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I am currently working on setting up a non-profit and plan to operate the platform just like Wikimedia runs Wikipedia. I see non-profit as the only viable, sustainable alternative in the long run. I am planting a seed, hoping others will join and help me build it, and soon enough enable me to step down. I have a full time job on the side and a family to take care of, and running this as a one-man-show is not an option.

Tech stack:

keycloak (auth) dot net core 6 typescript + react react router 6 bulma

I plan to open source both the backend API and the frontend client.

API documentation: https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html

A penny for your thoughts? Comments?

10 comments

As a long-time reddit user I applaud the idea. It looks cool and I personally think that you are correct that any kind of social media (for the future) that would not feed on its user base (ads and selling user data) should be offered by a non-profit. Personally I would not have issues if a non-profit would still offer ads it's social media site; they needs income as well, right? Just hope they would not offer the ad companies the data of it's user base.

Hey, are you aware of WT.Social? It’s run by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Guy) and he just released its second version. The philosophy of your product seems aligned with his. See if you wanna contribute or partner: https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1668266400723488769

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of this project. I doubt he’d be interested, but I’d love to shake his hand and ask him for an autograph. That man is a legend! I’ll check it out!

I have a fairly negative/pessimistic take on this model, but it’s my truth: Wikipedia, in my experience, is littered with some of the most aggressive, psychologically manipulative, and persistent ads of any major site. They just happen to be ads imploring me to donate to Wikipedia.

Now, imagine a wikipedia trying to juice it's numbers before it hits IPO in order to pay out it's VC overlords so they decide to have a 'premium truth' section above the regular article where facts are open to the highest bidder, the bidder with the most Free $peech.

Wikipedia is a easy target but it's definitely a mile better than a lot of the trash out there.

That is precisely how it works today!

There isn't one topic or person that doesn't have a share of dirty laundry and with the media going full clickbait nowadays one can source it well by wp standards.

A serious discussion should judge if the laundry is worthy of inclusion but what you get is power users flexing their muscles. They are judge jury and executioner. Non of the edit guidelines apply but if they did get the slightest consideration, the same faceless usernames have authority over those too!

That you have a nobel prize for the subject doesn't mean you get to make perfectly valid citations without permission.

The really stupid part is that people love to pretend it isn't so in stead of seeing and indeed enjoying the facinating dynamics of human interaction with such huge transparency.

It has all agendas represented for everyone to see!

you're either being disingenuous or maybe you're legitimately ignorant, I can't tell. It's clearly not 'precisely how it works today'. Sometimes words mean things. This is one of those cases.

Here is the premium truth, not a section but the entire article:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

and here is what citizen editors wanted to write:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

And here is the guideline that says you cant do a POV fork:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_forking

I have no opinion on the topic.

Are you asserting that some shadowy cabal paid wikipedia to keep 9/11 conspiracy theories off the main article? If not, how is that related to our discussion?

FWIW, I also don't see any section about whether or not bigfoot karate kicked the towers down either.

I agree that Wikipedias donation banners are very aggressive and the whole "Wikipedia has cancer" idea certainly seems plausible.

At the same time does any other top-10 site have a non-profit motive?

Top 50? Top 100?

I think scaling donations is difficult. Wikipedia makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but its closest competitor, Google, makes hundreds of billions of dollars. But to the average person, a hundred million dollars is a hell lot of money. So people get cynical.

Also it's possible that donation models just don't work well. Dwarf Fortress is one data point. It was decent money at $15k per month, then people dropped 7 million dollars on the Steam release on the first month.

An idea I would be interested in is some kind of public-private partnership for operating internet services like social media, search, and wikis, which are necessary for the public good but have no viable economic model. The government provides the public funding and private entities build and operate the services, because no one wants to log into a government-operated reddit clone to look for onlyfans leaks. Maybe this could be accomplished with grants instead of donations?

I think a reddit-like community could easily operate on a donation-based basis. Every development is open-source, and the operation costs are displayed on the site with a progress bar for the month until filled. It would be trivial amounts so it may not even need to be displayed, will be paid so fast.

> A penny for your thoughts?

when you open Reddit (or any of its clones) you see a bunch of posts. They may resonate to you, they may not, but you do see them.

Opening your site present me with nothing.

Do you have JS disabled or something? OP’s page loads fine for me and shows content

DDG on Android, but now it loads too.

When I commented previously I've got that stupid loading animation, site header, site footer and nothing more.

Which means the front page is served dynamically instead of from the cache and what there is no indication what there would be anything to be loaded (blank space instead).

Considering I received some updoots for the previous comment I presume I wasn't alone with a blank page.

I agree that a non-profit whose incentives are aligned to support the communities and users that are on the platform is the right way to go.

Unfortunately also predicting a number of sites get stood up as competitors and then eventually pendulum back and forth until some sort of network-effect equilibrium emerges but this looks promising.

Not as familiar with dot net core and how it handles traffic scale up / DB reads. I'd gather it works OK for that sort of use?

Lots of high-scale software runs on. NET like Stackoverflow or many Azure services. From programming paradigms it's essentially a Java clone so you scale vertically across OS threads (using abstractions like Tasks) and increase efficiency using async IO.

Thanks for the answer!

On Safari, getting: "Timeout when waiting for 3rd party check iframe message." And nothing loads.

Works in Firefox though.

Interesting tech stack. Are you running on Linux? What's the hardware / cloud?

Bare metal dell tower for the time being. Linux is coming when redis caching layer is added, and I’d like to move keycloak on a linux node as well.

Why do the endpoints start with capital letters? It's the first time I've seen it and it's so unusual. Why?

It's extremely common in asp.net apps

I wonder how you plan to deal with certain types of content, like piracy, porn, gore etc.

Doesn't sound promising to me. Pretty sure that the "real" path to success involves putting 100% in, to the point of artificially seeding the posts and comments for weeks/months. "Social" means already having an enticing place for people, whether you make it or fake it. You sound like you've already given up and are done with the project. Referencing wikimedia is putting the cart before the horse, that's fine when you already have millions of views and sweet sweet non-profit cash, but getting there is the hard part.

TL:DR site is ok, will to win is not there

What you describe sounds more "fake it till you make it" than "will to win" :)

Potato potato!