www.theatlantic.com
i don't think it has a central db (even a decentralised one) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
& none of that iffy blockchain stuff is involved i don't think
Oh cool, this is what undergirds Mastodon then. Yeah this seems similar to Lens, Lens just has all these additional monetization aspects (EG posts are tokenized and can be bought and sold on primary and secondary markets, and can be integrated into smart contracts). But I think the actual infrastructure is a lot more important than the monetization stuff, even though the monetization stuff does have cool implications for independent content creators and musicians and whatnot.
Any idea how the operational costs are facilitated for infrastructure like this? Not sure if these networks are peer-to-peer or not, and I still don't have a solid understanding of computer networking.
server space is cheap and it's all distributed - loads of small mastodon installs for e.g.
obvs adding threads to this equation is a big 🤷♂️
Could something like this mean there could be "forks" of Threads, such that Meta controls the main instance but there could be a plurality of instances? Or would Threads somehow remain under federal control of Meta?
only if they open source the threads software i guess which i don't think is on the cards
xenforo.com
Yeah I'm not sure if there is a way that could make sense, business-wise, unless Meta was just going to invest in a super high-quality UX for their instance of Threads - but even there, not sure if thats viable business-wise, especially at that scale.
well they are already paying for a gigantic server somewhere to host threads, they can throw some ads on there as usual if they need to make money on it. butthey don't they are absolutely rolling in $$$, so the economics are all skewed
the scope is inspiring, so the bigtech lads are all over monetising it
Yeah I'm starting to become a believer in this _____-as-a-service business model built atop some given open-source software. Meta could maybe do analytics or social promotion as a service.
One could see, at least to some extent, how something like this could work for Meta. If they keep the devs in-house who made Threads, they'd arguably have the makings for a world-class analytics firm to draw from the data of Threads, and Threads would probably be enriched in terms of data volume by being open-sourced, no? Meta would just have to give up the lucrative position of being able to control, to whatever degree, what information gets to flow through Threads, and I'm not sure if there is a more lucrative alternative.
heh, that's another interesting topic - yknow google analytics which tracks most websites just did an upgrade which involves shedding all the historical data. I'm wondering a. have they got fed up with hosting absolutley enormous amounts of website logs? b. what are they gonna do with that dataset = 10+ years of detailed stats on the majority (?) of web traffic?
Haha they probably have the freedom, through whatever terms users have agreed to, and by virtue of the regulatory vacuum around AI, to just pump all that stuff into their AI training. Apparently Zoom's terms of service allows them to use facial data and pretty much everything else for AI training, but I haven't looked into that directly yet.
analytics data is not really that valuable until its turned into dark ad patterns, and imho that business model is more than 50% fantasy.