The unfortunate lesson learned is that nowadays only a very small percentage of social media users will switch to an equivalent platform for ideological, ethical, or practical reasons. Disruption of the incumbent is required.
> still struggling to sustain 2 million DAU.
Seriously. Do we need every service to have a billion users? I'm glad there's places that are open to everyone, but at the same time I'm sad that a lot of smaller and niche places have disappeared. Those are the places I've found communities. It's possible on bigger sites but it's much harder. Your voice is one in a billion, it's not much better than having no voice. It's even happened more as HN has grown. And in any of these big places it's more likely that sensational posts rise to the top drowning out sensible or accurate messages (maximizing engagement doesn't maximize user happiness, communication, community, nor many other things). It's also harder to communicate because every community develops their own language and priors. A mutual understanding and that's what builds good faith conversations. I think if we've learned anything from these mega sites it's that even when people use their real names they still view themselves as "anonymous" (and conversely, in small sites people can hide their name, but it means something to the community, and they still have a reputation to defend)
I'm not convinced we are measuring the right things. It just feels like people are measuring what they think they should, and are not thinking about what the actual goals are. These are not the same thing. But that's Goodhart's Law I guess
Quite the opposite in fact. I think the world is much better if we avoid forming authoritarian corporate media platforms with some dickhead billionaire in charge.
I host my own social media platform with one active daily user plus two guys who signed up when I spam others Show HN posts. Link is in my profile.
I prefer the bazaar any day. And im the guy selling my wares from a carpet on the street, don’t even have a fancy booth
Sorry for rambling
> Sorry for rambling
And I think there is even value in just knowing that these are things people want. Even if it isn't everyone. Personally, I thought the cool thing with the internet -- in regards to markets and economics -- is that it meant you could make products (or whatever) for very small niches and still get wealthy. Because with 6 billion people on the internet, even a very narrow niche is gonna strike the interest of at least tens of thousands (if not hundreds or a few million). It's interesting that instead we chose to build things for everybody and nobody.
other than a few VC heads, in no world is millions of dailies a bad thing. i’d be shocked if hn had 2 million daily. and thank your god it’s not full of everyone screaming at once. it’s what makes it such a rad place to be.
i moved to mastodon when the infosec community migrated there and honestly, its OmgSoMuchBetter that it has less people. it’s like here on hn, the signal to noise ratio is fucking glorious.
i’ve mentioned this multiple times in the past, but in reality we (people) prefer multiple different spaces, and for very very good reasons.
it i want a quiet night with a fancy dinner, i’ll go to a quiet nicer restaurant.
if i want a loud night out with the friends, we go to a club.
if i want a goth night i go to the goth club
if i want to hear blues i go to a blues bar.
etc…
the big sites suffer from their own ridiculousness and still, years later haven’t figured out that trying to be everything at once is hilariously stupid. it just makes you bad at everything.
blue sky is incredible, at least until eternal september hits. Mastodon’s different servers hit so much better than the last years of twitter did. the minute everyone flocks to either of them, im out. we like different spaces for different moods, it’s common sense.
could you imagine how awful going out would be if you’re talkin with your friends and over and over some totally random people were constantly coming to your table and screaming shit at you? “defend yourself!” … no, because that’s not normal… bar owners would be like “bro, that guy who keeps screaming at random people has to go… fuckin weirdo.”
that’s the experience these same group of VC people keep trying to tell us is normal and what we should want. no thanks. thats weird af.
I fear we are just hyper focusing on being over the top, to be monopolies. It's good business, but is it good for us? I'm sure you can find some metric to say it is, but is that what the metric actually measures? We should make sure we are building the things people want, not what we think people want. To make life better for our communities, states, countries, or everyone. I have no doubt you can get rich while doing this. But if we're chasing a score harder than we're chasing a goal we'll always rationalize the former is the later. It's a great trap we've seemed to have fallen for.
[0] we even have good mathematical intuition to believe this. In high dimensional systems when things are normal distributed (really just not uniformly distributed) the mean is not representative of the whole. I think it's clear that there's lots of different people with different opinions about a lot of things (high dimensions) and that there's not a smooth even distribution of opinions (they clump)
We started as a protocol design company. Shifting to a product & services company has been a process, and "moving quickly" as a new org in an established market-space is a comical challenge. We got pitted against Threads, which was able to reuse the scaling and moderation infra of Insta and take on 100M signups in their first week. The only way to be competitive here is to find a differentiated & novel execution which finds PMF.
The protocol work is the PBC mission, but new technologies need PMF to gain distribution. We're not trying to sell people on ideology or ethics. I do want folks to know how the technology works, however, so I will post threads like the one linked here.
What does this even mean? Bluesky is less likely to mangle your posts? I didn't think that any of the services had issues with data loss.
Your account (authorized domain) resolves to your DID from a public catalog which resolves to your PDS server.
Anyone can talk directly to any PDS and replay and cryptographically verify every single post, like, and asset. It’s intentionally difficult to tamper with anyone’s speech, and any identity change operations get rolled into your crypto so any malicious break in your events can be identified and rolled back.
The only other cases would be when various accounts were hacked and used for crypto scams, which from what I understand, BlueSky doesn't solve either.
I switched from Twitter to Threads and have been happy with it (Bluesky was invite only at the time so I didn't bother). Threads actually got me to start using Instagram too, ironically.
This is a good point. All of the existing social media users are entrenched in the big 3 of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and that is why TikTok does not exist
State your case. You have an audience here, now sell us on your idea.
In this case, the incumbent is disrupting themself.
The X/Twitter block feature change appears to be an even bigger event than being banned in Brazil, according to usage stats. [0]
It's like the great Digg migration, but just 1-5% of the user base, over time. Each time, the network effects affect.