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lori

Cohost's financial update is a poster child for what I and others have been saying for a long time now: the internet won't survive without decentralization. You can't just make the next Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr. That's a joke. Cohost was against decentralization but they've now learned why centralization isn't feasible: only massive corporations with infinite VC can afford it, and they hemorrhage that money and close eventually too.

The internet is too expensive to work this way and it won't long term. We just got complacent while there was enough VC to go around. It's pets dot com again. It doesn't last.

And this isn't even about AP/fedi, while I like fedi this is true with or without it. We have to go back to having websites. Not The(tm) website for whatever, but lots of them. If you don't want to go to more than one? Too bad, it's how things will be regardless. Having One website isn't sustainable for corporations and isn't even vaguely feasible for little guys.

You have to have lots of websites. I can run a small community for a bit of my entertainment budget for the month or donations from a handful of users who like what I'm running. You can run a mastodon instance for a small crowd for very little. You can run a website off an old laptop laying around. You cannot run a 130k user site and pay you and your friends $94k a year to run it. It's not sustainable. I wish it was. It isn't. Sites have to stay small, and there have to be enough of them spread out to spread out the financial load to hobbyist levels. Sorry that you can't make a living running a site for your friends to hang out on, but it's just how the math works out. Reddit can't make money doing it, Twitter can't make money doing it, Patreon can't...they only survive on being Huge Corporations Who Can Bleed Money. You can replicate bleeding money on a small scale all you want but I wouldn't advise it. You can however run a forum for your friends for the cost of Netflix or whatever.

16 Jun 2023 at 0:49 | Open on hackers.town
33 comments
doll!

@lori i remember when cohost started there was a lot of people talking about how it was better than fedi because X, and while some of their concerns were valid all I could think was "yeah, but I know which one I trust to be around in half a decade"

16 Jun 2023 at 0:55 | Open on inherently.digital
Elias Mårtenson

@hierarchon @lori I never paid attention to it because it looked like one more of those siloed systems that popped up after twitter started becoming whatever it is now.

Remember post by the way? What happened to that one?

But I read the report that was mentioned in the above post. It reads like an explicit admission that it was a terrible idea to begin with, without saying it was a terrible idea to begin with.

I wonder if they could salvage something by adding federation and then spebd their time on building something that makes them unique. I guess that's what facebook is trying with their new platform that is supposed to be federated.

@hierarchon @lori I never paid attention to it because it looked like one more of those siloed systems that popped up after twitter started becoming whatever it is now.

Remember post by the way? What happened to that one?

But I read the report that was mentioned in the above post. It reads like an explicit admission that it was a terrible idea to begin with, without saying it was a terrible idea to begin with.

16 Jun 2023 at 1:52 | Open on functional.cafe
lori

@loke @hierarchon they are very against federation they do not like mastodon

16 Jun 2023 at 2:28 | Open on hackers.town
lunchy

@lori @loke @hierarchon of course they're against federation, if they weren't it would undermind their whole strategy

16 Jun 2023 at 2:52 | Open on tilde.zone
Elias Mårtenson

@lunch @lori @hierarchon What is their strategy? Granted, my understanding of them is limited to the financials post above and a few minutes reading comments.

16 Jun 2023 at 2:57 | Open on functional.cafe
bookandswordblog

@lori Patreon has a good business as payment processors, but they borrowed too much money and have to throw it around at random things so they can tell investors that explosive growth is coming. The Series C fund in September 2017 was probably the tipping point. mobile.twitter.com/FoldableHum

16 Jun 2023 at 1:19 | Open on scholar.social
~n

@lori From my experience… you can coop to run a small community but it’s a delicate balance. Scaling beyond a certain point clearly isn’t viable but concepts to share the administrative burden in a small scale? they do exist and demonstrate their viability on a daily basis. Dependably so. The internet isn’t a global village but I can easily see how it can be a fabric of globally interconnected villages.

16 Jun 2023 at 1:40 | Open on chaos.social
INIT_6

@lori

This is why I think the #fediverse like stuff needs to find a way to for a lack of a better word cluster. Folding proteins kind of thing. Distribute the workload. I have lots of extra resources I would love to share, meaning I can run whatever docker/VM you want but needs to be load and forget. I don't have time to struggle making Mastodon docker work, then build up a small community. I do have time to load up some software and contribute to someone else's effort.

At least I'm hoping this will be the next wave of decentralization software.

@lori

This is why I think the #fediverse like stuff needs to find a way to for a lack of a better word cluster. Folding proteins kind of thing. Distribute the workload. I have lots of extra resources I would love to share, meaning I can run whatever docker/VM you want but needs to be load and forget. I don't have time to struggle making Mastodon docker work, then build up a small community. I do have time to load up some software and contribute to someone else's effort.

16 Jun 2023 at 2:16 | Open on infosec.exchange
:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@lori I would love to calculate the total cost of ownership for all of the mastodon instances.. 10,000 instances running between $5 to $3000 a month depending on their size (+ Massive amounts of wasted money and compute due to the 10,000 S3 buckets modal).

I think there is a lot more waste in the fediverse than cohost... Cohost just needs to deal with scale.

Every second day another Mastodon admin calls it quits, which is worse as an "user experience".... plus I hope cohost thrives, it's a place that really understands that social networks should be fun and dynamic.

@lori I would love to calculate the total cost of ownership for all of the mastodon instances.. 10,000 instances running between $5 to $3000 a month depending on their size (+ Massive amounts of wasted money and compute due to the 10,000 S3 buckets modal).

I think there is a lot more waste in the fediverse than cohost... Cohost just needs to deal with scale.

16 Jun 2023 at 2:49 | Open on aus.social
lori

@shlee cohost can't deal with scale is the thing

And in my experience most of the time when admins are calling it quits they just started recently to begin with and realized they hated

16 Jun 2023 at 2:58 | Open on hackers.town
lori

@shlee also honestly I don't hope cohost thrives after trying twice to allow cub porn until people booed at them too hard both times

16 Jun 2023 at 3:07 | Open on hackers.town
Nora, tech aspect

@shlee @lori is it worse? The entire Cohost social graph will likely collapse at once; I lost essentially zero relationships when cybre.space died, because I was able to move and keep my follow/ers.

16 Jun 2023 at 2:58 | Open on tenforward.social
lori

@noracodes @shlee same here, was also on cybre.space, had plenty of time to move and it wasn't a big deal

16 Jun 2023 at 3:05 | Open on hackers.town
JDPON voluntary "victim"

@lori@hackers.town i expected the numbers to be awful but not THAT awful holy shit

16 Jun 2023 at 2:53 | Open on lethallava.land
P
Andrew (bookseller era)
Tommy Thorn

@lori A great reminder. I ran to my PayPal account and sent whatever money I had there to my instance (chaos.social).

FWIW, I agree, but I would hope something a little better than Web1 would be possible, like IPFS or some other distributed P2P mechanism. Fediverse isn't that.

16 Jun 2023 at 3:03 | Open on chaos.social
lori

@tommythorn I definitely don't think fedi is the be all end all of the web though it's pretty good for now. But whatever the web will look like, it can never be A Few Websites For Everything, it's not sustainable big or small

16 Jun 2023 at 3:08 | Open on hackers.town
rellik moo

@lori

I was just thinking about the dotcom boom & bust earlier, so good call on pets dot com

I mean, at least it's been >20 years

now I want someone to do a hobbits "but what about second dotcom bust?!" thing

16 Jun 2023 at 3:38 | Open on toot.cat
lori

@idlestate I think part of our problem online is how many grown adult netizens are too young to remember pets dot com and think the internet they know is how it's always been and will never change

The writing on the wall is that it's all about to collapse. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Discord...it's breaking down fast.

Meanwhile older folks grew up when corporate social sites didn't last that long to begin with.

16 Jun 2023 at 3:42 | Open on hackers.town
cinja ♾️

@lori @idlestate I had completely forgotten about pets.com ...

I remember specifically what I was working on in that time frame, cause it was pretty cool even if the startup doing it failed... Universal DB drivers w/ on the fly syntax translation.

Yeah, sure, it had some bugs... Like actually returning all the rows in a count query on Informix and then actually counting the rows and returning the result.. But.. The idea was cool, and there was some sweet distributed logic/architecture for it.

16 Jun 2023 at 3:52 | Open on hackers.town
varve

@lori @idlestate oof, yeah, I remember when "internet years" was a running joke and any website that lasted more than two years was positively ancient.

16 Jun 2023 at 3:54 | Open on weirder.earth
lori

@varve @idlestate even though myspace is technically around still in some weird form, it was only really relevant to anyone for maybe 5 years.

Meanwhile I have had a Twitter account (now 99% dormant because I'm here) for 14 years.

16 Jun 2023 at 3:56 | Open on hackers.town
Gabriela Queiroz 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇧🇷

@lori

I broadly agree with you. However, I think it won't really happen until we get better standards for "mini cloud computing". Basically, a way to make it easier to write web apps meant for a small scale such that an end user can install with minimal configuration.

Also, I wonder if we can use #gridcomputing and #dapp ideas to make it easier for people to pool spare resources together for hosting and computation.

16 Jun 2023 at 3:40 | Open on tech.lgbt
lori

@gabri I think it's going to happen whether we're ready for it or not, because funding won't be there forever for the corporate sites and the Cohosts of the world never had real money to begin with

Now I fully agree on you on what we need for it to go WELL, but I think it's coming whether we're prepared or not

16 Jun 2023 at 3:43 | Open on hackers.town
quickexplained

@lori yes, but the mobile experience is going to suck, which is a big lure of these big websites. Mobile browsing sucks and I Don’t want to return to that.

16 Jun 2023 at 3:58 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
lori

@quickexplained it's not really optional is kind of my point. Even if you don't want to go back to that, it's the only thing that survives, because the money is gone, or in some cases never really existed.

16 Jun 2023 at 3:59 | Open on hackers.town
quickexplained

@lori yeah, the money is now going towards machine learning, which sucks. And the only benefactor of that will be Nvidia as it is right now.

16 Jun 2023 at 4:02 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
:blahaj: Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑

@lori i am still not convinced that the federated model will work well with things like a reddit alternative or even an instagram alternative. We'll see, I won't abandon Reddit until I have to, but it seems it will be easier to just ignore an alternative and just go back to the official game forums for the games I like to talk about than to find the best Lemmy group for them.

16 Jun 2023 at 4:40 | Open on topspicy.social
Lauren Hetherington

@lori oh yikes. I was vaguely interested in cohost when it started. Unfortunate that they're having trouble.

16 Jun 2023 at 4:43 | Open on peoplemaking.games
Zennith

@lori I wasn't really aware of Cohost till now, but...

$46k in expenses per month on $5k monthly revenues? Whoaaaa. Yeah that isn't a business model. ^.-.^;;;

Like, sure, running a website or platform for passion, I love the idea. If they're rich and running a *big* website with *big* passion, that's great too!

But if someone is putting out a financial report, they're in srs business territory, and can't be mucking around with that INSANE negative cash flow. WHEW.

16 Jun 2023 at 5:12 | Open on furries.club
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