Reddit’s cofounder said that at first the company felt like ‘a homework assignment that got out of hand’ rather than a business::Reddit’s cofounder Steve Huffman said in its early days he filled up most of the site with content using different accounts until it got more users.
Not everything has to be a buisness.
This is the part that Silicon Valley doesn’t get. We can, do, and need good things that don’t make money.
They need to make some money - infrastructure isn’t free, employees need paid, etc. they should be self sustaining.
They don’t need to be 2009-Google profitable though. That pipe dream needs to end. 3-5% YoY growth is plenty.
Or, how about a simple nonprofit that charges a nominal fee to fund infrastructure? I’m willing to pay for a good service, especially if I’m pretty sure they’re using my money to improve the service itself.
The idea that non-profits aren’t profiting-seeking is the biggest misunderstanding in the world. I work for a large one, and it’s absolutely the same rampant penny-squeezing 30%-unsustainable-growth-seeking monstrosity as anything in the Valley. The pittance that gets thrown to “charitable causes” is just another tax dodge in an otherwise profit-demanding venture. Swap “shareholders” with “the endowment” and there’s no difference at all.
Much better to be a for-profit company with a charter demanding where profits in excess of modest growth targets are spent internally.
That’s too bad. I’d be interested to see some statistics about how customer experience is, on average, with non-profits vs private companies vs public companies. Maybe it’s still a net win even if there are awful non-profits
The problem is that for the number of users, a centralized platform is terrible at scaling. This is why they seek advertising revenue so much.
The only efficient way to solve this problem is by decentralizing, which is what Lemmy’s doing.
Eh, kinda, but I see Lemmy as multiple centralized services, not actually decentralized. All of the content I view is stored on my instance, even if it was created elsewhere. This means it’s going to have issues scaling because there will be a ton of copies of everything throughout the fediverse.
A properly decentralized service won’t have so much duplication, it’ll have just enough redundancy so it’s not at risk of failure if too many nodes fail.
Ah, I see your point.
If we want to be precise, we could say Lemmy is federated.
There’s centralized, federated,and distributed (e.g. DHTs).
On federated networks like Mastodon, I can send messages to my followers that I’m moving instances; after I finish moving, my followers can refollow me on the new instance.
I can export and import the people I finish and my block lists. I’m not sure if Lemmy has this functionality, but the point is that it’s still better than Reddit. A node daying doesn’t mean the end of the network.
The ideal would be to have a fully distributed version of Lemmy, where people could join virtual instances over a distributed architecture. Perhaps that will be possible one day, but for now Lemmy’s better than nothing.
Yup, I’m actually working on one distributed alternative, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually finish it.
And yeah, Lemmy is good in that it’s resilient to nodes dropping off, but it doesn’t solve the problem of costly hosting. I would assume the total cost of running Lemmy is way more expensive (perhaps an order of magnitude) than running Reddit, for the same number of users, because of how much duplication and communication there needs to be across instances.
So yeah, I’m here while lemmy is sustainable, but I’m worried about how it’ll scale.
This was my biggest wtf.
Companies like reddit used to love that shit - make something awesome to get a massive audience… And THEN monetize. So what the hell is he talking about “business”?
It isn’t even that it doesn’t need to make money. It’s that it doesn’t need to keep making more money than it did last year. It’s okay to have “stagnant” growth. It’s okay to just keep doing well rather than keep increasing profits.