I often get downvoted for suggesting this, but why not simply host all your chats, videoconferencing etc. on your own website? Make it a gated community and only post little teasers to the likes of Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and Twitter and Facebook. Let them come to YOUR site to participate and abide by YOUR terms. Why make a Facebook Group or a Discord server?
Why do so many of us, including the biggest influencers in the world, spend so much money only to post all of our content on the Big Tech’s sites and infrastructure? You give all your social capital to them too, and they turn around and sell it back to you (access to your own followers) and can deplatform you. They encourage you to pay them to attract eyeballs away from other videos, and vice versa, in a zero-sum game on their own platform.
They now increasingly even control our conversations and our democracy. Why not have these conversations on our own forums, powered by our own software, the way we do on HN?
We gave away all our social capital and our content, to these platforms. And then they turn around and train big data on it internally, and scrape it for their AIs.
People have complained for years yet do nothing about it: https://readwrite.com/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-posts-a...
I ask again: why not simply host it ourselves?
Why do so many of us, including the biggest influencers in the world, spend so much money only to post all of our content on the Big Tech’s sites and infrastructure? You give all your social capital to them too, and they turn around and sell it back to you (access to your own followers) and can deplatform you. They encourage you to pay them to attract eyeballs away from other videos, and vice versa, in a zero-sum game on their own platform.
They now increasingly even control our conversations and our democracy. Why not have these conversations on our own forums, powered by our own software, the way we do on HN?
We gave away all our social capital and our content, to these platforms. And then they turn around and train big data on it internally, and scrape it for their AIs.
People have complained for years yet do nothing about it: https://readwrite.com/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-posts-a...
I ask again: why not simply host it ourselves?