I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it. I also don't really care about the high growth thing but being sustainable is important. Sustained growth and profitability at least means the thing can be around for a while. I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. So if you get on the VC hamster wheel, there's no path but hyper growth. If you go against it and say, run a really normal business or even a social enterprise (aka non profit), maybe it actually benefits the people it's in service of.
This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've been thinking a lot about it. There are so many dynamics that trend towards corporate consolidation and ultimately the alienating effects of modern technology. The money to be made combined with rapid global scalability and network lock-in effects, mean that it's an uphill fight the whole way.
The bright spot is that so many technologists are disgusted with the direction tech has taken, and we have the know-how and agency to build alternatives. In order to address the selling out problem, I think we need to establish some standardized and well understood commitments to shepherding projects, products and companies that have some real teeth while not requiring a vow of poverty to maintain.
The other key piece is finding the right hooks to get normals using these products and not just defaulting to the big tech alternatives due to friction. This is the hardest part by far, but I feel there is enough general frustration with big tech that will be possible to harness in some way. The key will be some kind of killer app that appeals to enough people to gain critical mass.
If I take my American family and move to Australia, we will become Australian over time.
If I take my family and the entire city I live in to Australia, there will be an American city in Australia.
Eternal September is just when the influx overwhelmed the "carrying capacity" of Usenet, and anyone who has been on any forum for a length of time can refer to a similar influx (often complaining that everything has gone to crap since then).
Right out of the gates, you have selection bias in who wants to be in your club: probably people who share many of the same interests as the club. Then you have further selection pressure with inviting new membership: existing members are more likely to accept into the organization prospective members who are similar to themselves, or at least, an idealized version. Then, you have rituals, ranging from hazing to positive Big/Little type interactions, which proactively push new members to assimilate into the club.
I feel you though, marginalia, and appreciate your work. I wrote a search engine too once and after a few months of me not using it myself, gave up. My results were too specific and not broad enough to include the world.
This! Why is it everything we build is to communicate with the world? The reality is we live in a certain physical space, we can only see, hear and speak at a certain distance and while technology has enabled a way to overcome that, it does feel like we're overwhelmed by the scale of humans we can communicate with. I want to go back to real, small, private connection. Hence micro.
> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.
Even if the whole world isn't built this way, much of it could be, especially groups and interactions.
It’s what you said. The real world. Meet a friend. It’s as private as it gets.
Pick a small friend for true micro experience. :D
Jokes aside, unplug. And it doesn’t have to be that we build things at a world scale. But isn’t it amazing that we can and do build stuff at this scale.
Devs often don’t use tech as much as regular users! They build, and forget the use.
> This! Why is it everything we build is to communicate with the world?
Can’t say why, but it’s been the case since the communcation method of choice was shortwave radio, varying flavours of websites aside. Even just tuning in to a foreign station on a clear frosty night, for those of lesser technical means, was magic. Talking to people you never met on IRC felt like a continuation of that, especially when you had basically nobody in easy physical reach that you could converse with about your interests.
It feels strange to hear people talk as though Steve Jobs announced communication with strangers alongside the iPhone, when it’s always been a big path of the point—and initially most of the point—of the Internet for you.
The world still doesn't really exist. At least not in any where we can comprehend it. Since it is almost certainly incomprehensible and probably not even possible to capture the world as it is, then isn't the second best to build something that is nice?
That just as we went from hunting and gathering to farms and now cities, internet grew from a few people having access in universities and some tech corporations, to now phones in the hands of children in villages.
Let’s be more inclusive and dare I say progressive even?
I, for one, am not hankering to gather and hunt.
Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few tech channels since I'm from europe and the times I have time ended up being when the US was asleep, haha. Learned to much about a couple of topics over that time as well. I still know way too many arcane weirdnesses and internals of python from stints on #python.
Or old TF2/Tremulous/CS1.6/Quake servers. Times when we could call truces over voice to get us another beer and the other guy wouldn't come 'round the corner. And then you'd discuss current brand choices for a second. Or when one of the local pros started to take you seriously and would start some impromptu coaching, which usually involved a lot of death on your side because now they were looking for you.
That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs rarely have that community feel anymore.
At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?
Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code.
I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all on the mean streets of IRC.
There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.
It was a netsplit.
Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor.
The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History
https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021
Since the decline of freenode, their user count statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.
Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days.
What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a train station where everyone is always passing through and there are no shared values or experiences.