I live somewhere that has a lot of castles - there are 3 (possibly 4) within 2km of where I am sitting writing this.

I don't think any of these castles were built directly by kings - although I suspect their construction was either approved by a king or by someone who had delegated authority from a king. NB I can also see a large castle about ~11 km away that was a royal castle (and still has a military garrison).

I suspect that most castles are probably in other people's kingdoms.

When it comes to the "internet" - you are 30 years late to apply such forces. Everything is now DRMed, closed garden proprietary bs - there is no legal framework, nor will to reverse that and we are going to pay.

And this is not cynic talking ...

The real elephant in the room is unless you are an actual king, your castle is always on someone's land

I get the original point of the article, but the reality is you're always building something on someone else's infrastructure. It depends on how much the infrastructure you want to build yourself and own versus how much you get to use of theirs and for how much

We already have digital citizenship and already are digital citizens.

We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more.

A digital citizenship is in private corporations with out many rights in exchange hold our digital identities as they see fit.

It’s why we are offered digital citizenship to a digital identity in exchange for convenience of a single sign on to click.

This can setup a relationship Of being locked out of your digital identity and whatever it is tied to.

A way to keep a balance is to only use email as login, and own your identity with your own domain for email that at least can be moved between providers if you don’t want to manage your own.

It is the same process that turned literal kingdoms into representative democracies.

Do you think fediverse is a good direction as response to that?

Or, maybe reside on large platforms partially or temporary.

There is an existing solution to not having to put in massive efforts to get massive private companies change their ways a tiny bit.

The open web.

We can build any web we want, at any time.

And build we should.

All large communities were small once.

Starting a community and being a part of a small community is the only way they will grow.

Maybe forums like HN and forums of the past have some of that right still.

And maybe we can give what we want our attention, instead of it being gamified away from us.

Make all Algos for content recommendations open for scrutiny and watch the walls come down.

Do we go on massive platforms to find the small communities (like subreddits) that we like?

Disagree. That is still "playing nice"

When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B.

Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone.

On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.

At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a standing army with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign, everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are social contracts.

> your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself

To whom have these bodies caused problems, to anywhere near the same extent as mass market social media networks?

Just because you are using someone else’s services doesn’t mean you’re in their kingdom.

Self hosting (which I think you should be) is more like being Luxembourg. Sure, you still have to appease the neighbours, and occasionally you might be invaded, but overall you still get to see your own taxes and keep the culture somewhat independent.

You can make a html website in a torrent. Works surprisingly well.

One time I had a copy of someones website that got deleted and experimented a bit.

The index was paginated linked page titles 50 per page. I combined the paginated pages so that each had 2000 entries (I think it was, maybe 5000) Then I wrote a bit of js that takes a search query from the url?q= looks if it exists on the page, if nothing is found load the next html document and append the query to the url. To my surprise it paged though the pages remarkably fast.

If you want to you could, in stead of display the content, display a search box on each page with the query in it, have a row of dots for the page number (on page 4 display 4 dots)

Displaying 50 or 500 blank pages one after the other goes pretty damn fast if you load them from the file system. They can also be pretty damn big. If you put the content in comments the rendering engine wont touch it at all.

When you update the website you can make a new torrent that has the same folder name and the same files inside. Run a check and the client will discover you had nearly everything already. The only restriction is that it may not change existing html documents.

For that you can just attempt to load non existing scripts in the folder. Have script1.js attempt to load script2.js and 2 look for 3 etc

Can publish updates on a telegram channel.

>But wait! Your mailing list is hosted by Mailchimp which is another company, and your website is hosted by GoDaddy or Squarespace? Aren’t they evil kingdoms too?

>Not really. They are just hosting platforms that are invisible to your followers.

>The general public doesn’t have to go to Mailchimp.com to read your newsletter or squarespace to view your blog. Your readers go to your domain.

> This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.

I doubt it is true, and I'd assume people have set up a site. If the media industry failed to exterminate torrenting with enormous economic incentives to do so why would the crusade against child abuse achieve more success? It isn't technically possible to stop people communicating with each other over the internet.

This is addressed in the article…

This logic extend to governments as well. It's a spectrum which in many ways the mega platforms are directly comparable in their economic impacts to governments. This requires a more nuanced analysis than a reductive "it's a private company".

> Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized.

Do people say this? I’ve never heard anyone outside of web3 land say this.

IIRC it’s one of the big disappointments of the internet that is evolved in such a centralized way.

But also you can deploy a website which doesn’t rely on ICANN or a hosting provider, lets encrypt, email, or any of that.

Your only “king” would be an ISP (which you could also run yourself, if you were so inclined)

It wouldn’t be an easily accessible castle, but it’d be yours.

Full independence is nearly impossible

> a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it

They could arrest the person and take down their servers, same as now.

If you are a "YouTube creator", you have already firmly planted your castle on Google's land. The positioning of onself as bound to a particular website run by someone else is needless loss of independence.

Position yourself as a video creator and post your videos also to Instagram (when possible) and to Vimeo. Seed free / back catalog episodes via a torrent. Run a mailing list announcing and discussing your videos, with some premium content for paying subscribers only. Maybe have an X / SkyBlue / mastodon feed with more compact announces, comments, and high-virality short clips from your longer videos.

Cross-link and cross-reference all the channels of your presence. Make your brand recognizable across the publishing methods. Gently prod people to touch more than one channel of your video distribution, just to get the most avid viewers acquainted with several.

Yes, this is significantly more work. It also may bring significantly more results if your videos are good. This gives you a much stronger assurance that your brand and your following will not be lost, should you lose access to YouTube / Instagram / Vimeo / X / whatever other platform. Commoditize your complement, as they say.

I think one method here is to incorporate your own site into the content as much as possible. For example, if you are a creator, get people to sign up to a newsletter to get the source files. Get people onto your platform/forum/whatever as well as watching through YouTube. Easier said than done, but better than not doing anything.

From there, you also ensure that you have a backup of all your videos. I've talked to people that only had their stuff on YouTube/Facebook/whatever. It is super risky. If you have a backup, and YouTube bans you, you can rehost elsewhere, it won't be as big, but you might still have a business afterwards.

Your YouTube example is exactly what gave rise to Nebula.tv—creators banded together to create an alternative that would backstop them against YouTube's dominance.

You're omitting the choice of just not doing that in the first place.

If you want to be a Windows developer, then yes, you have to be a Windows developer in order to be a Windows developer.

But you don't have to want to be a Windows developer. You don't even have to want to be a developer.

There's an entire OTT sub-industry for video hosting and out-of-the-box monetization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-top_media_service

For instance, https://vimeo.com/ott is an effective (albeit expensive) option, powering Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) and other brands and allowing them to focus on content. Dropout, in particular, has found an effective model of releasing short clips from their improv-heavy shows on social video platforms, gaining virality there while subtly reminding new and old fans that they can find full episodes, and support on-screen and off-screen talent, by subscribing to the brand directly. Their growth would be impacted by the loss of a marketing channel, but not their underlying subscription fundamentals.

(The entire Dropout business story is quite inspiring and worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRK_gNfFdP0 )

A high school friend of mine contacted me out of the blue on facebook after probably 20 years. He had gotten on early with an MLM that made it big and one of them had such success on the platform that he had made multiple appearances at their national convention to give a testimonial to how it changed his family's lives. Mind you, this is a guy who was 2 years from being able to retire with a pension from the chemical refinery he worked at.

I laughed, told him I wasn't interested, and warned him that he didn't own his network: that the MLM could take it from him at any time, and it's why most of the experienced salesmen I knew lived well below their paychecks. He grew very upset, told me I didn't know what I was talking about, and basically behaved as if I had insulted his religion.

Well, half a year later I was laid off and found a new job with a marketing automation firm. On my second day, we had an all hands meeting where they were announcing that the MLM he worked for would be immediately breaking contract and leaving our platform because they reached a settlement with the DOJ over their methodology. Effective immediately, they were going to a distributor model and ceasing all payouts for network related sales.

I knew his world was going to collapse before he did. In the end, he had to sell his house and most of his possessions, his wife divorced him, and he tried to break back into the MLM world but could never get anything started. Nobody wanted to hire him for a traditional sales role because they regard MLMers as lazy and dumb. He's back at another chemical refinery, hoping to work there for another 20+ years to earn another pension.

One way is to release videos 1-2 weeks early on your own site.

Another option is to consider that "YouTube creator" should not be treated as anything more than a hobby; it should certainly not be your identity/job title. Unless you have some sort of contract with Alphabet, your videos are hosted at their pleasure and you are owed nothing. Your time is likely better spent not bolstering someone else's library of content.

Well there is podcasting and PeerTube.

A huge part of the world forwards videos primarily on WhatsApp. And links to YouTube.

Your question seems to connect discovery of videos and distribution.

Video hosting is getting easier. There’s platforms like avideo that are relatively easy to host.

Many companies use alternatives already like or Vimeo.

Hosting your video permanently first from your own setup isn’t too far fetched.

YouTube can be secondary.

Many people use social media to build their own email lists and communities.

YouTube can achieve the same. At the same time I think YouTube is more going to eat cable tv up or at least offset it more first.

With videos you can start by retaining control of your channel configurations and making it independent from any particular video hosting provider. See this for inspiration (not promoting it, just the gist of the idea): https://grayjay.app/

The optimal strategy would probably be to start on YouTube and then migrate to your own platform once you can afford it and have an audience willing to come with you.

Then probably dual stream for a while on your site with blended chat support before cutting the YouTube cord loudly and with warning.

> if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete?

They could use their popularity to promote and donate to alternatives.

Some of them have, it's called Nebula.

I have friends dealing with this very problem. They strongly believe in and agree that they should build in their own kingdom. They hate the platforms and all the ways in which they are bad.

But they are small business owners. They make their living entirely based on digital visibility. They need to get their message out to where the eyeballs are. They may try to get people to subscribed directly to their e-mail newsletter, but that's not enough. Most people find them on Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they delete those accounts, as they would like to, their business will be in deep trouble almost immediately.

Web discoverability has had the same dilemma since its inception. People only remember and actively engage with a few things. A search engine, some media platforms, some communities they are involved in, etc. If a link appears in one of those places it's extremely visible. If a web page does not show up in one of those places, discovering it is next to impossible. What are they going to do, guess the URL?

How can someone get some amount of visibility on the web without putting anything in anyone else's kingdom? Even someone following the POSSE model (post on own site, syndicate elsewhere) is extremely dependent on the elsewhere if they want to be visibility. Without the elsewheres to syndicate to, they will build an empty and isolated kingdom.

Why not both?

Build your castle in your own kingdom but have "vassels" in all those other kingdoms to get the benefits they provide and use them to promote your own kingdom. You might still rely on those 3rd party "kingdoms" for the vast majority of your income but you at least have options if one kicks you out and your fans know where to find you.

[edit: akin to a developer having the official git repo self hosted but mirroring it into github for the community]

The mailing list is king here. Always push people to your mailing list so you can do direct contact.

You use their APIs in a way that commoditizes them. Ideally your customers don't care if you switch to Anthropic, because the LLM provider is not the reason customers are picking you. Likewise, there is some structural reason that OpenAI will never release a feature that rugpulls you, eg, no 'chat to your PDF'.

An extreme form is self-hosted on edge-only devices where folks are buying some other hw. Ex: Nvidia selling GPUs and giving out free Triton inferencing OSS software. But most are in the middle, eg, some accounting app now with LLMs. Our case of investigations in louie.ai is right at that boundary: OpenAI likes to support data analysis, but folks using Splunk/databricks/etc all day expect a lot more out of software here, and that's too at-odds with OpenAI's org chart and customerbase.

Most business advice is really good at figuring out in hindsight why things went a certain way. But usually it's not that great at predicting what will work in the future.

This is a good counterpoint. I fell for this too.

There is an argument for airbnb the lands with a castle on wheels.

It's true, even assuming you do everything yourself, you're still building within the laws of a country, which is building within someone else's kingdom, as it were. I suppose the real rule of thumb should be "Don't build your castle in an autocracy."

Find the kingdom where you have most friends.

Desktop computers still exist and will happily run games.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 - Nov 2021 (122 comments)

yeah i came here wondering about substack which does give you everyone's email addresses...

While being guarded by a moat of snakes..

Channel points are free to the viewer and automatically accumulated by watching your stream.

Bits are purchased at roughly a 100:$1 ratio, and about half of that goes to the streamer (and half to twitch).

The leaked MrBeast PDF is enlightening in this regard; he knew he was building his castle in youtube and did so intentionally and explicitly because he thought it would get huge. He wasn't exactly wrong, either. His prediction-gamble earned him a life-changing amount of money.

Whether he could or should have built his castle in his own kingdom is irrelevant. His stated goal was to build a bigger youtube castle than anyone and everyone else.

> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

> Youtube is the future and I believe with every fiber of my body it’s going to keep growing year over year and in 5 years Youtube will be bigger than anyone will have ever imagined and I want this channel to be at the top.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649

The thing with being MrBeast is that now he makes YouTube a lot of money, so they have a good reason to keep him around.

I always start by searching HN. I'm no techbro so I take a good amount of what I read with a grain of salt. With such an open query (Digital marketing), you should limit to past year and there will be good content

first one:

Ask HN: How do you learn digital marketing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107413

It feels like a middle ground to me. If you can export your list, and use your own domain, and have an easy way to get the content out, it might be worth whatever distribution they can provide.

Just generally I’d always have an eye on the exit and watch for signs of things going down hill. Anything VC-backed warrants more care. Think about how they could alter the deal and plan accordingly.

in the "cloud"