An interesting little experiment that never seemed to take off (joined since the early days).
Unfortunately, I think that people simply don't want to pay for anything. Two years ago I launched a (paid) service for social media and messaging (Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP) and I got barely a handful of paying users. People got so used to receiving things for free and apathetic about how their privacy is violated by Big Tech, it seems they can't even think of a different alternative anymore.
People here love to shit on Brave because of crypto, but one of the reasons that I am so supportive of it is because I think that it is the first time where it flips the business model in order to get the users paid, who then get to choose who they can reward as their favorite creators and service providers. This, to me, is a model that creates a healthy market competition, and enables users to "vote with their wallets".
Alas, turns out that most Brave users are doing just to be able to collect meager $3-8/month as "rewards", or to speculate on the price of the token. I thought that with 50+ million users and 8+ million users receiving the token rewards, I could get at least a tiny percentage of the users to be interested in paying for the service with the token... but no, you go to the BAT's subreddit and all you see is people involved in the pettiness of their rewards or trying to pump the token.
I'm pivoting my service to host for companies. At least they understand the concept of a paid SaaS.
YouTube offers both models to users. I'm curious how that works out. What percentage opt to pay to avoid ads? And how does the revenue break down for ads vs Premium on a per/user basis?
The big issue with paid social media is that it's hard to get any traction to gain critical mass. A social media site that no one else is on is effectively useless. With something like a streaming service, which people pay for, a single user can get value on their own without needing to talk all their friends into also signing up.
All available for free in low-friction ways (and still only geek-popular), and easy to self-host if you care about privacy and ownership. It’s a really strange spot for a personal use focused SaaS.
Focusing on companies may indeed work better.
The idea started when I was working at Deutsche Telekom on their attempt at building their own messaging platform + MVNO (called immmr) and they killed it after spending two years and 30€ million working on it. I was convinced at the time that the reason they failed was because they wanted to do everything in space at once, and their main criteria for success was "we need to be #1 or #2 in our secondary markets within the first quarter of launching this". Obviously the launch kept being delayed, the feature list kept getting slashed and their client was full of bugs on critical features.
Their stated goal at the time was more about having an alternative to stop the tech companies from eating their margins with OTT services. I was convinced (still am honestly) that if they just focused on providing the basic services (messaging and audio/video calls) via Matrix and if they committed to help with the development of the open source client, they could get a more interesting offering, more time to grow organically and eventually still reach the stated goal.
I even wrote a "Ask HN" post back then [0] because I wanted to find a way to validate the hypothesis, but there was no response. When immmr folded, I decided to try with the MVP, and this is where we are now.
There is definitely a lot of space between the extremes of corporate everything and your own compiled-from-source home.
I want to think that there is a market for a “self-hosting appliance” — a small pre-configured box that you can connect to your router and set up (in a few clicks) to run a bunch of services with SSO and a Cloudflare Tunnel-like access path. The NAS companies sort of do this, but my Synology likes its own custom things too much and Docker is difficult (no easy SSO or tunneling, for one thing).
I’m not optimistic enough to quit my day ob to build that, though.
It is a debian-based distro with an "docker app-store", a VPN server (ovpn or wireguard) and a "portal" system that can basically open a proxy to the public internet.
They are more focused on the crypto space, to make it easier to run Blockchain nodes, but the architecture can work for anything that can be packaged for docker.
I think I'd call WT.Social somewhat of a failure to catch on.
Let's see if they can continue sigmoidal growth. Or raise funding.