Mikio L. Braun

ML and AI expert

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5 tweets

1
When it comes to federation, people mostly talk about freedom of speech and protection from censorship, but in this blog post from 2012, I make the point that federation is also an opportunity to explore different business models. blog.mikiobraun.de/2012/10/pheed-…
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Pheed, Tent.io, and the Future of Social Networks
Pheed made the news lately because they managed to get a large number of celebs to sign up for their service. Featurewise it’s somewhere between...
blog.mikiobraun.de
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Because let's be honest, we still haven't figured out how to make this work. Elon Musk is pouring enormous amounts of money into Twitter to keep it alive, and tries everything to break even, but essentially we haven't figured out how to make it work.
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So obviously nobody wants to pay for it, which means that the customers become the product and ads are the way. But nobody likes ads. Musk is now trying subscription models for elevated reach & features, API access, and organizations. But yeah... .
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There have been other attempts, for making users pay for prime content, selling data insights, etc. Without federation, the problem is that you cannot experiment at all, because you need to bootstrap a whole userbase first, every time.
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But if federation worked more in the way that you keep your identity but you can choose to be on a service fee/ad/data insights/premium content based model, we could maybe figure out a way to make all of this work without pouring millions of VC money into it.