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Comment by criley | Hacker News Reader

The second that App.net was announced and I saw the prices, I was out. You don't pay money to develop for a service that only developers are using.

The price was extremely high in comparison to what it offered: Sure, Apple charges to develop for iOS, but iOS has a few hundred million credit-card enabled customers buying software. App.net had a bunch of already-paid developers using the service.

I tried to figure out the point through a few emails with the creator but ultimately it felt like a service for developers flush with spending money to join a sort of app vanity press.

I'm glad that it's opening up now and I'm suddenly starting to get interested in the project!

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Meh, App.net always seemed to me like an elite club of rich Twitter haters...

Like by having an account you're saying, hey, I'm rich enough to spend $5/month just because I don't like a company.

Give it to charity for goodness sake.

There are a lot of users & developers who've been burned in the past by Twitter's moves, one way or another. The problem with requiring cash is that it does very little to encourage people to try on the service without being committed to it.

By moving to this free (with 40 people followed) model, they can allow users to try and thus get more that are likely to upgrade to the higher tier when they want more.

Developers (like @falcon_android) that have hit Twitter's token limit are also getting encouragement to move or support it - as it's not a small subset but a very large one of people who can use the service.

App.net is not open source. Developers are building on top of a proprietary system and could get burned again.

This is entirely true, but App.net's model relies on a healthy third party app ecosystem to drive new users & keep existing ones. The Twitter API limitations aren't a point that can be paid for or anything of the sort. As far as we've seen, once a client hits the magical 100,000 token limit, no client has come out of the process with more tokens.

You could have said the exact same thing about Twitter years ago.

100,000 user cap sucks, but is it possible on App.net to get 100,000 using your app?

Meh, Github always seemed to me like an elite club of rich Bitbucket haters...

Like by having an account you're saying, hey, I'm rich enough to spend $7/mo just because I like a pretty UI.

Give it to charity for goodness sake.

I pay for Github because the few private repositories I have benefit from Github's frequently expanding feature set and make it worth the cash I pay each month easily. I think it's worth it to support a service with an iteration cycle that actively benefits its users to the point where paying for it is worth it.

I feel the same about App.Net. They're constantly coming out with new things, such as the hugely-more-powerful-than-Twitter Messages API and the Files API, and they're enabling devs to build apps for ADN that are significantly better than the offerings for Twitter. All in all, I enjoy using ADN far more than I do Twitter, to the extent that it's worth paying for.

Bitbucket's free private repositories is a godsend to academic and other small-time projects. Github can keep their hold on "public code repos as social networking".

GitHub offers free private repos for academia.

Github offers five, whilst Bitbucket offers what is in essence an unlimited account to academic users.

You do realize Github offers educational discounts and accounts? See: https://github.com/edu

If you got the same value proposition out of App.net that you get from GitHub (plus the whole networking effects) that would be true.

But you get what out of App.net? Basically nothing.

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