Is it really that hard for someone who browses hackernews to get set up on a federated platform? I'm over here assuming that everyone on this forum that complains about how hard it is to run a startup should be able to run the docker compose and route a reverse proxy to their own instance, rather than take the 5 minutes to read about how the fediverse and activity pub works and find an instance they like offering free access.

I get that it is not a ubiquitous solution, but after my experiences on mastodon.social and others, I'm really starting to wonder just how genuine the sentiment behind "it's hard to sign up" is. It's not that hard at all - I have found it a lot easier than doing something like creating a modern facebook or google account for instance.

> Is it really that hard for someone who browses hackernews to get set up on a federated platform

I got it to work. Most of us on here can get it to work. But it's a pain, there's a daily bug to contend with, and when I consider that process for others I know together with the community's hostility towards feedback which entails a better onboarding process, it doesn't strike me as worth it. (There are definitely folks for whom it's worth it. But you have to put a premium on federation for its own sake, and a large premium at that.)

Just because we might be tech-savvy doesn't mean we have an affinity for jumping through hoops that we don't think are worth it.

Agreed, but I'm also confused. I made a kbin and lemmy.world account about as easily as I would a reddit account. Are the servers still impacted for some?

The new UI and general idea of federation takes some figuring out, but the high level experience of "see a post, click, read comments, comment" isn't any different from Hackernews.

The thing you are missing is that Reddit is not (sufficiently) profitable. :)

It would probably be profitable if they didn’t employ 2000 people to run what is in essence a large but relatively basic forum system.

It's still not an absurdly profitable venture even if you drop head count to 300-500 which is likely a reasonable number. A lot of people could have good careers in that smaller reddit, but it's not a multi-billion dollar unicorn.

That still seems high for what Reddit is. I would have expected them to have 50-100 employees at most.

Reddit is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and that number has been rapidly increasing.

They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.

Yes but would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy? Fast may seem good but it's actually slow when compared to the fastest horses. Every company must be a unicorn, so sayeth the investors.

> would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy

Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

>> would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy

> Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

Not exactly. The rest of the economy may run on "low-growth or steady-state business models," but the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses demand "30% YoY growth in perpetuity." It's a cultural problem.

> the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses

Reddit was held by a media company, Condé Naste. It chose to raise growth equity from VCs, among others. In summary,

The whole world needs to slow down and take a breath.