Hacker News Reader

Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

How do I post a message on Discord/Twitter/Instagram from my personal data storage? If this is not supported, this idea is born-dead. Very few will use it, for the regular person the conversation goes like this:

- Who can see my personal data storage posts? Can someone with Twitter see them?

- No, but you'll own your data

- Bye

So maybe start with something which backs-up what you post on Twitter/Instagram/Discord to your personal data storage through APIs/data export.... This has no downside if it's easy to "activate"

View on HN

At this point distributed protocols are getting good enough that for a large class of social applications, network effects are the only thing keeping the incumbents in place.

The irony of ad supported free services is that if you just let the advertisers pay you directly for eyeball time then paid for your services, it'd be better for you financially while keeping the web pure outside of the "paid to consume ads" app.

The push model is easier, all of the above three protect automated data exfiltratration pretty severely.

There are SO MANY bots on both Twitter and Instagram that a legit developer shouldn't have any issues automating posts.

Discord is a bit harder, you an post as a "bot" easily, but if you want the posts coming from your actual user, you need to poke the actual client.

You just wait. The closed services will close down or become hostile enough that people will migrate. Not everyone will, but over a longer period - enough.

People getting into Solid and ATproto today are like people using own XMPP servers decades ago, or Mastodon years ago, or Matrix. Some projects like that will succeed, others will fade. But one day, you won't be able to post to Discord due to some policy changes and you'll have to reevaluate options.

Also, you can't backup from Twitter anymore. Or Discord. Or google photos. Or many others - they cut off that option once they're big enough.

> You just wait. The closed services will close down or become hostile enough that people will migrate.

I've been waiting a long time. Over that time, the closed services have only gotten more popular and no regular person is ever complaining that they are "hostile".

Regular people don't like ads, but they dislike paying even more, so they're pretty OK with the status quo. They certainly don't want to be paying for a domain name and paying for hosting.

The creator/consumer divide is still 90/10. Your example just doesn't matter.

If I don't create anything, and just consume creators, what do I need a personal data store for?

Just your existence itself already create a lot of data ;)

you just created a comment here.

also your government, your service providers and many other entities are creating data on your behalf

I think you got the ratio backwards, but assuming that then your argument serves to bolster GP's position.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com