The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams - Waxy.org
waxy.org
Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?
  • perishthethought@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    9 months ago

    Wowww, super important story for all lemmy users to read and learn from. I believe the fediverse is the solution to Ello’s self-inflicted problems.

    Go support your local instance. Let’s see if we can keep this going, as a non-VC funded community this time.

    • The Baldness@beehaw.org
      2·
      9 months ago

      And yet the fediverse has the opposite problem. You can never trust that something you deleted has actually been deleted on other servers.

      • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
        4·
        9 months ago

        There is no solution for that beyond properly setting user expectations. Users may want to understand that anything published on the internet should be assumed to be a permanent record. Anybody that can access a post on any website has the ability to copy and re-post it on another website such as an internet archive.

  • Retronautickz@beehaw.org
    2·
    9 months ago

    I think part of the issue with Ello was that they sell themselves as non-corporative social media while maintaining two of the most important characteristics of corporative social media:

    • Centralisation and lack of federation
    • Being closed-source

    The story would have gone completely different if they

    • Had made it open-source allowing users to contribute to the project, both as devs and through donations.

    • Added decentralisation and federation, allowing others to make their own Ello servers. This could have taken a lot of weight (financial and otherwise) from the developers/founders. Users cost money. Dividing the user base within different servers, pay by and moderated by different people means dividing the costs.