zlacker

>>waxpan+(OP)
No amount of manifestos, bills of rights, public benefit designations, PR campaigns, taking VC funding, not taking VC funding, not selling out or whatever the hell else we want to talk about can make up for one simple fact – a company needs to bring in more money than it costs to run. Ello tried for 8+ years but could not manage to do that.

This post is focusing solely on the VC funding aspect and proclaiming it as the cause for failure but ignoring the fact that Ello was dead in the water regardless of it. The company had no users and no business model. Heck a reasonable amount of ethical advertising may actually have done some good for the community and helped the product survive.

>>paxys+k02
I mean Mastodon exists, each instance requiring just a small amount of funding to keep the lights on. There is also Tildes, which I think is a nonprofit registered in Canada.

It depends on what your aim is. Had Ello followed a proper nonprofit structure from the start, they could have continued indefinitely with a small staff and volunteers maintaining an open source code base and handling moderation. It would not necessarily be easy, but it would be doable.

They didn't though, and the fact that the original CEO later got into into NFTs and now something-AI maybe shows he was something of a bandwagon-jumper. Back then everyone wanted to be the next Facebook, so that was what he jumped into.