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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • Captain Janeway@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone•i love the modern webEnglish
    241·
    1 month ago

    I think the issue is that these platforms are motivated by advertisers. I can build a Reddit clone in a weekend and have it be ad-free. It’s not expensive to host text + urls - which was how old.reddit.com used to operate. It’s basically a few dollars a month or I could host it out of my house for the cost of electricity (and security). And, without advertisers, I don’t really care what I host so long as it doesn’t directly contributing to harming others.

    The main issues are:

    • No one wants to join a platform devoid of content
    • Once you reach a large enough platform that people want to join, it might require revenue streams to afford the scale
    • It’s hard for people to even find platforms (Google will direct you to the top 5: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok)

    The modern infrastructure hasn’t changed. It’s still HTTP and servers. The problem is internet culture. We used to use the internet as an extension of our community. We could share links, forums, etc. in person (bizarre, I know). But now the internet is our entire community. And there is little drive to participate in niche communities. People like to be heard and to engage quickly on the internet which requires a large-ish platform (Lemmy is a good example of this).