Meta’s reputation has eroded so much that many will view this as an act of desperation rather than a chance to reframe social media. The idea of paying for social media to become the customer rather than the product has been both discussed and tried. There is such a deep lack of trust from years of bad deeds that I doubt anything positive will come out of this.
Not just that, but there's no mention of removing ads or tracking. So it sounds like people get to pay for the privilege of being the product on a platform which has degraded to the point of being absolutely useless.
I can't imagine the economics would work to support anything close to what they make from the ads & tracking model. They'd probably have to charge $39.99/month from everyone to compete.
$196.2 B ad revenue / 3.58 B daily users (as the average rate over the year) comes out to < $5/month from everyone.
Of course, the trick is you don't actually get "everyone". You get the users with more money, who are more valuable ad targets. Still, $39.99/m seems like it'd be pretty high.
They were adopted by professionals long ago, and those highly tuned and validated proprietary models are going to kick the butt of the models that you have access to every day of the week.
You could theoretically have a web that does not bloat. HTML is a very good technology for building clean documents. You are not going to get that, though. What happens instead is that you start on a thoughtfully designed page and are always one click away from a cookie consent banner on top of an email capture modal beside four flavors of ad. "Sure, but you can install adblock/VPN/Pi-hole/reader mode/turn off JS/etc/etc..."
I like Gemini because it actually delivered a lightweight protocol that provides what I was looking for. Additionally, it is not just a technology. It is an ecosystem that gained more traction than the hundreds of other attempts that never went anywhere.
The spec made mistakes, but HTTP has mistakes too.
Thanks for dropping a comment! Collecting Gnutella history is a hobby of mine if the article did not make that apparent. I’ve seen a lot of your past work related to Gnucleus while researching the protocol and digging through old documents in archive.org. It always surprised me that the homepage was still online after so many years.
Are you still active in open source / decentralized tech these days?
Are you asking if lime wire used Gnutella Web Cache for bootstrapping? I’m not sure. GWebCache is one of many possible ways to boot strap, and I have not run lime wire in over a decade. I saw that GTKGnutella moved off of GWebCache sometime ago and uses some sort UDP based tool now. I am fairly certain that Shareaza still uses it because I see those results come up in my Web cache pull from time to time. I have seen a few advertisements from lime wire fork projects as well.
If I recall, proprietary clients usually shipped with their own bootstrap server. I think it may have even contributed to the legal cases, but it's been a long time.
Part of that war is a war on URLs. URLs are bad if your goal is to keep people in app. Reddit, a site built for link sharing, favors self posts more in recent years. Sites like HN, Lobste.rs are a rarity and feel dated against the backdrop of everything trying to be a walled garden. I am grateful such places still exist.
reply