Our Super-Secret Plan to Bring the Internet Back (Part 1) | Hacker News Reader

Our Super-Secret Plan to Bring the Internet Back (Part 1)

blog.mikoto.io

42 pointsCactusBlue33 comments

@CactusBlue: Cool, I realy like the reasons and as much I feel welcomed by the idea of moving to a new home, the same I feel strongly pushed away by the used images of oversexualizied stereotypical boobproviders, completely not cool. And no, this has nothing to do with peoples love to manga and stuff. Many women just feel that they as a single person, and as women in general, are reduced to the size of their bodyparts, if constantly shown stuff like this - even when it's not meant that way. Think twice, if that's the picture women get from your internet, is this their internet as well? I wonder, do I want to live where everyone judges women just by their bust size? And will your little sister want to live there? The current internet is stupid enough, make the new places better.

I can personally say that this single image would preclude me from recommending this platform to 95% of my social circle.

I understand much of the concerns for what you're saying here, and I do understand that there are obviously some people who might be turned off by the branding. That is okay; we don't need to reach out to everyone yet, we do not want to take on a branding that offends no one, but appears soulless (like Alegria art).

I do understand the issue for gender equality as well, and as we have a diverse group of individuals who are involved at various parts of the project (they are mostly weebs as well and have no issues with the branding), and I'll make sure that our future branding will have cute anime boys as well ^^

In the future, I'll provide an enterprise version with the anime branding disabled and replaceable by your custom branding. in the meanwhile, if you have suggestions on what parts might be sexualized and might be offensive, please let me know!

Don't get me wrong, I like manga and anime as well. And it's not about gender equality. It's that these type of images (unhealthy big breasts, trying to force their way out of way too tight clothes) give a unwelcoming impression to women.

Even if a lot of your friends tell you "I don't mind", believe me, deep inside they feel at least slighty uncomfortable. Women learn to pretend, because if you speak up, you'll be excluded. It's that simple.

Next time you need to choose an image for your project, ask yourself: "whats the message I want to get across" and "do I realy need boobs for it?"

And if the second answer is yes, you'd be better working on a page for lingerie ;)

This comment gives me Harrison Bergeron vibes.

I do agree with the intent, but large breasted women do exist in the world as well. Some of them even like bursting out of their clothing.

Naomi Wu / SexyCyborg on YouTube, for example [0]

Absolutely agree. I now actively dislike this company and product and I don't even know what it does. And I'm male.

Regardless of the sex, identity, or orientation of the poster, it's crass, sexist, juvenile, and unprofessional.

Frankly as someone who lived for a long time in a place where there is a serious homelessness and drug overdose problem, I wasn't too impressed with the use of homeless people as a repellant either.

> I don't even know what it does

We build real-time extensible messaging platforms. I apologize that I haven't described it too much in this post; mostly meant it for my twitter audience who already have heard of it before, but I do understand that I've done a very bad job at describing what it does. I will make a post on it later.

> Regardless of the sex, identity, or orientation of the poster, it's crass, sexist, juvenile, and unprofessional.

We're not a project that take ourselves too seriously yet. The internet started off weird, and I think some weirdness is probably necessary. With that being said, we're currently using AI art in our publications because we don't have that much funds right now (we'll probably hire a designer at some point)

> Frankly as someone who lived for a long time in a place where there is a serious homelessness and drug overdose problem, I wasn't too impressed with the use of homeless people as a repellant either.

I used it as an opposition to "the public square of the internet" analogy used by X (formerly known as Twitter). The city I previously lived in had a decent amount of homelessness and drug problems (although probably not to the point of some US cities). If you have a better analogy, please let me know so I can make a better analogy!

I don't think I fully understand the goal here. The post says "not many people know of Mikoto other than as "An open-source alternative to Discord", even though we've had many big features that differentiates us."

but then goes on to describe what looks like an alternative to Discord. What am I missing?

our main differentiating factor is that we allow for higher amounts of multi-modal communication through an extensible channel system; we have a built-in wiki already, you can add additional "channel types" by writing extensions.

Ah, I understand. This is just a Discord competitor, then? Given the title of the piece and the comment I quoted, I think I was just expecting something very different and reading things through a mistaken lens.

I feel like its design will end up creating a separate space by itself. The kinds of features, how the onboarding is set up, who the devs are, etc influences the kinds of people who sign up.

There really doesn't seem to be much to say about the "onboarding" ... unless I'm missing something, it just dumped me into an empty interface and invites me to create my own space or enter an invite code. Lacking an invite code there doesn't seem to be any way to join a demo space in order to get a feel for how it even works.

Quite anticlimactic, IMO.

a button to join a "demo space" has been requested often - this is the highest priority now, and I'm working on it; sorry if you've been having a hard time joining!

Dev here. We're aware of this, and "creating a separate space" is probably necessary - our featuresets are designed to give anyone the power to run their own Space. All in all, I think the bigger influence is who's already on the platform, which I will go into more depth in the next part of this blog. We want to build an extensible system for building your own space.

Will I be able to change the space I’m in based on my mood? It would be fun if I could manipulate the algorithm serving me content in real time. For example, I would like to turn on “make me sad” mode or “make me want to exercise” mode.

Spaces are similar to Discord "Servers" or Slack "Workspaces" (but more extensible through the Space owner by extensions); you can be part of multiple spaces at once. There is minimal algorithm on the main feed, apart from the ones you add through extensions.

Isn't this the Fediverse?

No, and there are many ways we diverge:

- Mikoto builds on real-time, push-based messaging. We felt that for a social plaform that defines the next generation, having it update real-time is necessary.

- Mikoto builds on the assumption that your Space is private by default, and only what you decide to make public is shown to the unauthorized internet.

- We aim to maintain a logical separation of operators (handles technical side of server hosting, and physical nodes) and owners (runs Spaces).

Nobody ever cares about the owners, look at at the tech products still being used and their owners appeared in a certain passenger list...

Railgun reference??

Yep :)

This is an interesting idea, one I'd like to see where it goes

So are there any spaces one could use to test it out with?

try mine - https://beta.mikoto.io/invite/FILVbhQ8QlS-

as far as I can tell there are some issues with it, I dont seem to be able to upload pictures yet. I guess it is being developed. There are also pages in the settings that are just like "bans pane goes here", "permissions pane goes here" etc

sorry there's a lot of placeholder; it's still in active development with myself as only "main" dev.

https://alpha.mikoto.io/invite/WtvbKS7mrLSd

there's also this:

also sorry for your link; it should be https://alpha.mikoto.io/invite/FILVbhQ8QlS- - that's a bug on our end, I'll fix it right now ^^

Looks interesting.

Why not Discord?

I've originally started developing Mikoto as a Discord extension, but pivoted when I realized that it was against their TOS + there's only much you can do if you only have a partial control over the stack.

We're open source, at https://github.com/mikotoIO/mikoto. We also will have a very comprehensive extension API, powered through iframes + wasm "containers". We also focus our features on superusers, and will eventually seek monetization through selling integration and enterprise hosting.

Why not Matrix?

Spent some time reading through matrix specification; my opinion is that it's overkill in some ways and under-delivers in some parts of its specs for my usecase, enough to justify writing a whole new protocol from scratch

With that being said, we're working on implementing a matrix compatibility layer!

Because Discord sucks, is a privacy nightmare, and is a walled garden.

It's not fun when you know any random member of the Chinese Communist Party can read your posts at any given time.

>AI anime girl banner

Immediately no. This project immediately reads as a grift at worst, and at best simply unserious.

We don't take ourselves too seriously, and we probably won't for a while. I'm still the sole developer on the project (outside of few code contributions here and there). We are fully self-funded at the moment, and we have no plans to raise - if we're grifting, then we're doing a very bad job at it :)

It's okay that you don't take this project seriously - no one took the early internet seriously either, and not everything has to be like that.

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