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   ( @perishthethought@lemm.ee ) English
    11•1 year 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.

  •  Retronautickz   ( @retronautickz@beehaw.org ) 
    2•1 year 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.