Episode: 4116
Title: HPR4116: Response to 4109: Building community without SEO
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4116/hpr4116.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:49:40

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,116 from Monday the 13th of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Response to 4,109, Building Community Without CO.
It is hosted by Hobbes and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Building Community does not require marketing, and too much marketing
can sometimes destroy community.
Thank you, Nightwise, for your Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,109.
Really appreciated the walk through the forest, and you're thinking about how we can make
HPR grow and expand our community and keep it alive.
As you pointed out, we're having trouble getting episodes recorded.
However, I do not think that your marketing approach is the correct approach.
I feel we need to double down on our religion, as you spoke about us being sort of like a
convent of nuns, cloistered in our monastery or whatever.
We do have a religion.
We believe in open source.
We believe in that information should be free and should be unencumbered by insidified
platforms, such as Discord.
So, I'll try to give you a more organized rebuttal as I record the rest of this episode.
First, being a good rep-apportion debater, I'd like to acknowledge all the things we agree
on.
I think there's a lot that can be improved about the website, the intro, and the way we
handle a comment.
So, I really appreciate your insights there.
I totally agree.
There's a lot that could be improved there.
Not so sure we need to worry too much about the short attention span of young people and
they're perhaps the quaint introduction with the guitar episode at the very beginning.
It is a little bit long and it is a little bit, I don't know, pedantic and citing the
number of the episode, et cetera, but I think it is helpful and if people don't like to
see what they can do as I do on my podcast, my podcast, and simply skip the first minute
automatically of every episode.
And I love that it's a predetermined length so that I can do that.
So it's relatively straightforward for people to take the pieces of an episode that they
like.
You can even speed up or slow down people's voices if I'm speaking too fast.
Feel free to slow it down on your podcast.
Regarding the suggestion to move to discord from the comment section, I agree with you.
I've had trouble replying to or making comments and I find it quite difficult to interact
with a lot of the excellent speakers we have on this podcast that would love a better
way to more easily interact.
Recording response episodes isn't as easy as I thought it would be as I'm trying to
do now with you.
It's a lot easier to see the transcript or the show notes and then reply in some context
where you have all the information at hand instead of having to try to face your rebuttal
or your response entirely on memory.
However, I think discord is exactly the wrong platform for such an engaged, thoughtful
dialogue among peers who have, who share value.
Discord is a well-known platform for exploitation of people.
It's obviously very commercial.
They sell your information to advertisers and to scammers.
Every time I do sign on and I do have to sign on because some of my communities are
managed there.
I'm flooded with potential scammers that I have to block.
It's full of bots and con artists and people that prey upon those who are less technically
savvy.
It was obviously originally a great place for gamers to interact but of course it's also
a great place for cheaters to gather and share tools and among us hackers.
I'm sure that's a very popular platform for gameplay and for managing their hacking
exploits but it's not a great place for having thoughtful dialogue and in addition, it
does work on Linux.
If you're using an open source software and your operating system and you're trying to
support open source, discord is exactly the wrong package to use.
They do not support open source.
Not only do they not open source their own products, they do not simply support open source
operating systems or browsers.
Their application requires you to update with their updater automatically at every time
I have logged on.
Admittedly, I only have logged on maybe once every couple months but every single time I've
tried to log on, I've had to completely reinstall the desktop application and re-sign their terms
and conditions and they do that intentionally because they are preparing for repeated rug
poles.
In case you haven't been following the news on MongoDB and Redis and Reddit and Terraform
even, all these platforms where people have spent their lives contributing open source
software to these communities, they have had the rug pulled out from under them and
by simply changing a few sentences in the terms and conditions and that is not something
I can withstand on any product that I will ever use.
Any organization that threatens or even wants to leave open the possibility of a rug
pole, they might, they can go stick their platform where the sun doesn't shine which
is the same I can say for any other in-shitified products that you want us to utilize for managing
this community.
Like you, I want to be more positive than negative.
Building community is very, very hard and I really admire the founders of Hacker Public
Radio and the maintainers, the janitors as they call themselves.
I love their humility and their hard work and diligence that maintain the quality of
this podcast and the quality of the tools that they use and their reliability.
It's just amazing that this product has remained and sustained itself for so long based entirely
on volunteer effort.
Communities are that sort of thing, they are built by passionate people who are giving
of themselves freely and without any expectation of appreciation even from the community.
They know that if they have something of valuable to give others can make use of it and it
will be good for the world and they are putting it out there for us and it saved me from
a bout of, we'll admit it, depression over the past couple of years, I'm a new user
to Hacker Public Radio and I found this platform at a time when it was very well needed.
I was becoming depressed at the world deteriorating around my eyes, becoming incitified.
I'll rank it right up there with my discovery of Cory Doctorow in his book on incitification
called The Internet Con.
That might be something else that you might appreciate that you could get from this
episode that's more positive.
There's a whole trend around the world now of people flooding away from platforms like
Discord and Twitter or as the founder of the new owner of Twitter would like us to call
it, he would like us to use the letter X to describe it but of course that's not, there
are a lot of other things that are called X so I prefer to call it shitter but using X
is the first letter and Twitter and pronouncing it in Spanish speaking in other countries
where Latin is the origin of their language.
One of the places they're flocking to is an open source platform that's completely
free of lock-in and incitification and that's Macedon and even they have tried to pull
the rug out from under us as Mozilla has hired the founder and creator of the Macedon.Social
server and basically the dictator for life as he feels he is now for the whole activity
pub network that powers Macedon.Social and all the other servers that federate with
his but now that Eugen has gone to the dark side I think many of us are going to look
for other servers to where we can host our our emissives of of 142 characters or in the
case of of Macedon 500 characters or less so the Macedon platform is a wonderful place
for managing the community you can curate that community in any way you wish and you can
ensure yourselves that people who share your values will find you there are more than a
million monthly active users on a Macedon now and many more that are active less often.
It's got more than 10 million subscribers I think now on all the various servers that are possible
and it's even possible to host a server that doesn't share the general open source values.
There are some really horrible Macedon servers out there and they can have their isolated communities
without interference from us more optimistic hopeful open source proponents
and there's a there's various hopeful and thoughtful opportunities that I'm discovering over on
Macedon things like the tiny web there are I don't know if you remember the old web circle
where you would have a red web ring they were called I guess where you would have just a circle
of links where one site links to another and people put up their quite very focused blog posts
or websites focused on one tiny little thing where they have something that they're passionate
about and that's where human interaction is at its best when we focus on what we really
care about instead of what we think others want to hear about from us when we're trying to make
something popular when we're trying to make something that will make us money when we're trying to
build influence rather than simply giving what we know that is when we start to chip away at our
souls and we start to give away a bit of ourselves to the corporate algorithms and
business world yeah we have to give up ourselves every now and then to sacrifice our
well-being in order to support our employer or our lifestyle or just to just to live in the modern
world we have to tow the line on a lot of things that don't align with our values but in our private
lives that should not ever be the case we should not ever be forced to say something that we don't
believe in passionate but just to build up a circle of friends and unfortunately that is the
trap that most of the zombies out in the real world on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and
all the horrible social networks that are sucking people in with the tension hacking and
outright exploitation and deception that is making life hell for most of us.
A place ruled by the elite the elite who have gained influence by being sensational
being saying things that are interesting and engaging I do not want to be engaged
I just want to have a conversation I just with another authentic human being from the other
end of the line and that's all I ask be authentic. As soon as I detect that anyone is trying to
promote themselves or gain influence over me or try to shift my opinion in some way
or pushing some propaganda or money-making scheme or trying to make even money for themselves
I'm less likely to trust everything else that comes out of their mouth. I appreciate people who do
things simply for the joy of it and that includes marketing even marketing for nonprofits.
I've recently been involved in a very confrontational engagement and engagement is a word you
typically use for warfare. When you're coming face to face with an enemy perhaps
or even a user a user in the sense of a drug user someone that you want to get addicted to your
product so that you can build on that insritification strategy that has made so many people so
much money. Well I'm sure this rant has gone long enough for most of you so I've got to end on
a positive note so night wise I really enjoy I really appreciate your name I as someone who suffers
from insomnia as others on Hacker Public Radio do I can appreciate that name being wise at night
that's when I feel many of my most thoughtful and wise ideas come to mind and a lot of it is
because I listen to Hacker Public Radio in the night. Also I congratulate you on finding that
getting and purchasing that nightwise.com URL for your blog post I'm sure you're an awesome
marketer and a great asset to all of your employees but marketing is not what we need. I don't
think at Hacker Public Radio I think what we need is community building and there are a lot of
great resources and strategies around doing that and I will try to list some of them in the show
notes with this podcast episode as long as well as links to Macedon servers and other resources
that can help us grow. Well that does bring up one last idea that I have we picking up on your
discord idea I think it would be a great idea to connect our comment section on the website to
some social media platform but of course I would prefer that to be an open source and federated
completely free of lock-in and free data free source code free everything and the only place I
found that so far is with the activity pub protocol which is and there are several applications
including Feddy Lab that I currently use on my my phone which connects to this what's generally
called the Macedon social network so I will try to put resources there for how we could bridge
and there are several bridges to Macedon even threads is a bridge from Facebook over to Macedon
and there are bridges to Twitter and I'm sure we could being the the clever hacker crew that we are
we could hack together a server that does a bridge from our website comments that or the RSS feed
and sends it over to Macedon which by the way also provides you an RSS feed for all of your posts so
it's open in all the right ways over on Macedon so let's let's put our heads together and let's
come up with a let's have a conversation around how we can build this community at hacker public
radio and make it a thriving future proof or as I prefer to say evergreen place let's make it green
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