Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.

On the other hand, if anything goes it can probably be fairly hands off.

And yet some Reddit mods manage subs with 10s of thousands for… free.

But they also have thousands of very well paid employees. Average salary $150K+.

Only 100 users and anything goes --- yes, I can see how that might be acceptable. I can also see how most people might have little to no interest in participating.

Saying this on HN is irony crystalized.

It’s a site mostly used to share links and comments. Places like it abound on the internet.

In case of any shenanigans, they’re liable to lose users to an alternative faster than you can say digg.

Even though it’s owners are powerful people in tech, I’m willing to bet it’s not generating billions for them.

And with anonymous accounts, their incentive to harvest data and use it for ad targeting is little.

This is a big deal for so many things, where solutions and advice can be retrieved instead of having to reinvent the wheel.

The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences. Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok.

Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a sustainable platform.

I think the future of online communities will be community for the sake of community…and nothing else. Very mundane and boring on the outside, driven by nothing other than “I’m sharing waffle recipes and I’m going to just upload them to the internet on my hosting provider or via my old Compaq Presario and I do not care about engagements just email me later and goodbye.”

Hell, it's only about 45 million in the US (assuming you believe Twitter's own numbers - which I definitely do not).

So at best, you're getting 1 in ~8 folks in the US. More realistically, I'd assume your audience is more likely 1 in ~20 in the US - assuming you manage to get literally everyone to follow you.

Is that larger than you're going to get on your own site? Probably.

Is that everyone? fuck no. It's basically no one. You're reaching the worst 5% of the country - those who have nothing better to do than browse twitter, or those who are using twitter to promote themselves.

The brief exception to this is politics - where Twitter was an easy way to get a relevant soundbite from a politician on a topic. I think that era is waning very quickly.

Most media sources aren't embedded in small forums.

Admittedly - it's fairly certain that some of those will be about ycombinator itself - but I don't really find that outside the scope of the ask - given that many of the hits for twitter are really just following the company drama and not expanding the reach of a single user's tweet.

Mastodon is really better suited as a collection of smaller communities much like Reddit's r/ forums then for one “universal” platform.

It’s already had some scaling issues with folks trying to use it as well.

But reaching a larger audience is inherently negative, not positive. What is the purpose for speaking to 10,000 users vs 10-20 users? If for marketing, or some other money making scheme, sure there is an advantage. But for users who care about specific content, what value does a cacophony of noise offer? As it is, unity and cohesion will always master diversity and confusion, so shouldn't a "larger audience" be the antithesis of what adds value to a platform?

To a degree, such things can even be seen in major platforms themselves. If we go to something like YouTube, there are different categories of content, and within each categories, sub-genres of content sorted by various factors users are truly interested in. It then does not make sense to attempt to reach the audience invested in makeup tutorials, to also foster users and content around HFT on NASDAQ. If anything, one group would accidentally stumble over the other, and be the worse off for it. This in turn, would hurt both communities atmospheres, and degrade the "convenience factor" of the platform itself. (The more categories and unrelated categories, the harder it is for the user to navigate the platform to find "worthwhile" content, and the harder it is for the owners to curate the UGC.)

One of those things is not like the others.

This HN website, phpBB forums, etc., don't interface with other systems. Mastodon does. Usenet and BBS' problem was more that they just predated the massive influx of always-online users that came with the advent of smartphones.

It's not like Twitter is a single server through which all content gets pushed. It's a replicated, distributed network of servers. ActivityPub servers are too, except the shards in network are not all owned by the same entity.

How would you learn about something via Twitter, sans promoted tweets? You'd find out about it from the retweets of the people you follow. That's literally the same thing you'd do in a Mastodon instance.

The big difference is that nobody in the ActivityPub network has the power to force content into your feed. Hasn't that been one of the biggest complaints of mid-2000s era social media? That the algorithm takes presidence over your own preferences? Never in my life do I want to see another "here's one weird trick you can do with a couple of pennies in the bottom of a plastic bag" click-bait article. That's basically impossible to propagate within the ActivityPub network. But that doesn't mean nothing can propogate through the network.

I'm having long, engaging conversations about topics I care about with people within the ActivityPub network. Almost none of those people are on the Mastodon instance I am currently inhabiting. I'm having more of these conversation than I had on Twitter, where I have 15x the number followers. From my perspective, my word is getting out further through ActivityPub than it ever did on Twitter.

The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters in the people I followed, but the overall breadth was large.

In theory something like the fediverse provides this as well, but I'm not sold.

With ActivityPub, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.

I don't mean to sound overly dismissive, but maybe instead of putting the onus on a social media website to provide that experience, wouldn't it be more sensible to get that from a news aggregate site? I.e. Google News, Fark, Reddit, etc.?

Part of the issue with how modern social media platforms is the intent to keep users on their platform for many hours at a time. Instead, limiting content on those sites to the intent of the platform, and allowing users to find that other content outside of the site would be a "better" way to manage their experience on the platforms content. For example, a platform devoted to Formula 1 would not be a good place to inject articles about COVID information or political events. It wouldn't be a good place to do so, not just because it would be severely off topic, but also because it would be managed by people who would otherwise be focused on curating the topic they are (presumably) knowledgeable on.

Basically, I'm saying it's not a good idea to get news updates from Twitter for the same reason why it's not a good idea to get a sushi from a gas station bathroom.

> Instead, limit content on social sites to the subject of the platform

That's my point. I'm saying the thing I liked most about Twitter was that there wasn't a single "subject of the platform". Don't get me wrong, I also spend plenty of time in more specific corners of the internet, but I've yet to find something that quite replicates Twitter for me.

I have almost everything in one app: YouTube, Reddit, HN, Twitter, blogs, webcomics, news etc.

Exactly. Landlords should not exist.

Come on, you are getting A LOT from all those platforms. You feed someone else's enterprise just as much as it feeds you. Those who have even small audiences get a lot of value, not sure why you are trying to picture it as one way street.

That would be the fediverse (Mastodon).

Find a server with people who share your interests, or make your own. Making some VC shithead richer all the while you're gamified with rage and adverts is not what I want to continue doing.

Thankfully, with the Muskpolaypse, that's looking more and more sustainable. We're even now seeing news agencies casually adding their mastodon user.

> To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you.

And in Mastodon, data portability is a thing on every server. I can pack up all my data from one to the next.

And, any server that tries to be an advert spreading server will soon get defederated. Spam is not acceptable, at all.

It's a pity that we never hear from Advertisers

Paying to be viewed and heard (ads) is not cost effective for most artists.. It's almost always a scam, and it makes life as a musician even more impossible than it was prior to the Internet. You're better off now buying a billboard by the highway instead of trying to share free music on social media.

I think it's insane how limitedly people view the Internet, and how often it's only viewed only from one personal perspective at a time... Designers think from their personal perspective and that's it, there is only one success path and post format imposed on millions of people with these platforms.

This is Elon's problem right now too. He is trying to work out issues that suit his perspective, to the disappointment and dismay of many who those decisions will stump.

What the Internet needs is a community that separates big industry from independent creators (and that also does not charge people who are not making a profit to function), and also separates advertising from organic content They'd also need to police that heavily, just as much as illicit and negative content... That's the only social solution that will work moving forward. All these social platforms, like the metaverse seem to think that they can just build yet another shopping mall full of ads and then people will want to hang out there, and that won't work. Sites like facebook and Twitter were originally successful because they were free and equal for visibility, but as they try to tweak that, the same sites fall apart and fail. People are growing wise to the sites that begin the free to paid shopping mall conversion model.

People now want social sites and apps that help them to make money in simple and direct ways, and apps that free them from needing desk jobs, not sites that want to trap them into watching ads and spending money on big business products and services and scams like Crypto and NFTs. The app makers that don't get that will languish with weak user bases, and they will burn a lot of money in the process.

Of course a site that enables making money "in simple and direct ways" would be a hit - but I'd suggest that what you're missing isn't a site but a time. Early social media was part of the general gold rush of commercializing the net - a lot of easy money was bubbling about. The Fediverse doesn't really have that gold rush, but neither will Twitter 2.0 - it'd require a paradigm shift (like the Metaverse - which I'm not particularly bullish on, but it's a possibility) for fresh investment at scale.

Anyway, depending on your creative goals, I encourage you to still check out the Fediverse. It won't be simple and direct, but (if you're not already popular / willing to pay for ads) you'll probably get more genuine listens and engagement than you will from commercial alternatives.

The absolute majority of the people on the planet have neither the time and technical knowledge, nor the desire to maintain their own platforms or stacks.

Decentralized communities suffer from all the problems of user-friendliness and ease of maintenance that Open Source generally suffers from.

I used to gleefully ridicule all things Twitter. But I've come to see it as more of a public benefit than a public menace. The automated censoring aggravates me because it does get things wrong, even after requesting review. So a tweak was in order, but this is not that kind of tweak, it's worse. I think we need something like it. I'm not sure if one is enough or if two is too many.

So just group chats.

I've seen a lot of people talking about the need for a nationalized version of something like twitter as a result of seeing how much damage one person with money can do. That would make it more like a community garden where people are doing it on their own land, but communally owned and in the same location as other people to take advantage of all the benefits that make it successful in the first place. Small decentralized communities are nice, but never really went away and fulfill a different need - there's plenty of small forums or discord channels for programming questions, but I still prefer to use stackoverflow when it's an option.

Whereas decentralized online communities have existed, they were mostly isolated which meant that users had to make multiple accounts if they wanted to participate in various niche interests.

Now that you can create one account in one server and still be able to participate in other federated communities in a "global square" if you wanted to is an important departure from communities of the past.