For Your Community to Survive, Run the Technology Yourself

In Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things, Catherynne M. Valente describes how online communities die:

These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.

We keep losing online communities because they are funded by venture capital. As soon as these companies reach the end of their runway or the investors want some of their money back, their platforms usually deteriorate into a hell hole of attention-grabbing, algorithmically-optimised hot takes, advertising and abuse. It’s the same cycle every time.

And yet, people flock to every new VC-funded website, providing us with a text box to share stuff. Valente, after experiencing a thirty-year rinse and repeat of rising and declining online platforms, writes on Substack. How is Substack different from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace or LiveJournal? No one can predict which direction Substack is going in the future, but its owners and investors certainly don’t care about the people and communities they host. Their goal is to become profitable or to find a profitable exit.

Building good technology is hard. It takes time and money. Successful online platforms operate at a scale that is not viable as a hobby. We can only sustain online communities by paying to use the platforms. But even if there was one, funded by the community, free of advertising and algorithms, how long would that last? People’s interests change, their lives change, they spend less time online, they spend more time online elsewhere. Mastodon, at the moment, looks like it’s on the right track. They rejected VC funding to keep the not-for-profit status, and the project receives enough donations so their maintainer earns a salary. But how much of people’s current drive to fund alternative social media platforms is down to Musk’s shenanigans at Twitter?

The only certain, long-term approach to secure an online community’s existence is to build the technology yourself or use open-source software and run the service on machines you maintain yourself.