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Comment by piperswe | Hacker News Reader

I'm befuddled that Automattic is still investing in adding features (e.g. federation) to Tumblr. There's just about no chance of them actually making money from it, because its users are just about the most monetization-hostile users on the Internet.

It doesn't help that the CEO actively antagonized a large portion of the site not too long ago.

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Their play is not to make money from Tumblr users, but to grow the total number of users connected to ActivityPub. Then they can go to BigCos and say "here it is, you can drop Twitter/Threads/Instagram/TikTok and control your social media presence directly."

It's not that different from what Facebook is doing with Threads. They are not interested in making money from social media, they are just hoping they can become the main infrastructure provider.

basically bring your own domain like Google Workspace or O365. I'd love to see the Mastodon project (or any other AP implementation) adopt that managed services model.

I don't believe there is anything stopping someone from starting a managed Mastodon service.

Isn't that what masto.host does anyway?

- masto.host

- mastodon.green

- social.lol

- communick.com

- cloud68.co

- elest.io

I couldn’t come up with a list of URLs I’d be less likely to trust with anything without visiting them.

godaddy.com

x.com

abc.xyz

It’s absurdly expensive to offer, because none of the major implementations support serving multiple domains in a single process, so you end up with a lot of duplication.

Takahe is the only one that is doing it, but unfortunately Andrew stopped working on it.

this looks dope, I'm going to have to take a closer look now that I've heard of it. Does seem the project is in danger of being sunset unless new support comes in the way of the developer:

> TLDR: I am looking for new developers and maintainers for Takahē who want to help in exchange for my mentorship, or I'll have to sunset the project.

https://aeracode.org/2023/11/06/life-critical-side-projects/

The repo is still being updated so it doesn't look like it's in too much danger:

https://github.com/jointakahe/takahe/commits/main/

It seems that most of the work is going on at a fork, now: https://github.com/avaraline/incarnator

hooray! Thanks for sharing, this is great to see. I used to follow the ecosystem much more closely than I do now but I'm definitely looking to jump back in soon.

I wonder if Meta's Threads is being built with that capability. I would expect an incumbent player to make an entrance into this market and they seem like the furthest along in capacity and capabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(social_network)

I mean specifically, I'd like to see the actual Mastodon organization (Eugen Rochko's team now that they're a legit nonprofit) take that role. Or any other fedi software project tbh, doesn't need to be Mastodon themselves.

I've been trying that with Communick for over 5 years already, and (thanks for Trump and VP Elon) this was the first month where my revenue (barely) passed my operating costs.

Companies/agencies/media institutions are not interested in being trailblazers, so they will just go where they see their audience going, meaning Bluesky nowadays. On the other side, the absolute majority of end users still believe that (free) social media is not something worth paying for, and the most you'll see is people that contribute a few dollars per year "to cover hardware costs".

> It doesn't help that the CEO actively antagonized a large portion of the site not too long ago.

I love that this statement could apply to either Tumblr or WordPress. CEOs are such an expensive liability lately.

It's the same CEO! Ol' Matt pissed off the Tumblr userbase and then followed it up a year later with the WordPress debacle.

Oh shit, somehow I hadn’t put that together! Ha! Well played!

Ironically, I found the opposite. Tumblr users will pay Tumblr to "blaze" posts of other users, sending the post to everyone on the platform.

I don't think there are many platforms in which users are willing to give the platform money.

If you asked me whether I'd give money to support Reddit, I'd say just let it crash and burn.

Very few social platforms have figured out that the right way to get money is from the readers supporting the posters, not from the posters themselves.

Reddit gold is a pale version of this. Neither Twitter nor Bluesky show any signs of getting it.

Hard to say that isn't the "right way" when they are making money with it.

If we're talking hypothetical right ways, I think what "social" media gets wrong is to envision an anarchy for its users. People are never equal in a society. A teenager isn't the same thing as an elder, nor is a doctor the same thing as a nurse.

I think I've read before that anarchy doesn't work because eventually people find someone who is reliable and naturally that person becomes their authority on the subject, creating an hierarchy.

Social media tries to put all users in the same bucket even when it's well-known that most users belong in the "never posts anything" bucket while very few users belong in the "power user" bucket. There are passive users and active users.

While hierarchies can become ugly fast, I don't think resigning on implementing them in any form is the right answer, specially now that everyone is on the Internet.

What else would they invest long term capital into? Developing PHP is the only thing that could come to mind

> I'm befuddled that Automattic is still investing in adding features (e.g. federation) to Tumblr.

The article is saying the opposite though: they are not adding federation directly to Tumblr's own codebase. Instead, federation will come about from some planned future migration of Tumblr onto WordPress.com infrastructure, which already has that feature.

Paying Tumblr user here - I'm delighted to give them money to not have adverts!

If they're converting Tumblr to Wordpress, I bet it will get folded into their main hosting solution eventually and Tumblr will cease to exist.

That doesn't make sense. The primary use-case (and traffic driver) for Tumblr is a social network for logged-in users, similar to Twitter but with some differences in the feature set.

The public blog network is a minority of traffic. If you've never actually been a Tumblr user, you won't have an understanding of the product at all.

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