Here’s the sticking point imo: the youth will always drive the direction of the internet, and they are an implicitly destitute demographic.
Corporations know this and so create “free” platforms where the youth can congregate and share content (and of course the corp profits via other means). POSSE works for marketing teams, but the idea of everyone owning their own domain name is just not gonna happen. People don’t even pay for email.
The only way the fediverse can compete with TikTok and the rest is if older users with a bit more money subsidize the younger users who may not even have a debit card. If the money invested by the total fediverse userbase isn’t enough to fund the service for all users, then it will fail vs the for-profit options. That’s how I see it.
I don’t think the problem is only younger users and their lack of money. It’s not like the vast majority of older users of the internet want to deal with anything more complicated than putting a username and password into one site and being done, even if they do have the money to spend on a domain.
Personally I love the idea of POSSE. I think it would genuinely be an improvement on the way things are on the internet right now. But the barriers to entry, both in terms of finances and knowledge, are just too high for the vast majority.
There’s nothing that stops you from making a shitty ad-laden but free and easy to sign up for Lemmy instance. I’m guessing that’s the inevitable economics once the fediverse reaches a certain size.
Come to think of it, with the TikTok comparison, is anybody hosting videos on fed yet? That would be the hardest one to do for free.
It wouldn’t be possible for an individual. Video hosting in the scale we see from something like YouTube is built on massive content distribution networks.
Yeah, I don’t know how YouTube works exactly, but the margins they’ve historically earned tell me it’s not simple or low-resource in any way. How big a scale do you need before you could make it work? It’s not something to run on a home server, but I assume you don’t have to be YouTube, if you could earn a bit more per user.
Massive up front investment. Millions of dollars of hardware, distributed to be close to end users to minimize latency, all with their own redundant internet connections.
Petabyte level storage- that’s thousands of terabytes. Video storage takes up a lot of space, and storage drives fail. For every piece of equipment you have to buy a second one to run in parallel, that way if one fails the other can keep the system running. Oh, and you need a third so you can replace the one that failed.
Hosting in general is a very high investment prospect. You can do it Inexpensively using something like plex, but that isn’t very scalable.
People used to post stuff to their own websites all the time. And when someone had a cool website and it blew up from getting shared on reddit and hitting the front page, the site would go down because 50,000 people were trying to access a webpage that could serve, at most, 1% of that volume at a time. This means you now have to contract with a CDN like Cloudflare if you expect to operate at scale (which you probably won’t). So people started posting to reddit or Facebook or whatever because there was a 0% chance of that happening. This article addresses those issues but also acknowledges that there aren’t any real solutions at the moment.
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Instead of a half-dozen platforms competing to own your entire life, apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and others are building a more interconnected social ecosystem.
In the last year or so, though, particularly after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition alerted users to how quickly their platforms can change or die, POSSE has gotten some traction again alongside ActivityPub and other more open ideas.
POSSE’s problems start at the very beginning: it requires owning your own website, which means buying a domain and worrying about DNS records and figuring out web hosts, and by now, you’ve already lost the vast majority of people who would rather just type a username and password into some free Meta platform.
Reece says he’s interested in building tools to aggregate and make sense of replies, likes, comments, and the rest, but it’s a much harder prospect.
Reece mentions a tool called Bridgy, which both allows cross-posting and aggregates social media reactions and attaches them to posts on your site.
Modern social networks are not a single product but a giant bundle of features, and the next generation of tools might be all about unbundling.
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