Comment by NotAnEconomist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotAnEconomist | Hacker News Reader

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I think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable:

1. Everyone makes a website.

2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes.

3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client:

3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes.

3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds.

3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed".

4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented.

There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services.

It's what happened with blogs and RSS anyway.

Some of the concepts you noted - specifically #1, #3, #3b, and #3c - form the basis of some of the stuff that the IndieWeb participants discuss/work on; see https://indieweb.org. In fact - and i think someone else might have already mentioned these guys - https://micro.blog already provides such a paid service. (There are free features of this service, but IIRC the paid parts fulfill some of the items you noted above.)

> submit articles to content indexes

... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)

... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)

Like they did with email. Then you have companies come with robust AI tech and filter the spam, and also give good recommendations. A few of those companies come to dominate the market

... aaaaaand, there it goes; we're back to the situation we have now with Facebook and Google.

That's the point:

The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.

The situation you're calling out is exactly the point.

The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.

That's also my point.

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