The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams
The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams
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?
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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
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Had made it open-source allowing users to contribute to the project, both as devs and through donations.
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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.