Indie creators ditching one VC-funded company for another thinking it'll be different this time. It won't. The incentives remain the same
LiveJournal was a trap
Medium was a trap
Patreon is a trap
Substack is a trap
Etsy became a trap
Beehiiv...
The difference this time is there are real indie alternatives
Ghost
WordPress
Transistor.fm
Fediverse
Outpost.pub (self plug)
Buttondown
Liberapay
OpenCollective
And more
The hacienda must be built
kinda. since blogs, there have always been places to post. but we lacked good ways to get writers attention and money, especially without recentralizing. the #fediverse solves the former, if everybody would just join us here. we still don't have a solution for the latter.
mostly, the value of a network comes from the number of people on it. I do think we win long-term as the incentives push towards treating people like shit on closed networks. but beyond the money issue I mentioned above, minor technical and norm improvements here that will come slowly because we do need to argue about them over time, what do you suggest? we have to be careful not to ruin the independent culture as we do anything here imo.
So spot on. They absolutely didn't need to take that cash
@Yuvalne
Awesome. Thank you!
It's running out of room but added those in
@ryansingel I'm thinking of shifting @thenexusofprivacy (currently self-hosted on Ghost) to a real platform. Is there a privacy-friendly configuration for outpost.pub? I'm okay giving up some of the functionality if I can give stronger assurances about not sharing data.
[Yes, it's the dreaded privacy tax. Part of me just wants to say 'screw it' and give up ... but it's called The Nexus of Privacy, so it wouldn't be on brand.]
Depends on what you mean by privacy friendly.
All our tech is cookie less. But still uses Mailgun to send email.
Drop a note with requirements/concerns to Ryan at outpost.pub and I'll see we fit yr needs
@ryansingel Unlike many of the other traps on this list, LiveJournal wasn't *originally* a trap. It started off okay, but then became a trap once it was sold to SUP. (Or maybe when it was sold to Six Apart; opinions vary on that.)
Anyway, for anyone who misses LJ, I'd like to wholeheartedly plug Dreamwidth. Based on the same codebase (though they've added lots of good new features), and privately (but transparently) run. They're awesome!
Your blog doesn't need a database.
Built it in Jekyll or Hugo and host it for $0 on a CDN.
@bflipp That’s a great model for some use cases, but not at all.
Ghost is a full-fledged membership management and permissions-centered CMS, with robust authoring tools, staff permissions, external APIs, etc.
Different tool for a different job.
@Klaus
WordPress is open-source, has a monster-sized community of devs, themes, plugins, etc, and Automattic have been great stewards.
Yes, they took some VC-funding but relatively little, and I've yet to see them act badly.
I don't love it *technically* for membership-centric sites but, yes, I'll put it in this category
Anthony Parrott
Ryan Singel
McNeely
william.maggos
rholland_again-again
Robin Syl 🌸
Murmel
Talya (she/her) 🏳️⚧️✡️
Jon (now at neuromatch.social)
ch0ccyra1n is leaving fedi soon
Kagan MacTane (he/him)
GeoWend
Brett
Klaus
ED-209
Raphael Lullis