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Comment by ClassyJacket | Hacker News Reader

There's a community of people (myself included) who still use old tech from that era like iPods and GameBoy Advance. Both for nostalgia and fun, as well as disconnecting from our phones and the current social media.

Could there be a similar case for bringing back a low-fi social media not ruined by algorithms, either MySpace or something like it? I guess the network effects, i.e. the requirement of your friends being on there, make it more challenging for social media. But I think there's a possibility of some sort of community who want to be MySpace-Amish. Personally, I think the peak of my happiness with technology was around 2007 - 2010, but obviously age and personal nostalgia have an effect there.

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You can be Myspace Amish on Mastodon. You could even call your instance that and build your CoC around it.

> Could there be a similar case for bringing back a low-fi social media not ruined by algorithms, either MySpace or something like it?

Everybody that keeps reinventing Facebook/Twitter (Post.news, BeReal, BlueSky, etc) does so with dollar signs in their eyes. There are FOSS options for messageboards and IM services but people gravitate to the least-friction options, which lead to spam and flame wars because there's no cost to do so.

The problem with the FOSS options for these services is that they're a PITA to set up or use, and they usually cost money. It's not like using a FOSS alternative to Photoshop, where you just download Krita or Gimp and run it locally on your PC: with a service like Mastodon, it needs always-running servers, so you either have to have your own server on the internet (not really viable for most people), rent one from a colocation provider or other service ($$$), or pay a subscription fee to keep your instance on someone else's server ($). Now compare this to using Facebook, which is free. And since there's zero interoperability between different SNS services, you have to go where all your friends are.

There are more than enough public Mastodon instances that the vast majority of people will never have to even think about hosting their own instance...

I am interested in seeing something like the original MySpace. I'm not very active on it, but there is subreply.com (formerly sublevel) that made the HN frontpage a couple of times in the past.

There's https://spacehey.com/ for that.

You might like the "Tildeverse" There are also things like active Telnet-based BBS servers, for a pre-web social experience...

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