alt Hacker NewsDon't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)
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You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom.
If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably also your payments provider.
Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody else's kingdom.
This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
Easier said than done… if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete? And how many of your viewers will move over to watch your stuff there? This advice probably works for blogs and mailing lists but isn’t really actionable for other content.
Interesting article but it only talks about 1 half of the coin. For the sort of stuff they are talking about you can't get near the visibility and ease of use building it yourself.
You will see a fraction of the traffic that somebody doing the same thing on those platforms will see.
They try to hand wave it with build a tower and bring them back to your site but that rarely works well.
I need to create an account to use your site has a significantly higher bar than I hit subscribe to see your next video in my feed.
Rule #7: Use a social media platform that lets you own your identity and social graph.
Social media has certain benefits that your own website doesn't. Public key cryptography, self-hosted servers, and an open protocol make it possible for your followers to actually follow you, regardless of what app they use to access the protocol. This is what we're building on nostr (in contrast to bluesky and farcaster, which are nearly as closed as the legacy solutions). It's not always pretty, but it works better for sovereign social media than anything else.
I've had this attitude before and missed out on some major opportunities. For example, even though I was an early smartphone adopter, I refused to develop apps for the iPhone when the AppStore was launched in 2008 because of the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem. There are a variety of billion dollar companies which can attest that building their castle in Apple's kingdom worked out fine for them.
The big question today is: Do you try to make an AI business using OpenAI's APIs, or do you host everything yourself? One could make the argument either way.
Problem is that everywhere is already someone else's kingdom. This advice amounts to "Don't bother trying to build a castle."
More discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662
Good advice, but really think it is a lot harder to get eyeballs than this makes out. What the big platforms brings is the audience. Yes, you can make a site to archive off the content, and direct people to your own site. But that is a backup plan. If you get de-platformed, and you go it alone, your audience will stagnate and shrink. Each little guy just doesn't have the reach or infrastructure to drive eyeballs.
Hence, why the proliferation of sites that do this for you like substack, twitch, etc... Anything with content, by being a part of a bigger crowd you can gain more eyeballs.
This advice goes back to previous generations of web entrepreneurs, way back to 2015 or earlier: https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634
" It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. "
I'm about to launch an small indie Web site, and yesterday I started going through a list of 11 social media sites on which to grab the brand name.
But initially the Web site has only an email list signup form.
I figure, if I have an array of icons for social media sites where everyone is owned, then random people interested in the site will just pick one of those.
I guess I'll soon see whether I get many connections that way, whether people actually read their email, whether they forget they signed up and flag it as spam (scrodding me with GMail), etc.
(Later, I plan to have an active Fediverse presence, for people who want some social thing like that. But I don't expect many people to be on Fediverse, so first I'll have to sell it to people. It's an easier sell if that's the only "app" on which I'm putting out stuff, rather than hypocritically supporting all the social media ranching companies by replicating content to them.)
Kind of tangential, but this article mentions Twitch Boost - I can't imagine small creators having any real issue with this. Building momentum on twitch is hard, and usually involves a ton of luck. If you have no viewers, you get few recommendations, until either the algorithm helps you out and you get lucky or you get a big raid/rehost that gives you the momentum to grow. It's either that or you happen to be one of the first streamers of some entirely new gaming category that doesn't have any big names attached to it, you get lucky there, and grow.
Offering a shortcut to skip all that and pay for growth seems like a common sense move for a lot of small creators. I struggle to think of the arguments against it - are they concerned big creators will flood money into it and drown out smaller ones? They already drown out smaller streamers, especially in streaming categories that are very "saturated." They also have no incentive to boost their stream, they're already top of the recommendations anyway.
Great revenue idea, and a change I as a small creator was welcome to see. Often I have viewers want to spend their channel points or bits or whatever they're called and I tell them to save it, I don't seek profit off of what I do (plus twitch takes it all anyway) I have a day job - but I do feel bad because they seem to want to spend it on something and I only have enough energy and bandwidth to add custom emojis or bot commands, which are dumb and people tire quickly of anyway.
The term is "sharecropping".
Well, cute symbolism. But, pretty much common sense. Yes, if you don't own the infrastructure where you build your (content, audience, ..), then there is inherited business risk.
Many screenshots and a lot of text to get that point across.
You will never own every dependency. The raw IP Internet is also someone else's kingdom, more and more by the day. Best you can do is try to balance the utility of someone else's kingdom with its risks.
Yes, build a place where people can reach you at any time if the place where they met you becomes out of reach for any reason in the future.
Nice. Convinced me to add a mailing list to my website. :D
I promise, 1 mail update per month. Exceptional cases, 1 mail a week.
This actually piqued my interest, does anyone know of any good resources to learn digital marketing?
which by this point, is nowhere at all.
we cannot even go die and just drop dead in a ditch like the animals we are oh no.
now we need a certificate, and we need to essentially buy, a lot of land for our rotting remains to rot in, lest a single lot of land go unclaimed…
While the article admits that it’s pretty much necessary to use “other people’s kingdoms” to get any interest in or visibility for your castle in the first place, I feel it still greatly underestimates the power of the few large kingdoms that are in actual place on the internet at this point in time.
If your goal is to monetize your castle, you generally need the masses. And while you should indeed spread your risk, be it throughout multiple kingdoms or having one of your own, it is naive or even ridiculous to assume you can get the bulk of your revenue-generating visitors to continuously add 'visiting your castle in your kingdom' to their routine. That is a conscious effort they have to make, not just a mental choice but an actual action, to go to your (e.g.) website.
Simply put: the majority of visitors to any castle do their visits in the FB/X/IG/YT/TT kingdoms. Only a negligible few of them will consistently make the effort to go to your kingdom. Spread your risk, but don’t delude yourself.
Meanwhile, Mr Beast.
curious how ppl feel about substack in all this? its def not your kingdom but you do have everyone's email addresses
I started a newsletter on Revue. Then Elon shut it down quite drastically after my 17-ed edition. I'm using Convertkit now where frankly speaking I'm running the exact same risk...
Building castles on the intern-net is fun.
Maybe the knowledge can be transferred to the doctor-net.
>know it sounds good to be anti ad but that means they have no clear way to monetize.
Nitro
Also generally a good idea not to build any sand castles.
Is this a political post? :D
....as everyone builds their core digital infrastructure in the cloud... :/
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The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal.
The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity.
Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.