Fighting abuse of a platform on the scale of decentralized units rather than the platform as a whole is a very high cost. How does a decentralized platforms perform against an adversarial attacker (spammers/nation states/etc)?

You have addressed the idea of centralization by talking about what it does well, but you have failed to address what decentralization does poorly. Namely, turning O(1) problems into O(N) problems.

How do decentralized organizations handle conflict/how do you prevent schism?

Email was very decentralized, but spam never got dealt with until email was nearly entirely centralized on gmail. So why could e-mail never successfully fight spam before centralization?

I don't think your post attempted to explain the forces that led us towards centralization in the first place and what the benefits of that centralization were.

I don't think decentralization is obviously better or worse than centralization, I think there are a series of tradeoffs that make different styles of platform better under different contexts. I think a "good king" centralized platform will beat a decentralized one until it doesn't (which is what we are experiencing right now), which means that during the reign of the "good king" the cost of decentralization is higher and therefore unappealing.

> things actually do cost money to build and run.

how much does HN cost to keep running, again? didn’t Stack Overflow notoriously run on hardware not that different from what some passionate devs keep in their home?

the hardware is cheap enough that the BoM cost angle is debatable today and will only be less true over time. the other costs (time commitments) fall into well-known buckets: moderation, and development. Reddit, Discord, etc are already moderated by unpaid users. lots of open source development already happens without money or an expectation of any return on capital.

you’re sort of implicitly denying that bbforums and such could ever be a dominant mode of online community, despite that at one point they were. if community aggregators (Reddit) is what displaced many of those independently-run forums, then today’s federation is something of an attempt to force that role back open and allow independently-run forums an even playfield.

You can't compare HN or SO to reddit because they were written by technically competent people who wouldn't dare use python server-side.

The main problem, as with most centralized web services, is scale. In order to serve an increasing amount of users, the cost and complexity of maintaining the service grows exponentially. Most of the problems Big Tech is solving are related to scale.

What decentralization does is distribute this cost and complexity to more granular and manageable levels, so that instead of a single company having to carry the maintenance burden, a number of individuals or groups can do so instead. Of course, if the individual instance or whatever distributed unit grows too large itself, then you run into the same problem on a smaller scale. But it's more manageable, each instance can decide how it should be handled, and in practice most instances won't grow to have this problem.

That said, decentralization is not meant to solve the cost of running and maintaining infrastructure. That is an inescapable fact of the internet. What it does address is the problem of large companies controlling vast amounts of the internet, and getting to decide how information is shared online, and who gets to have a voice. Twitter and Reddit are prime examples of what we don't want to happen again, and there's no way to accomplish that with a centralized service.

By your reasoning, Linux should not exist. Yet, it does, and companies make money contributing to it without resorting to ads.

A distributed, open-source, collaborative approach to forums could work. It did work in the past. Somewhere in between usenet and reddit was a plethora of small message boards run, frequently, on open source software. Many of the same people who ran those message boards now run reddit subs only because its easier and because users gravitate towards big, centralized places like reddit.

A return to a multitude of little message boards seems unlikely at this point, but migration to a monolithic and distributed open-source alternative to Reddit or Stackoverflow could happen. We just have to reach the point where enough people appreciate that there is a need for such a thing. A lot of people probably thought reddit was some kind of non-profit public service, but now they're going to have to wake up to the reality that Reddit is a business and they are now determined to make a profit even if it means driving their service into the ground. (From a business standpoint, a few years of actual profit leading to collapse is better than decades of producing no profits, especially in a sector where disruption could easily lead to collapse in that timeframe anyways.)

Moderation is a key problem to solve. Moderation is what keeps forums on-topic and free from spam, hate, and other trash, but it's also frequently abused to push bias or power trip. Existing social media sites typically do a poor job of providing transparent or accountable moderation. You typically don't know who the mods are, what they've done, what they're doing, nor do you have any way to challenge their actions in a meaningful way if you have a reason to do so.

Getting moderation up to professional standards without paying for it would seem like an obstacle to a free social media service, but today's social media sites don't pay their mods either. If you provide anonymity and don't demand accountability, it turns out people will just volunteer for the job! As such, a lack of an elegant solution to the moderation problem should not be viewed as something that blocks alternatives to the online forums we have now. They haven't addressed the problem either.

The replacement for reddit doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be there.

That's an issue, but I don't think that's the main issue. There's plenty of ways around that if the will is there. Worst case scenario you could just create an old-school mailing list. Everyone has the infrastructure for that already in place, and plenty of close communities were built around them ~30 years ago.

However, there's two big things standing in the way:

1. The vast majority of the population - I'd say at least 99.99%, probably more - is only interested in jumping on the next big thing. People who liked and enjoyed being part of mailing list communities, handcraft html webrings, AIM, self-hosted forums, MUDs, etc. would probably be happy to go back to those if they were suddenly popular again. But when they went out of popularity in favor of current social media trends, everyone jumped ship. Everyone's following the crowd.

2. Online communities tend to not place any limits on output, so a few hyperonline individuals dominate the conversation (and in cases where moderation occurs, have methods to control the community). Hyperonline individuals don't tend to be the best socialized ones (people with healthy lives aren't spending all day on the internet).

That's flawed in a few ways.

With regard to #1

The vast majority of the population are seeking to fill some need when they get online. Its not about popularity, popularity only provides exposure.

Its whether that need is being satisfied, both at the time they choose to jump ship, and continuing on into the future. Also, almost everyone born after the 90s has been indoctrinated prior to the age of reason that they can go online and find anything they might need, addiction triggers and other psychological traps await. There is also, as always, the ever present coercion through concentration of business sectors into a few entities who play shell games and limit your agency and choice. In some places you can't apply for college anymore using paper, its all digital and digital systems break when they aren't properly designed for resilience; these result in less opportunities acting as a filter and coercively limiting those who fall into the implementation cracks with no other choice.

#2 is purely normative, and neglects abuse which may include jamming communications or something more subtle but still malign. This view is filled with supposition, and makes broad over-generalizations, its non-sequitur.

Agreed, we need to be honest about which problems we are actually trying to tackle.

Decentralization doesn't tackle the "how do we long term maintain a social network" problem. No decentralized protocol does. Which means, ultimately, these servers are slowly being turned off by their owners in 10 years or whatever the case, and we're back at it with "how do we solve the current problem of online forums disappearing?"

If we look at this from a technical perspective, what is the cost of running such a service?

Something like Facebook obviously costs a lot more to run, as it stores photos and video and also provides each user with an individually generated feed. In contrast HN is rather lightweight and basically serves mostly static cachable content to all users. I believe it was stated somewhere that the entire HN comfortably runs on a 64GB 4/8 bare metal server. On the extreme side I host my personal static web site on my home DSL connection fronted by Cloudflare, as the CDN does all the work and the bandwidth used is minimal.

To the people running these new communities the software cost is low as they're based off an open-source service of choice (Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.), and as we saw on Reddit moderation can be done by volunteers. Are the remaining costs for admins, hosting, etc. feasible for a non-profit with some user donations? And can we create more efficient platforms with a plainer style that will minimize the server and electricity costs?

The cost is not in the servers (even though that costs money too, obviously).

90% of costs of places like Facebook are wages and various other expenses that you need too once you are running operation at a similar scale.

E.g. you do need to pay for a large team of lawyers because you are dealing with a ton of copyright takedowns, cease and desists, even lawsuits every single day.

The same with large team of moderators/content reviewers because in many countries people posting illicit content (with the definition of illicit being different by country!) may get your business blocked/shut down in that country. Including seizure of domain, any hw you may there, etc.

Add to that various regulatory compliance (e.g. the the GDPR once you are above certain size), engineers to run and maintain the systems, security team to deal with any attacks that happen 24/7, accountants, secretaries, even janitors and cleaners to keep the offices habitable.

Those are the actual costs. Not your puny server in a closet.

What if you could run your node on a raspberry pi in your closet, and interact with thousands of others doing the same (at the cost of a static IP address)?

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/65.md

I have a slightly different take on this, which is that the real problem is "expected load".

I pay for a certain amount of internet bandwidth - and depend on it! I work from home. Now I'd be willing to part with some amount of that, particularly in off-hours, to support a decentralized service - particularly a forum.

But I want to know what my commitment and loads are going to be upfront. I remember playing with IPFS and being extremely annoyed that just running the node ate something like 10mbps of my internet connection just by existing and doing nothing.

As far as I know none of the decentralized service ideas have a good answer as to how to spread the load or limit the load they'll impose on people hosting them - nor an answer as to how one can "help out" if they want (various "Raspberry Pi that takes care of it" proposals are not a bad idea).

Greg (our hypothetical admin here) doesn't have YoY growth targets to hit. He just needs enough money to keep the servers running. He hasn't got millions in VC funding/debt.

I wonder if something like "The Well" would work these days? Start a Reddit/Digg kind of place to share on specific topics, but charge a few dollars a month to belong. No ads, no tracking, just a place to share stuff with ohers.

The Irish Mastodon instance is very well funded for a volunteer effort https://opencollective.com/mastodonie

That doesn't really say much. I have never said that no such thing exists or that running on donations/as a collective can't be done.

But it is rather an exception than a rule, esp. at the scales we are talking about (e.g. Reddit or Twitter), with world-wide audiences with varying legal and financial regimes.

Look at newspapers. Look how many people actually bought subscriptions to popular services like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook - vs how many are using them for free.

VC’s (or proxy organizations for government think tanks) are willing to pay for it indefinitely. Why? Because it allows them to shape public discourse at an incredibly cheap bang for the buck.

You have a premise that the web site has to cost a lot of money. I keep wondering if Reddit-like aggregator could be run such that

* The founders take minimal amount of VC money to get things running

* There is no self-hosting of anything unnecessary

* Everything is hosted on-premise (not sure if this would cut costs in the long run)

* Serve the users the least amount of ads to make it worthwhile

So basically run a decent service that you can sustain for decades. You won't become an IPO billionaire, but maybe get a humble couple of millions.

Perhaps it can't be done, and enshittification is the only way. In that case, I don't see any other way than decentralisation run by donations to get us something decent.