Sadly this doesn't seem to built on ActivityPub or any other kind of federated standard, so it's just another walled garden social media site.

Feels like another reddit. Instead of doing another social media, why don’t you guys do social networking better. Social media is designed to be distracting, variable rewards addicting, and thus inherently monetizable by ads. Focus on the people and the relationships. Currently WT social is quickly filing up with affiliate spam links, climate change alarmism (even if we didn’t sign up for that category), and spammers. Hacker News is a lot better for news and better moderated.

I signed up for WT.Social when it first launched. The interface was so bad I never wanted to use it, even if I did like their initial pitch. I have occasionally gone back to check it out to see if it improved, and the answer was always no. I've pretty much given up on it.

Same here. I'm surprised it still exists as I never again logged in or heard about it.

Logged in just now, the UI is grim and the last posts all seem to be about 6 months ago

Same

The interface and overall feeling reminded me of the internet 15 years ago. I like the vision, not the execution. What I didn't enjoy is that it's really slow.

How is this concept different from reddit though?

Privacy? Uh- they just had a tracker in their email from AWS.

And my blocker already had awstrack in its blacklist so I had to temporarily disable that just so I could register.

> We’ve also repurposed the Wikipedia model of community editing, meaning if you see something dodgy or misleading on WT Social, you can go in and correct it yourself.

Does that mean that if I make a post, some random other user can edit it?

That’s how StackOverflow works too. Difference being that SO only allows very specific topics.

I like how their register page starts with: "Login with Facebook", "Login with Twitter". Makes sense to transfer users from the bad guys to the good ones, but feels off to me. I would expect such initiative to be email registration only.

An interesting little experiment that never seemed to take off (joined since the early days).

Yeah. UI is unrefined in a way that is kind of fun in a Craigslisty way but doesn’t totally land for me. The core ideas of a social wiki never seemed to reveal themselves to me in a super interesting way

What are a few things you would change? What do you look for in a social media?

All I'd want from social media (actually, from all of the internet) is to remove the existing ad-based business model. When content publishers are paid by advertisers, their interests are no longer aligned with the interests of the consumers.

Unfortunately, I think that people simply don't want to pay for anything. Two years ago I launched a (paid) service for social media and messaging (Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP) and I got barely a handful of paying users. People got so used to receiving things for free and apathetic about how their privacy is violated by Big Tech, it seems they can't even think of a different alternative anymore.

People here love to shit on Brave because of crypto, but one of the reasons that I am so supportive of it is because I think that it is the first time where it flips the business model in order to get the users paid, who then get to choose who they can reward as their favorite creators and service providers. This, to me, is a model that creates a healthy market competition, and enables users to "vote with their wallets".

Alas, turns out that most Brave users are doing just to be able to collect meager $3-8/month as "rewards", or to speculate on the price of the token. I thought that with 50+ million users and 8+ million users receiving the token rewards, I could get at least a tiny percentage of the users to be interested in paying for the service with the token... but no, you go to the BAT's subreddit and all you see is people involved in the pettiness of their rewards or trying to pump the token.

I'm pivoting my service to host for companies. At least they understand the concept of a paid SaaS.

I signed up for App.net when it first launched. It was a paid social media service that promised to put the customer (the user) first. It started out with what was basically a Twitter clone, but they said the foundation of the service allowed nearly anything to be built on top of it, so it would evolve over time. Ultimately, it didn't take off and shut down some time later.

YouTube offers both models to users. I'm curious how that works out. What percentage opt to pay to avoid ads? And how does the revenue break down for ads vs Premium on a per/user basis?

The big issue with paid social media is that it's hard to get any traction to gain critical mass. A social media site that no one else is on is effectively useless. With something like a streaming service, which people pay for, a single user can get value on their own without needing to talk all their friends into also signing up.

> Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP

All available for free in low-friction ways (and still only geek-popular), and easy to self-host if you care about privacy and ownership. It’s a really strange spot for a personal use focused SaaS.

Focusing on companies may indeed work better.

Yeah, you are absolutely right. In my defense, these were just the start. The longer roadmap included Pixelfed and Peertube (for photo and video sharing), and SIP + the possibility of buying DIDs (phone numbers), effectively allowing users to ditch their mobile voice plans. I was also hoping there would be some middle-ground between self-hosters and the free instances. The free instances from Mastodon are still very fickle with their moderation, self-hosting requires dealing with the cost of hosting, domain names, administration time, etc. I thought that there would be more people willing to pay $10-15 year to have a worry-free solution.

The idea started when I was working at Deutsche Telekom on their attempt at building their own messaging platform + MVNO (called immmr) and they killed it after spending two years and 30€ million working on it. I was convinced at the time that the reason they failed was because they wanted to do everything in space at once, and their main criteria for success was "we need to be #1 or #2 in our secondary markets within the first quarter of launching this". Obviously the launch kept being delayed, the feature list kept getting slashed and their client was full of bugs on critical features.

Their stated goal at the time was more about having an alternative to stop the tech companies from eating their margins with OTT services. I was convinced (still am honestly) that if they just focused on providing the basic services (messaging and audio/video calls) via Matrix and if they committed to help with the development of the open source client, they could get a more interesting offering, more time to grow organically and eventually still reach the stated goal.

I even wrote a "Ask HN" post back then [0] because I wanted to find a way to validate the hypothesis, but there was no response. When immmr folded, I decided to try with the MVP, and this is where we are now.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221

> some middle-ground between self-hosters and the free instances

There is definitely a lot of space between the extremes of corporate everything and your own compiled-from-source home.

I want to think that there is a market for a “self-hosting appliance” — a small pre-configured box that you can connect to your router and set up (in a few clicks) to run a bunch of services with SSO and a Cloudflare Tunnel-like access path. The NAS companies sort of do this, but my Synology likes its own custom things too much and Docker is difficult (no easy SSO or tunneling, for one thing).

I’m not optimistic enough to quit my day ob to build that, though.

Are you familiar with https://dappnode.io?

It is a debian-based distro with an "docker app-store", a VPN server (ovpn or wireguard) and a "portal" system that can basically open a proxy to the public internet.

They are more focused on the crypto space, to make it easier to run Blockchain nodes, but the architecture can work for anything that can be packaged for docker.

Exactly. And now it is not early days. Twitter had 58 million users in 3 years after launch in 2009. This has only 450,000 and calls itself a Twitter alternative.

I think I'd call WT.Social somewhat of a failure to catch on.

Half a million people ought to be worth something.

My website picked up half a million registered users in the last three months, so it's not unheard of.

Let's see if they can continue sigmoidal growth. Or raise funding.

Why did they not start with Lemmy's code base?

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

They might have started at the same time.

I cannot even find the source... It's said it was "soon to be FLOSSed" 3y ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/e4en47/wtsocial...

3 years ago is about the exact time lemmy was first announced. An early alpha of a rust + react new reddit clone with some weird custom websockets is probably the opposite of how they would have wanted to start their codebase.

> (they/any)

I wonder when the fad for putting pronouns after your name will die out.

It feels a lot like the little 3rd person biographies people used to write about themselves in the 2000s.

> no ads, no paywalls, no sponsored content – just like Wikipedia.

So nagging popups for donations, then?

Speaking of the Wikipedia fundraising banners ... It's worth mentioning here that in 2020/2021, Wikimedia took about $90 million more than it spent – the Wikimedia Foundation's net assets increased by over $50 million to $230 million, and the completely separate Wikimedia Endowment (not included in the Wikimedia Foundation's assets as it's held by the Tides Foundation) from $62.9 million to over $100 million.

Internet hosting, by comparison, cost them $2.4 million – that is less than the sum of what they pay their top-8 executives.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...

At this point, Wikipedia is basically being used as a cash cow. People are tricked into donating to Wikimedia by making them believe there is some kind of financial emergency, with donations needed to "keep Wikipedia online" or "protect Wikipedia's independence", when they are literally richer than ever.

More sources here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31702595

Healthy culture does not come from opposition of something (advertising, toxic people etc.), but from a positive vision.

You seem to confusing the opposition of something with "negativity". Obviously, opposing human trafficking, racism, etc. is culturally healthy and completely consistent with a positive vision for culture and humanity.

I dunno, a social media platform with the mission statement "We're against human trafficking" would probably still suck.

What makes you think I confuse those two?

You can have for a while a group based on opposition of things that everybody agrees on. But even in such case, unless there is some shared vision on how to achieve that, there is soon infighting and thus an unhealthy culture develops.

Downvoting for disagreement or if you don’t understand somebody does not contribute to a healthy culture here.

> What makes you think I confuse those two?

I'm taking what you wrote at face value. You wrote that healthy culture "does not come from opposition of something", but in reality, one can't have a healthy culture without opposition (in words and in deeds) to bad things.

Sure, but i think there is some truth to defining yourself by your enemy as a failure mode.

I obviously want my social media to be opposed to human traficking. However, if that is literally its only defining characteristic, it doesn't sound like a fun place to hang out.

> Sure, but i think there is some truth to defining yourself by your enemy as a failure mode.

Although I'd go further and add "only" before "defining yourself", I think there's wisdom in that statement. Some political parties have fallen into that trap, reactively opposing anything "the enemy" is for even at the cost of their constituents' health and happiness.

> We’ve also repurposed the Wikipedia model of community editing, meaning if you see something dodgy or misleading on WT Social, you can go in and correct it yourself. Yes, even on Jimmy’s posts.

So basically you will eventually get a heavily left-wing biased moderation[1].

No thank you!

[1]: https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/wikipedia...

Pretty sketchy article there, bud.

What is sketchy about it? You mean to say Wikipedia Co-founder is lying?

I mean that he has very little evidence for his claims

> I mean that he has very little evidence for his claims

This is not just his claims. This is pretty self-evident to those who are on the other side of the political spectrum which admittedly most IT/software crowd are not.

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/

"A 2018 study by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu compared levels of political bias in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica by quantifying each encyclopaedia’s respective usage of phrases favoured by Democratic or Republican members of US congress. Their study found that Wikipedia articles are more politically biased than those in Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as being slanted towards Democratic (as opposed to Republican) points of view. The study also found that the amount of bias in Wikipedia articles tended to decrease the greater the number of people who had edited them. The reason for this trend was explained in an earlier study by the same authors: “Benefitting from the efforts of many contributors, an article is also more likely to present controversial content in an unbiased way: thus diversity may help reduce content bias.”"

"Wikipedia’s list of deprecated sources currently contains 16 right-leaning sources: Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Epoch Times, FrontPage Magazine, the Gateway Pundit, Infowars, LifeSiteNews, News of the World, One America News Network, the Sun, Taki’s Magazine, VDare, WorldNetDaily, and Zero Hedge – and just one left-leaning source, Occupy Democrats. Other politically biased sources have also been deprecated, but it is harder to position them on the left-right political axis, such as media companies controlled by the Russian or Chinese government. The deprecated right-leaning sources include both those that advance far-right conspiracy theories (Infowars and WorldNetDaily) and those that advance ordinary conservatism (the Daily Mail and the Sun), as well as many shades of grey between those two extremes. It could be argued that even the non-extreme sources that have been deprecated are not of a particularly high quality, so the prohibition against citing them is not a problem per se, but a similar standard has not been applied to lower quality, left-leaning sources such as CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos.

According to Ad Fontes Media‘s widely-used media bias chart (which is commonly cited in discussions on the reliable sources noticeboard), CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos are all less reliable than the Daily Mail. This is significant because the Daily Mail, a deprecated right-leaning source, is often used as a benchmark for judging whether other right-leaning sources should be deprecated. All three of these left-wing sources are widely used at Wikipedia. An external links search shows around 2,580 Wikipedia pages linking to CounterPunch, around 2,400 linking to the Daily Kos, and around 1,640 linking to AlterNet. (These search results include both articles and talk pages, because Wikipedia’s software does not have a way to confine an external links search to just articles.)

A proposal to deprecate AlterNet was made in April 2019, but the proposal received very little support. One user argued that AlterNet should be deprecated due to the site’s distribution of false medical information—that anthrax can be treated using homeopathy, for instance—meant that following its instructions can cause bodily harm. On the other hand, one of the users opposed to deprecation argued that AlterNet is “valuable for providing progressive viewpoints and reporting or interviews of progressive organizations.” The majority of the Wikipedia articles citing AlterNet are not medical articles, but in light of Wikipedia’s status as the most widely used source of medical information for doctors and patients, allowing citations to AlterNet poses a risk that does not exist for most of the deprecated right-leaning tabloid newspapers and political websites."

Let's take a look through a US lens at. Do you agree that it is true by all realistic measures that Joe Biden won the last US presidential election fairly, and not through electoral fraud?

Do you think that Covid-19 was a serious pandemic, effectively mitigated by vaccination - at least before omicron?

Do you think it is fair that sources that consistently claim the opposite should be deprecated by a resource that espouses factual content?

If so - that's most, if not all of the US source deprecations explained.

Can you think of a similar non-factual conspiracy that has infected substantial numbers of left wing sources?

Alright. Since you want to want me to look through a US lens (I am not a US Citizen) I'll do so. But I won't go by your talking points as the Right Wing in US isn't bothered about the questions you pose at all. The Right Wing in US specifically has issues that affect it more. Some of them are:

1. Do you agree that it is true that the story of Hunter Biden was gagged by the Establishment and the details were not reported or were skewed to favor the Biden family in the leftist media? That the narrative was decidedly more in favor of the left?

2. Do you think it is fair that sources that consistently claimed the opposite (of Hunter Biden's laptop story being authentic) should be deprecated by a resource (Wikipedia in this instance) that espouses factual content (New York Post in this instance)?

3. Do you think it is fair that Fauci, who flip-flopped multiple times on mask mandate (funny how you moved away from mask mandate to vaccination as you know you will be on a slippery slope if you go that route) was still considered an authority on the pandemic by the Left wing Establishment to such an extent that they kept defending him and keep defending him to this date?

4. Do you think it is fair that the "Gain of function" research, the Wuhan lab leak theory and Dr Fauci's involvement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology was suppressed by the media and left wing establishment? Anything that tried to counter the mainstream theory on origins of the virus were shut down or blocked? That the theory on origins of the virus being from natural causes (that it jumped from bats to humans through another animal with no proof whatsoever) was peddled and enquires on the lab leak theory were shut down or blocked, giving enough time for the perps to clear up any evidence that might link back to them?

I have plenty more that go into realm of internal US politics and issues. Like why did CNN, NBC and Washington Post settle lawsuits with Nick Sandmann? If they are epitome of Truthfulness they should have fought the defamation case to the bitter end rather than settle for an undisclosed sum of money. If I am speaking the Truth I wouldn't back down.

> Can you think of a similar non-factual conspiracy that has infected substantial numbers of left wing sources?

Yes. Blind belief in whatever mainstream media spouts. Maybe you should start to wonder if conspiracy theorists have already gone mainstream and those who are now labelled conspiracy theorists are ones who are asking genuine questions and seeking answers that none in the Establishment have a straight answer for.

If I have to go by what mainstream Western media says about my country, it would be that my country majorly lives in slums, is extremely poor and has money to waste on Space and Technology but isn't using that money to feed the poor. This is how mainstream Western media denigrates my country repeatedly. I have seen enough fake news peddled against my country by Western media outlets to even consider them reliable anymore.

Reality has a well-known left wing bias

> Reality has a well-known left wing bias

Nick Sandmann begs to differ.

On a more serious note: Nope. I have had enough of left wing fake news about my Country and my experience says otherwise. I was center-left most of my life. Not anymore. This is now the majority sentiment in my Country.

The fact is that left wing bias exists in mainstream media outlets in most Democratic countries. Whether they are tied to reality is highly questionable. Yes they do get some of it right. But most of it horribly wrong. Left wing media today is beholden to the Establishment. There is no counter to the Establishment anymore.

You know when you try to visit a site, and they tell you they value privacy and freedom—but then require that you register to view their site, they are a cult.

How does having a user account make you less free or infringe on your privacy?

Letting them correlate your access patterns certainly does reduce privacy.

Fun fact, you don't need user registration to do that.

But user registration makes it so much easier! Single identifier shared across all user's devices and browsers, and which survives reinstalls, cookie eraser plugins, and needa no GDPR notice - that's the best thing an advertizer can hope for.

Sure, but its a bad metric to decide what sites to use. The evil ones will still track you regardless, the non-evil won't regardless.

Usually registering an account also requires an email address. However, if definitely indicates wanting to track your use on their site.

If they don't say they value privacy and freedom, what are they?