I probably shouldn't judge based solely on this, but I had never heard of Post News, so clicked their home page.
Most of it is covered by a "login" prompt, and the trending story is 'Messi unfollows Taylor Swift's ex on Instagram." Is that "toxicity-free?" I don't really know.
I didn't even get to the end of the linked post when I got hit with the paywall. They should have asked me in advance. I'd have told them that if you can't even read the post explaining the end of the site without hitting a hard paywall, your site won't have a chance in 2024.
I wondered why I'd never heard of them, but it's easy to see why, given their lack of understanding of the importance of sharing to gaining brand recognition.
It is full of Medium style enshittification for sure but it is par for the course for VC. I am sure they serve the Google Crawler a nice copy without authorization though.
So you were growing, but not enough to keep investors happy, who would eventually throttle the product for every bit of return once it had even a smidgen of community momentum around it, and turn it into the same ad-filled mess that are the current alternatives.
First, as a quick meta-response about the tone of your comment, please read HN guidelines[0]:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Edit out swipes.
And regarding the GP comment, which says:
>So you were growing, but not enough to keep investors happy, who would eventually throttle the product for every bit of return once it had even a smidgen of community momentum around it, and turn it into the same ad-filled mess that are the current alternatives. Where are the not-for-profits in this space?
I'm assuming GP means he's looking for something:
- Not optimizing for ROI after getting community momentum
- Not ad-driven or ad-filled
- Run by a non-profit
In which case, yes, a very large portion of the Fediverse fits all three. I have never seen a single ad-supported instance of Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla, Funkwhale, Misskey or PeerTube.
They might exist, and there are some big servers that have used/forked Mastodon for commercial purposes (eg Gab, Truth Social...) but they are not considered to be part of the Fediverse and are scarcely "federated" with anyone.
Interestingly enough, "ad revenue" is not even listed as one of the revenue drivers for Fediverse/Mastodon communities in their docs. [1]
You might also be interested to know that Mastodon was officially incorporated as a gGmbH (a German form of non-profit LLC) in 2021. [2]
And the largest Fediverse server, mastodon.social, is itself operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit. [3]
I don't know, but I do know pre-AWS, pre-node architecture.
Running a site is mega-cheap, if hosted on your cable modem. Doubly so if you rent a racked server. And a racked server + CDN can be done for mega-cheap.
It's not about underlying costs, unless of course you AWS.
But on the not-for-profits side, it's hard to find that in a lot of spaces. While perhaps a weird alternative, where are the not-for-profit restaurants?
Again, that may seem like a strange comparison, but... we have soup kitchens. Food banks. We have "donated" things, with volunteers.
But we don't have "restaurant experience" for free.
How would a non-profit restaurant work? If we look at grocers, the only sort of "merged" retailer is Costco. It's owned by institutional investors, but it does derive most of its profits from those who shop there, via memberships. This keeps (supposedly) the target on the shopper, not on using the shopper as a product.
Yet it's hard to get people to pay for news, to pay for anything. A reader of this may say "But I...", and if you do... you're a rarity, and not really relevant to the overall logic -- people don't want to pay for things on the internet.
Someone here once commented that AP and other news aggregators could just be deployed by Google. Well, great. More 'using the client as the product' Google foolery.
It would, however, be trivial to setup a site to do just that. Direct, non-hyped headlines. Only news. No ads, no tracking, no 1-pixels, and in fact, no javascript. (Just being hardcore here).
The real issue comes down to comments. Over and over, again and again, I see volunteers saying comments are the thorn. Policing them. Even if everyone on the planet was a Pleasant Person, there's SPAM. Ad-ware, astroturfing, and so on.
I think any sort of not-for-profit won't be done at scale, ever, if it includes comments. At least not under todays model. Volunteers can't handle the load.
However, I do know people that operate mailing lists, for bike clubs, for athletic clubs, mailing lists as we've had for 30+ years on the internet, and which flowed from BBS systems.
These are operated with often 200 members on a list. No one cares about profit, or about growth of the list, or about debate. They're about the topic.
Again, I think as soon as you get into "Lots of people all talking together", it means "OMG, I can post something an 1M people will see it!", and then comes in the horrid behaviour. The politics. The ads. The spam. The commercial pitches. The posturing.
I don't think non-profit at scale can be done due to this.
Owner came right out on launch and publicly told disabled people they had to go to the back of the line because basic accessibility for disabled people wasn't as important as polish for existing able bodied users.
Most of it is covered by a "login" prompt, and the trending story is 'Messi unfollows Taylor Swift's ex on Instagram." Is that "toxicity-free?" I don't really know.
Looks like they went the clickbait route.
I wondered why I'd never heard of them, but it's easy to see why, given their lack of understanding of the importance of sharing to gaining brand recognition.
So you were growing, but not enough to keep investors happy, who would eventually throttle the product for every bit of return once it had even a smidgen of community momentum around it, and turn it into the same ad-filled mess that are the current alternatives.
Where are the not-for-profits in this space?
The best-known web client/app on there is Mastodon. And it fits the bill of what you seem to be looking for.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Edit out swipes.
And regarding the GP comment, which says:
>So you were growing, but not enough to keep investors happy, who would eventually throttle the product for every bit of return once it had even a smidgen of community momentum around it, and turn it into the same ad-filled mess that are the current alternatives. Where are the not-for-profits in this space?
I'm assuming GP means he's looking for something:
- Not optimizing for ROI after getting community momentum
- Not ad-driven or ad-filled
- Run by a non-profit
In which case, yes, a very large portion of the Fediverse fits all three. I have never seen a single ad-supported instance of Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla, Funkwhale, Misskey or PeerTube.
They might exist, and there are some big servers that have used/forked Mastodon for commercial purposes (eg Gab, Truth Social...) but they are not considered to be part of the Fediverse and are scarcely "federated" with anyone.
Interestingly enough, "ad revenue" is not even listed as one of the revenue drivers for Fediverse/Mastodon communities in their docs. [1]
You might also be interested to know that Mastodon was officially incorporated as a gGmbH (a German form of non-profit LLC) in 2021. [2]
And the largest Fediverse server, mastodon.social, is itself operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit. [3]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1]: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/#monetization
[2]: https://joinmastodon.org/fr/about
[3]: https://mastodon.social/explore
Running a site is mega-cheap, if hosted on your cable modem. Doubly so if you rent a racked server. And a racked server + CDN can be done for mega-cheap.
It's not about underlying costs, unless of course you AWS.
But on the not-for-profits side, it's hard to find that in a lot of spaces. While perhaps a weird alternative, where are the not-for-profit restaurants?
Again, that may seem like a strange comparison, but... we have soup kitchens. Food banks. We have "donated" things, with volunteers.
But we don't have "restaurant experience" for free.
How would a non-profit restaurant work? If we look at grocers, the only sort of "merged" retailer is Costco. It's owned by institutional investors, but it does derive most of its profits from those who shop there, via memberships. This keeps (supposedly) the target on the shopper, not on using the shopper as a product.
Yet it's hard to get people to pay for news, to pay for anything. A reader of this may say "But I...", and if you do... you're a rarity, and not really relevant to the overall logic -- people don't want to pay for things on the internet.
Someone here once commented that AP and other news aggregators could just be deployed by Google. Well, great. More 'using the client as the product' Google foolery.
It would, however, be trivial to setup a site to do just that. Direct, non-hyped headlines. Only news. No ads, no tracking, no 1-pixels, and in fact, no javascript. (Just being hardcore here).
The real issue comes down to comments. Over and over, again and again, I see volunteers saying comments are the thorn. Policing them. Even if everyone on the planet was a Pleasant Person, there's SPAM. Ad-ware, astroturfing, and so on.
I think any sort of not-for-profit won't be done at scale, ever, if it includes comments. At least not under todays model. Volunteers can't handle the load.
However, I do know people that operate mailing lists, for bike clubs, for athletic clubs, mailing lists as we've had for 30+ years on the internet, and which flowed from BBS systems.
These are operated with often 200 members on a list. No one cares about profit, or about growth of the list, or about debate. They're about the topic.
Again, I think as soon as you get into "Lots of people all talking together", it means "OMG, I can post something an 1M people will see it!", and then comes in the horrid behaviour. The politics. The ads. The spam. The commercial pitches. The posturing.
I don't think non-profit at scale can be done due to this.
But I could be wrong.
Restaurants are in the small business part of the scale
Non Profit->Small Business->Growth Business->VC Backed Growth Business->Unicorn
Where nefarious treatment of customers correlates to the X axis.
Techcrunch story: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/post-news-the-a16z-funded-...
This seems to be a syndication platform for "Big News" to post paywalled articles and a way for them to collect micropayments.
Why can't this run on autopilot? If the thing is built (which I assume it is), it would require no/very little maintenance.
Why does it have to shut down?