Created a tiny Discord for some friends and have been wondering what I can do to make it worth spending time on (specifically, how do I make it more interesting than all the other servers they could be spending time on--if I just copy what I've seen works, then I'll probably just have the same thing with less activity).

Worth mentioning my specific intention was to foster the sort of high quality discussion that is possibly unique to this website. So I guess I'm wondering if HN's recipe can be replicated, and what's the secret sauce. Strong rules and moderation? But the culture seems to play a big role too.

When we were initially discussing moving off Facebook I looked at self-hosted options, including mastodon, but we explicitly did not want federation—just a private group for us.

signed: a person who maintains a mumble server... that no one uses.

They are all valuable including the current view to see how it might change/evolve.

I'll have to look into HN's experience with helpful bots in the past (or not)

I care about a social networking site because my social network is on it, not because some third party goes through effort to post content. I want content from sites like hackernews because it is interesting in and of itself. I want posts of my parents’ dog because I care about my parents.

These are two totally different use cases and I don’t see what we gain from conflating them.

This is why Facebook sucks (it combines the two), while Reddit was good for a long time (of course Reddit has gone downhill in implementation, but the concept is solid).

I've taken this to mean the individuals in the group just don't really need another social platform. But I do wonder if there is a better way to get small communities like this to engage so it is more spread out.

Why not? Most people just want to show stuff to their friends, they don't care about being influencers and so on.

That depends on your definition of value. I am craving for a small easy-to-use platform for people who are maybe all interested in a certain activity, talk about it, know each other, and support each other. Hopefully, that platform would stay so small that it would not be worth it to flood it with crap content made just as an advertising vehicle, fake reviews, narcissists trying to get attention, and all that crap that comes with the size.

Also, let me question a bit your claim that eyeballs are on X, etc. - I kind of agree, but only if we are talking about people who already have an audience. If you start on Twitter now, nobody will hear you. It's like shouting into emptiness. You have to scream really loud to get attention... and not everybody wants to be a screamer.

Am I wrong? Is it still possible to build an audience by being authentic, without things like commenting not because you have something to say but because you want to get noticed? Or YouTube... is it still possible to be seen without chasing retention and all the things Mr Beast talks about?

I miss those days of small internet when you could start a blog just for fun, about something that you simply liked, and people would somehow find you without the need to stuff your content with SEO words, do social media, link-building, and god knows what else people have to do these days.

Or maybe... am I turning into a "good old days" old dude?

Self-hosting and network size are independent. What matters is how many people use the protocol.

If Alice has her own instance and she's the only one on it, she should still be able to go to any other instance and seamlessly make a post as alice@aliceserver . Then she (i.e. her server) gets notified if the people there reply to it, anyone there can follow her and have her posts from her own server show up in their feed etc.

If the protocol was popular then your self-hosted server that only five people use would be in a network with a billion people. See email.

It’s just not as popular to as many people.

In Europe not too long ago my partner and I called in to an undergroundish bar of the kind we used to frequent when we were younger for a beer on the way back from dinner.

It's the sort of place where people write on the walls, and I couldn't help but notice how many instagram tags there were.

Properly articulating why I felt like it was a shame that the one thing a lot of these young adults wanted to share was a link to their little ad-gated corner of a big tech company's garden would probably need more space than I've got here.

There's even an "opt in to tracking or pay" ultimatum on Instagram there.

Before the modern social media era there were billions of PHPBB sites that were largely differentiated only by the crowds who used them, and the choices the moderators made. It's really nice to have that back with some federation added in.

You thinking individuals hosting their own site is weird, is weird to me.

The push for people to all be on the same platform and a single code base run by a marketing company is the strange thing.

It also doesn’t rely on a benevolent administrator like mastodon does, each user has their own urbit tied to their ID.

Disclaimer that I work on it, but I think it does a better job of solving the underlying issues than federated setups like mastodon.

https://tlon.io/

Feels like mailing lists.

And yea, the allow list method is pretty good depending on the vibe. I feel a lot more comfortable in my 10 person discord of people I know personally. If that's the energy youre going for it totally works

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/423962/what-is-a-ti...

In fact, I believe some of these small websites are just UNIX systems that allow the public to have accounts in them.

Like Paul Stamatiou's extensive Hosting your own Mastodon server

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36761283

Then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384970

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29470565