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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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'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".

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

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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