We will be shutting down Post News within the next few weeks

I agree, unfortunately I think this is what hacker news looks like when dan is asleep.

They were hyped up as a more 'mature' version of Twitter, focused on real conversations instead of engagement-bait and virality.

Looks like they went the clickbait route.

I didn't even get to the end of the linked post when I got hit with the paywall. They should have asked me in advance. I'd have told them that if you can't even read the post explaining the end of the site without hitting a hard paywall, your site won't have a chance in 2024.

I wondered why I'd never heard of them, but it's easy to see why, given their lack of understanding of the importance of sharing to gaining brand recognition.

It is full of Medium style enshittification for sure but it is par for the course for VC. I am sure they serve the Google Crawler a nice copy without authorization though.

I have never heard of Post.news and I don’t want to make an account, but Propublica is a nonprofit news entity isn’t it?

Do you know about the Fediverse?

The best-known web client/app on there is Mastodon. And it fits the bill of what you seem to be looking for.

I don't know, but I do know pre-AWS, pre-node architecture.

Running a site is mega-cheap, if hosted on your cable modem. Doubly so if you rent a racked server. And a racked server + CDN can be done for mega-cheap.

It's not about underlying costs, unless of course you AWS.

But on the not-for-profits side, it's hard to find that in a lot of spaces. While perhaps a weird alternative, where are the not-for-profit restaurants?

Again, that may seem like a strange comparison, but... we have soup kitchens. Food banks. We have "donated" things, with volunteers.

But we don't have "restaurant experience" for free.

How would a non-profit restaurant work? If we look at grocers, the only sort of "merged" retailer is Costco. It's owned by institutional investors, but it does derive most of its profits from those who shop there, via memberships. This keeps (supposedly) the target on the shopper, not on using the shopper as a product.

Yet it's hard to get people to pay for news, to pay for anything. A reader of this may say "But I...", and if you do... you're a rarity, and not really relevant to the overall logic -- people don't want to pay for things on the internet.

Someone here once commented that AP and other news aggregators could just be deployed by Google. Well, great. More 'using the client as the product' Google foolery.

It would, however, be trivial to setup a site to do just that. Direct, non-hyped headlines. Only news. No ads, no tracking, no 1-pixels, and in fact, no javascript. (Just being hardcore here).

The real issue comes down to comments. Over and over, again and again, I see volunteers saying comments are the thorn. Policing them. Even if everyone on the planet was a Pleasant Person, there's SPAM. Ad-ware, astroturfing, and so on.

I think any sort of not-for-profit won't be done at scale, ever, if it includes comments. At least not under todays model. Volunteers can't handle the load.

However, I do know people that operate mailing lists, for bike clubs, for athletic clubs, mailing lists as we've had for 30+ years on the internet, and which flowed from BBS systems.

These are operated with often 200 members on a list. No one cares about profit, or about growth of the list, or about debate. They're about the topic.

Again, I think as soon as you get into "Lots of people all talking together", it means "OMG, I can post something an 1M people will see it!", and then comes in the horrid behaviour. The politics. The ads. The spam. The commercial pitches. The posturing.

I don't think non-profit at scale can be done due to this.

But I could be wrong.

So are many subreddits! r/sydney for example. It ain’t that hard.