> government overreach

How would you avoid the same problem that discord ran into that made them require ID verification? I doubt they're doing this for fun. Incorporate in the Bahamas?

the largest block of discord users are from the US which hasn't got id verification laws regarding age for social media. The 2nd largest is brazil, which does, and the 3rd is India, which doesn't.

So they are forcing users from countries that haven't passed these laws to abide by them. They don't have to do this, they could just require brazilians use face-id.

I've been tempted for a long time.

I don't think I would need VC to get off the ground.

I keep coming back to the gigantic headache of content moderation, and it gives me pause not to do it. There are some truly terrible people who will try to tear the platform apart.

I wonder if you break TOS by sending unlawful content that way... :) Would have to be local model I'd imagine.

Any option that is not self hosted will eventually suffer the same fate. Decentralization is the way forward

What successful mass market service is self hosted[0]? We're in an endless cycle of cool new service suffers enshittification and abandoned. I'd love to break the cycle, but self hosted hasn't had a lot of success.

[0] Self answer: Maybe crypto and email would be the best examples, and neither of them are fantastic examples.

Discourse?

> Honestly, this is HN and founders should pay attention to this. People don't want to host their own shit, they want a one-click easy switch. All of these alternatives have baggage.

I mean, come on, this is, what, a couple hours of vibe coding, max?

Let's go AI bros on HN. Chop. Chop. ... Wait, why am I hearing crickets?

For those who don't get it, yes, I'm being sarcastic. It isn't that easy to code this, but the problem isn't coding or even deploying.

The problem is your manual service. Logins are a pain in the ass and chew up sooooo much of your customer service time. Then there are the griefers. Then there are the spammers. Then there is law enforcement compliance (in spite of what HN says, you DO have to comply with local laws). etc.

All that costs time which equates to money.

I was once talking to someone who made a point that Discord specifically tries to hide IPs so that people playing a game can't DDoS their opponents. o_O! At that moment, I realized that I simply can't imagine all the malevolent behavior that Discord withstands.

Remember when Tumbler banned porn? People migrated to other platforms like Reddit, and it died.

Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to a fledgling app.

WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government boosted Signal.

Sooooo, what is a good discord replacement?

Oh I think it definitely did damage, just not enough to kill such a massive platform overnight. Twitter has lost a significant amount of users while other social networks grew or held steady, and the cultural impact seems to have waned a lot.

I've never been a regular user of Twitter, pre or post elon era, but a lot of people I follow in other ways used to be very active on there and discussions would often spill over into other venues. That still happens a bit, but much less than before.

Its hard to say. Reddit is still a shit show, but I still peer into niche communities you won't find anywhere else on the internet.

Discord is even more niche than that. There's tons of IRC esque group chats of that's what you need. But a community: not so easy to replace.

The lowest grade I got in my business degree was in the "IT management" course. That's because the ONLY acceptable answer to any business IT problem is to move everything to the cloud. Renting is ALWAYS better than owning because you transfer cost and risk to a 3rd party.

That's pretty much the dogma of the 2010s.

It doesn't matter that my org runs a line-of-business datacentre that is a fraction of the cost of public cloud. It doesn't matter that my "big" ERP and admin servers take up half a rack in that datacentre. MBA dogma says that I need to fire every graybeard sysadmin, raze our datacentre facility to the ground, and move to AWS.

Fun fact, salaries and hardware purchases typically track inflation, because switching cost for hardware is nil and hiring isn't that expensive. Whereas software is usually 5-10% increases every year because they know that vendor lock-in and switching costs for software are expensive.

Right, but is that a like for like comparison?

AWS has redundant data centres across the world and within each region. A file in S3 will never be lost, even if you store it for a thousand years.

What happens if your city has a tornado and your data centre gets hit? Is your company now dead?

And how much do you spend on all these sysadmins? 200k each? If you’re saving 20k/month by paying 100k/month in salaries, you aren’t saving anything.

You want a mess?

Put together a nice and clean price list for your friends in the purchasing department.

I dare you.

That's a feature, not a bug.

This is actually one of their smart decisions. "Copilot" is currently going through the corporate regulators, who know nothing about technology, but I can't buy it until they say everything is Legal.

So once we have signoff then my counterpart in Sharepoint/M365 land gets his "Copilot" for Office, while my reporting and analytics group gets "Copilot" for Power BI, while my coding team gets "Copilot" for llm assisted development in GitHub.

In the meantime everybody just plugs everything into ChatGPT and everybody pretends it isn't happening. It's not unlawful if they lawyers can't see it!

Thanks for validating my intuition!

> In the meantime everybody just plugs everything into ChatGPT

I believe you meant "everyone plugs everything into ChatGPT for Co-Pilot"! A statement with its own useful ambiguities.

It is comical, but I can now make a serious addition to Sun Tzu's maxims.

“All warfare is based on deception.”

“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

"Approval is best co-opted with a polysemous brand envelope."

I kill jobs for a living, and always wondered when the promise of "Low code" would kill my job.

Turns out AI reduces the barrier juuuuuuuust enough for competent managers and clerks to automate their own processes.

Thank god most managers aren't competent, I might just make it to retirement.

It's really nice that I can still post here anonymously.

I really only come here for tech news, but I doubt ICE cares.

I'm in public sector IT and yes, Microsoft Canada is considered a Canadian company. And yes, it's dumb as hell.

As a response to the tariffs we were told to use Canadian companies, and lo and behold, all of our big name software companies were magically Canadian.

Come to the dark side my friend.

Embrace Oracle Apex.

Ops vs Dev

Situational Leadership gets into this. You want a really efficient McDonalds worker who follows the established procedure to make a Big Mac. You also want a really creative designer to build your Big Mac marketing campaign. Your job as a manager is figuring out which you need, and fitting the right person into the right job.

Agreed. Meanwhile, many job postings out there looking for 10x full-stack developers who have deep experience in database, server, front end, devops, etc.

I think the concept of Full-stack dev is fine, but expecting them to know each part of the stack deeply isn't feasible imo.

Expert Generalists are a thing: https://martinfowler.com/articles/expert-generalist.html

BUT they're completely wasted if you just use them to turn JIRA tickets into end to end features =)

Haha agreed. Thanks for the link, will give it a read. I feel like expert generalists should be founders or CTOS, and they are probably not applying for the positions that claim to be wanting expert generalists.