> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better.
>
> Some things work precisely because they’re small.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
amelius · 14m ago
You could run something like Facebook but in tiny shards. It would be better. And require 1/1000th of the engineering workforce.
xnx · 11m ago
I can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").
No comments yet
pier25 · 48m ago
Facebook around 2008 was pretty cool. Just me hanging out with my irl friends.
And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.
xgkickt · 5m ago
I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.
sugarpimpdorsey · 26m ago
I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.
rco8786 · 52m ago
Yea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.
thewebguyd · 48m ago
Yeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up.
Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters
wat10000 · 8m ago
The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that.
I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.
There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
theropost · 2m ago
But what if everything scales but what if no matter how complicated how obscure how mundane how niche what if everything I mean everything scales
manoDev · 38m ago
> The cost to build is so low now.
The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.
priyanmuthu · 36m ago
If the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.
manoDev · 33m ago
Yes – but when people say "AI", most often they are talking about the latest OpenAI/Claude development.
nine_k · 27m ago
Can you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?
brabel · 14m ago
For quality to be comparable, you need to use a relatively big model, which will only work if you have around 64GB of RAM or more. The latest OpenAI local models (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/), for example, are really good, but you probably want the 120b to have results at least near what you get with their best cloud models, and that requires I think 80GB+. If you don't have that much, you can try stuff like the DeepSeek models, which are known for being ultra-efficient and runnable with "normal" computers, if you don't mind the politics of using that (and there are many models now that are similar!) but I haven't tried too many more to be able to comment.
On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.
jvanderbot · 24m ago
Aider!
derwiki · 19m ago
+1 Aider, first time I used it I knew I was looking into the future
conradev · 16m ago
I care far more about the noise and air pollution that x.ai is causing in Memphis (ruining lives) than the environmental impact of the industry as a whole.
6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.
kylecazar · 1h ago
Building things for yourself is fun -- I do it. But the original article was written for startup founders, building companies.
derwiki · 1h ago
Yep, totally — the OG advice was founder-focused. I just couldn’t resist twisting it a bit, because the line itself is too good not to repurpose.
j45 · 1h ago
It's also possible to build things to solve your own problems, that might be problems other people have too, which they also try to solve but fail at, which are problems that are painful enough that they would spend on.
They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.
pimlottc · 10m ago
I agree that not everything has to go huge. I don’t see how ChatGPT has anything to do with this though.
zahlman · 1h ago
> There’s an old startup mantra — probably from the early Airbnb or Y Combinator days — that goes: “Do things that don’t scale.”
It's definitely the first result on Google and sort of ruins any credibility of the article.
derwiki · 43m ago
Haha funny timing! I wrote this post last weekend and haven’t checked HN much this week
deepfriedbits · 17m ago
I love this mindset and where we're headed with the cost to build so low now. I follow r/MacApps and it's been wild to see the explosion of quality, specialized apps shared there. I have often thought it's because of Cursor, Claude, and other code production accelerators showing up recently.
Ekşi Sözlük (eksisozluk.com) has always been like that, and it still is. People wait over 4–5 years just to become a user, while non-users can only read. It remains one of the biggest websites in Türkiye, yet the design is still very simple, with only one or two new features added over the years. It reached more and more users, but it never really scaled in true meaning. It still like a weekend project
celaleddin · 3m ago
Interesting and lovely to see ekşi sözlük getting mentioned on HN (even though I remember seeing ssg on HN before if I remember correctly).
I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version.
I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed.
I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.
prisenco · 26m ago
I wonder if slow growth businesses like this will win out in the end. Every other social network decays under a crush of revenue expectations and an In-N-Out model of tech can grow steadily without ever falling apart.
Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.
midhir · 1h ago
> Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
Why does this happen? How is it economical?
j45 · 1h ago
They are automated bots, it's economical when it's automated.
Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
nine_k · 22m ago
It's only a startup when it can attain the hockey-stick growth. Otherwise it's just a sparkling hobby.
Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.
A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...
ggambetta · 11m ago
In my double life as an actor, I've written some software that greatly simplifies the main day to day task of running a talent agency. Its ~15 users love it to death, but that's it, it has a total of ~15 users. It's my happy little project.
Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
easton · 52m ago
> It would grab the photo, grab the caption, and send it through a direct mail API to my mom.
Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.
gbear605 · 41m ago
If you search “physical mail API”, I see several options. The first one that I saw charged $1 per letter.
derwiki · 43m ago
There are a few but I use directmailers.com!
mooreds · 1h ago
Interesting perspective about writing a bunch of mini-apps that you aren't concerned with making money on or scaling.
Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster.
The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.
j45 · 1h ago
Making tools to make the tools is the real devops.
CI/CD can be as complex and full of pagentry as some people want and it's great when it fits, and premature optimization the rest of the time.
nickserv · 1h ago
I feel like the main takeaway here is that if you want your personal project to last, you should run it on your own server.
j45 · 1h ago
Also making it easy to host and maintain. The more custom or esoteric libraries, the better.
If you do build it with boring tech in a simple way, you can just rely on it.
Kibranoz · 55m ago
Open source your apps so other people can use it and host it on their own if they want.
Some non profits also hosts popular open source server - client software
supportengineer · 13m ago
If I was a successful billionaire, and I didn’t want any competition, I would tell all the young smart people to go play in a different field
samdixon · 41m ago
This reads like a LinkedIn post
m3kw9 · 1h ago
Money maximizers always try to scale, so we can handle a million users. I do think that’s risky most times. When you have limited resources Don’t scale till it gets close to breaking.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
No comments yet
And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.
Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters
I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.
There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.
On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.
6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.
They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.
Yes, it was posted again just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913359
I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version.
I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed.
I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.
Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
Why does this happen? How is it economical?
Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.
A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...
Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.
Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster.
The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.
CI/CD can be as complex and full of pagentry as some people want and it's great when it fits, and premature optimization the rest of the time.
If you do build it with boring tech in a simple way, you can just rely on it.
Some non profits also hosts popular open source server - client software