Chris TrottierSubstack is not a suitable alternative to Twitter.
If Elon Musk can buy Twitter, he can buy Substack.
However, Elon Musk cannot buy the Fediverse. No one company owns it. It is not for sale.
At this point, if a social network refuses to join the Fediverse, I’m not interested.
Anyone trying to build yet another proprietary walled garden is just a mini-Musk.
You do not need a billionaire or a VC fund to use social media.
They are just middlemen opportunists trying to insert themselves between you and your friends.
The Internet was built to make it easy for you to connect with others, and that is getting easier with protocols like ActivityPub.
You don’t need Elon Musk. You don’t need Mark Zuckerberg. You certainly don’t need any Silicon Valley tech bro to let you use social media.
To people who say that Elon Musk won't buy Substack because he could "barely afford" to buy Twitter: Substack is no unicorn.
Substack's current valuation sits at $585 million.
That might be an over-estimation because its revenue for the entirety of 2022 was probably $18.6 million.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. He can assuredly buy Substack if he wanted it.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23660473/substack-retail-investors-revenue-profit
I've worked for a social media start-up before. In fact, I was an early employee at a well known one. I know how this goes.
Founders start with the best of intentions.
But then VCs start making demands. And at that point, startups go for the fastest, easiest method to acquire revenue growth. That is, if they want to stay on board.
A good many of them take their exit as soon as it becomes available. Just look at Instagram and WhatsApp.
If Elon Musk walked into Substack's office right now (probably with a sink) and offered them $585 million to buy it, do you think their shareholders would say "No"?
Not on their life.
They would be skipping for joy. Everyone who owns equity in Substack would be popping open bottles of champagne.
Meanwhile, all those writers that Substack is paying will now be under Musk's thumb -- yet again.
This is why the Fediverse is the better choice compared to Substack.
Some folks might be thinking, “Unlike the Fediverse, Substack gives writers an opportunity to get paid.”
Not so fast.
When @TexasObserver was nearly shut down because they lacked funding for operations, they turned to the Fediverse for help.
Within 48 hours, we helped them raise $250,000 in funding—and now that 70-year-old newspaper still lives.
As a result, 17 journalists still have their jobs.
🤣
“But Elon Musk could buy all 23,000 Fediverse servers and do the same thing here!”
I assure you that my servers are not up for sale. And from speaking to numerous other admins, they won’t be selling either.
You see, for the same reason people play basketball because it’s fun—not because they want a $50 million NBA contract—many of us run and operate Fediverse servers.
But it’s amazing that some people can’t imagine doing things without a profit motive.
Imagine if people asked the silly “How do you make money?” question about other hobbies.
“You play chess. How do you make money from it?”
“You eat cheese. How do you make money from it?”
“You own a cat. How do you make money from it?”
Maybe I do these things for their own sake—because they give me joy.
The difference between Substack and my Fediverse servers is that Substack has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to generate profit.
I do not.
Mark Britten@atomicpoet On a less financial point, the issue I have with it is that it's not really comparable to #twitter , it's more like a blogging platform. Which isn't, in itself, a bad thing, but it's not a twitter replacement.
TimPlease don't follow me and "Like" my server. It's for my code backup, not your pleasure, but if there are links you like, please follow the link. I'm sure the artist would appreciate it.
Tim
tecreations.ca
🐧DaveNull🐧 ☣️pResident Evil☣@atomicpoet The other name for "shareholders" is parasites…
Aaron@devnull @atomicpoet Exactly!
Cynthia Morse Linton@devnull Not if they are activist shareholders. They can definitely be trusted to force change from the inside. @atomicpoet
@lucywildboots Parasites' role is to make as much as possible from other people's work and from the planet resources. It's litteraly their main, if not the only, reason to live·
There's no way they're going to actively make sure to "sacrifice" their profit for ethical reasons…
Being an activist and being a capitalist are mutually exclusive…
@atomicpoet And this is the bottom line. You just summed up everything that's wrong with the model of capitalism that America follows, in one thread.
Imagine if instead of having an IPO to get their payday after building a business, the founders instead sold the company to the workers or customers, and it was converted to a co-op. Suddenly the motive from start to finish becomes building value for the community, period. No more shady manipulations, where customers are frogs in a warming pot, becoming nothing more than resources to mine.
Imagine if all businesses either stayed privately owned or went this route. No more swinging, crashing stock markets. No more billionaire oligarchs living on financial rent. No more treating human beings like livestock milked for their money by strangers so far removed that they can't remember the humanity of those they are exploiting.
JasmineYou just described capitalism.
No money, you die isn't a system. It's murder. It's also the base of the capitalism pyramid scheme. Oligarchs pay us to do labor they won't then LITERALLY CHARGE US just to be ALIVE. All that "pay" just gets channelled right back to them.
@MysticaRose @atomicpoet That's exactly my point! But it's not all forms of capitalism. It's capitalism as we practice it. We can do better!
@MysticaRose @atomicpoet Your words remind me very pointedly of the "company store" and that old song, "Sixteen Tons," btw.
Exactly.
No. It's CAPITALISM. No money, you die is the core of it. The next level in the pyramid scheme is "war is good for business". Read, death = profits.
The oligarchs "pay" you to do the work they don't want to and the CHARGE you for your very SURVIVAL. That "pay" gets channelled back up to those very same oligarchs.
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛@hosford42 What you are describing can be referred to as #ExitToCommunity ! Perhaps you are already aware of it, perhaps others aren't. It's a cool concept!
/cc @Marc
@hosford42 There is a series blog.opencollective.com/exit-t… by @opencollective , several others have written about it too (follow the hashtags), and there's a website e2c.how/ .
Marc@clacke is right to bring up E2C. It's an interesting attempt to align incentives in a more broadly rewarding way. If an E2C isn't valuable for its workers, it isn't valuable financially for the founder of the E2C.
NiLace@atomicpoet Even if he buys all your servers, he would be buying the hardware and maybe the admins time. For me, the differentiator here is that he would not be able to buy my own server and I retain the privilege of blocking all of his servers and continue being in the Fediverse without a trace of his decissions on any of my Fediverse services.
Troll@atomicpoet then again, if someone were to offer me $50 million to stop being a satirical online “troll”, I would seriously consider it.
@troll5 Look at this guy with big league ambitions!
@atomicpoet it’s under $5 million per follower. And I have some valuable followers!
@troll5 @atomicpoet Yeah, ok, I do a buck per , per lifetime. But maybe that's too much. If you all could settle on a coin, I could setup a payment system, but until then, not even OAUTH2.1.
Bye.
Tim
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦@atomicpoet and even if he *did* buy all existing instances, setting new ones up is trivial and migration between instances is possible, easy even. All these fedi users already understand instances, and probably understand migration.
The garden is not nearly as walled.
Also, let's put the $585m in perspective: that's ~75 times less than he paid for 
. It's about a third of 's annual interest payments.
CritteRo 🇪🇺@atomicpoet >Imagine if people asked the silly “How do you make money?” question about other hobbies.
I wish I could only imagine. I get asked the same question whenever I start a new hobby or whenever I do something for fun
Yassie > moved to 0w0.is@atomicpoet “Where’s the profit motive” mfs getting upset when I hang out with my friends without charging them for it
BorderCollieGuy@atomicpoet My partner and I own cats. Plus we run a cat boarding facility which is very profitable.
BrisVegas@atomicpoet this!!!
@BrisVegas @atomicpoet Please. Go back to reddit. Tim
joel b@atomicpoet @TexasObserver sure but now all those people who saved them now own the platform right? They have editorial control and can declare news sources as 'state affiliated' on a whim.
What? No no I'm thinking of a different social network again.
What? No no I'm thinking of a different social network again.
Ollie Francis@atomicpoet @TexasObserver The issue I still have is discoverability. The homepage of Medium, for example, gives a fine selection of articles to start reading. I haven't found a Fediverse offering that manages that (yet). It's frustrating, because I imagine that should be easy with an ActivityPub feed. I can't understand why I haven't found something like that yet.
@ollie_francis @TexasObserver The important question: what exactly are you trying to discover?
@atomicpoet @TexasObserver Personally, I want a place where I can be given a list of long-form writing from creators and hashtags I follow without any of the short-form, quick-fire posts that tend to form the bulk of Mastodon.
I want articles, not comments. Fewer and higher-effort postings. Medium for the Fediverse.
I want articles, not comments. Fewer and higher-effort postings. Medium for the Fediverse.
Evan B🥥ehs@ollie_francis @atomicpoet @TexasObserver I'm optimistic medium will add activity pub to their main service? They are obviously excited about the fediverse. The custom domains could be pesudo instances!
CC @coachtony ;)
@eb @atomicpoet @TexasObserver @coachtony If they can't make money from it, I can't see how it is in their interest to do ActivityPub for their actual main content. Mastodon only works for them because it drives traffic to their walled garden.
@ollie_francis @atomicpoet @TexasObserver @coachtony I'm not suggesting it becomes open source or self-host-able, just that it integrates with AP.
Tony Stubblebine@eb @ollie_francis @atomicpoet @TexasObserver yes we are excited. But.
I think usage trumps protocol. So by usage the fediverse is, for now, effectively short form. To maintain social etiquette we think it’s better to bring our authors via an instance rather than our posts via AP. I’m sure it will change eventually. But first we all should not lose track of establishing this first short form use case. It’s not guaranteed to last
Kévin ⏚@ollie_francis @atomicpoet @TexasObserver Plume is a project that is a federated blogging platform, WordPress has plugins to enable ActivityPub and so does writefreely.
There is long form content floating out there, in theory what you're looking for is totally possible but it would need somebody to build it (or it might even already be available in a non-mastodon instance of something)
@ollie_francis @atomicpoet @TexasObserver Fediverse Observer has a good list - https://plume.fediverse.observer/list
Currenly, fediverse.blog has a bit of a spam problem they're fixing, but I have found some good reads there.
If you want to see what I've done - where I've pulled in 23 years of blog posts, my instance is blog.sus.fr
Bill Seitz@ollie_francis This was pretty easy for me. You go to the 'known network' and look for someone saying something interesting. Then you follow them. Repeat. They will boost other users they align with and you will see those accounts as well.
The real joy is when you discover an entire instance devoted to things you find interesting. Then you can just go to the local network and follow anyone who catches your eye.
This is vastly, vastly superior to relying upon whatever corporation had the biggest ad-spend that day.
The real joy is when you discover an entire instance devoted to things you find interesting. Then you can just go to the local network and follow anyone who catches your eye.
This is vastly, vastly superior to relying upon whatever corporation had the biggest ad-spend that day.
@skotchygut Absolutely. But I want just the long-form pieces, not the quick-fire comments we find on Mastodon.
The discovery engine of Mastodon works, I think. I just want that with articles rather than social media posts.
maegulGenerally I'm right there with you. This is, IMO, the unfortunate side of Mastodon being so dominant on the Fediverse, and, more broadly, the various platforms being clones of an existing platform and the fediverse being more fractured than is desirable.
IE:
Microblogging is easily superficial. A diversity of platforms isn't a diverse online experience. And UX or design innovation, IMO, hasn't really happened (yet) on the Fediverse.
Lee 🌏@ollie_francis @atomicpoet @TexasObserver
I hope this doesn't sound facetious but why not build that yourself Ollie. That's the great thing about Fedivers, you can have that idea and build on it. If it's a good idea you will have lots people willing to support you.
I hope this doesn't sound facetious but why not build that yourself Ollie. That's the great thing about Fedivers, you can have that idea and build on it. If it's a good idea you will have lots people willing to support you.
@MrLee @atomicpoet @TexasObserver Even if I had the time, computers hate me. I wouldn't stand a chance. 🤣
Aaron Bailey@atomicpoet History is littered with examples of platforms that no longer exist or are irrelevant, however owning your own domain name, website and list of subscribers will always work out in the long run.
Codesmith@atomicpoet Further, if a company did not sell in such a circumstance, doesn't that mean they could be sued by shareholders for neglecting their "fiduciary duty"? The amount of power the rich have can not be overstated. Trying to beat them by playing their own game is a waste of effort. Thankfully there are alternative approaches. Hopefully enough of us pursue them.
Jef Spaleta@atomicpoet yes, he can basically destroy a lot of things on a whim.
ZZ Bottom
Lily Star@atomicpoet I am old enough to remember when FB allowed some federation. Probably before Thiel.
@starlily @atomicpoet Are you thinking of when they allowed XMPP clients to connect to Messenger?