Mathew Ingram

To my knowledge you can't run your own self-contained Bluesky server/network that doesn't go through (or at least partially rely on) services owned/operated by the Bluesky corporation.

> A world of full self-hosting is not possible with Bluesky. In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

> The cost of running a full-network, fully archiving relay has increased over time. After recent growth, our out-of-box relay implementation (bigsky) requires on the order of 16 TBytes of fast NVMe disk, and that will grow proportional to content in the network.

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

> The fediverse currently hosts around 27,000 servers (many more users, but let's focus on servers). Adding just 5 more servers would be a blip in terms of the affect on the network. Adding 5 more servers to an ATProto ecosystem with that many fully participating nodes would be an exhausting number of additional messages sent on the network. ATProto does not scale wide: it's a liability to add more fully participating nodes onto the network. Meaningfully self-hosting ATProto is a risk to the ATProto network, there is active reason to disincentivize it for…

"The killer use of this, IMHO, would be the ability to integrate your technology into an already existing block of text hosted elsewhere just by dropping a line of js into the page"

I double vote for this approach, for selfish reasons (i.e. I might be a customer one day). The reasons are clear: Getting to end users directly is expensive. It would be 'easier' to sell Revizr to vertical applications as a plugin and let them spend all that money.

However, that being said and being less selfish, I wonder if the world is ready yet to build web apps out of other web apps. I don't think so yet.

Scribd is a good comparison. They went ad-supported because that is probably the only model right now the market will understand, even if it is not viable. If the tables were turned and I was you, I would really want to charge directly for my costs like a proper subscription SaaS service. Here's a sobering take on Scribd's model:

http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/02/19/scribd-cool-feature-or-actual-business/

Other comparisons are web-to-print (e.g. postalmethods.com) and web-to-fax (myfax.com) services, but people are more willing to pay for those because there are obvious hard costs for them.

I believe that your future is all about being a 'feature' rather than a 'product'. I suppose I'm saying you ought to explore this model alongside an alternate revenue stream that will keep you afloat.

I've definitely seen clips of heavy artillery tucked away into friendly barns and garden sheds. Maybe there's just wealthy people who like to collect large guns and there's some pride in turning away a Nazi invasion with their defenses.

Here's a cute video I found discussing the line of 12 fortresses protecting a little bottleneck of a river valley - he explains that the two camouflaged as villas are done so as not to be eyesores for the tourists.

https://youtu.be/tPL9-L2gwzo

https://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2015/06/12/the_villa_rose_was_a_heavily_armed_swiss_fort_that_looked_like_a_pink_suburban.html

EDIT a few more examples here

A former infantry bunker is camouflaged as a medieval house in the town of Duggingen. Notice the half-circle windows, which appear to have been painted on Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. If you look closely, you can see a massive door in the hillside that would swing open - A Swiss Air Force Mirage III RS outside its mountain hanger. https://mathewingram.com/work/2022/02/14/switzerlands-hidden-artillery-placements-and-bunkers/

> they need to be pumping out lots of little experimental tools for finding, consuming and creating tweets

This existed as a thriving third-party ecosystem, before Twitter dismantled it, http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/

"Last year, Twitter effectively admitted that it needed third-party developers ... For anyone who had worked with Twitter in the past, however, this was a little bit like Fox Inc. asking for chicken volunteers to help it build a new hen-house. As far as I can tell, there’s little or no evidence that Twitter’s outreach program is working. What would Twitter be like today if it had embraced its ecosystem and tried to build on it instead of cutting it off at the knees? ... I think it would have a lot more goodwill to spend — both with developers and with users — than it does now, and I think many aspects of the service that it is now trying to build up, including smart recommendations and curation, would be a lot better off with outside input than they are now."

I wrote a post in response to Costolo stepping down. Since the trendy thing is to post punditry about Twitter, I couldn't help but chime in.

"On Twitter" - http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/

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Also, you can make up your own mind about this:

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-facebook-twtr

http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/

https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e1139fe12

http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engagement-has-fallen

https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/

http://blog.higg.im/twitters-self-immolation/

http://john.do/twitter-quit/

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulogy-for-twitter/361339/

http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/

Sergey and Larry were famous in the valley for supposedly being clueless about how business worked.

http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2006/12/04/let-me-cut-you-wacky-kids-a-check/

I also know a guy that Sergey tried to recruit in the early years. Imagine if you saw this logo:

http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-com-history/1998.jpg

..on a business card printed out from a laser printer on ordinary office paper. The guy pushing this on you is some grad school dropout with a strange voice who keeps saying he's going to change the world.

Look like a winner to you?