You Win or You Learn

1

Mastodon

#Decentralized Social Network #Open Source #Social Network 603 social mentions

2

Tom's Hardware

The problem with social media is that it has to get a large userbase, and it's much, much harder to convince someone to pay than it is to use your free service. Especially if your service is social media. Twitter seems to be trying to get people to pay, and it isn't going well for them. No, in today's world in order to make a "profitable" social media, you have to get people to pay through other means. Like news.ycombinator.com, forum.bodybuilding.com, https://forums.tomshardware.com/, and other forums do by promoting the main site (ycombinator.com, bodybuilding.com, https://tomshardware.com/). The forums definitely help the main site so they are a net positive to run, but you don't pay by using them directly. Alternatively, if you don't care about making huge profits, there are a lot of social medias out there which seem to run on donations and volunteer work alone. 4chan, letsrun.com, lemmy.world and mastadon.world, and (although they're invite-only) tildes.net and lobste.rs, don't seem to have an income source besides (at most) banner ads and a merch store. Forums can be very cheap to run, especially if they're text-only: I imagine you can run a site with ~1 million daily users on <$100/mo, a few admins who work after their day job, and an army of volunteer moderators.

#Startup Community #Software Marketplace #Social Networks 23 social mentions