This morning I promoted nolto.social, a platform that was made - at least I thought so, to be a Fediverse based alternative to LinkedIn. As I'm getting more and more annoyed by LinkedIn and all the useless posts over there, I was happy to find an independent alternative.
nolto.social still worked this morning, but when I came back later; i found the project deleted and at least when you are viewing the website from your smartphone, you see a message from the developer of nolto.social where he states that this project was never meant to grow. Obviously this was just a one person project who became overwhelmed by the success of the platform and by the fact, that companies started creating profiles and nearly 1000 people joined within a short time period. But now it seems that this project ran out of control and the maintainer decided to pull the emergency break. He is also talking about negative feedback he received for the platform and even personal harrassment.
It is sad that a promising project like this had been terminated, but I can understand what made the maintainer doing so. Managing a business platform can become a fulltime job quite fast and it also requires technical ressources and money to run these resources.
I firmly believe that we need an alternative to LinkedIn. I believe that people don't want all this bullshit posts just created to please the algorithm and to generate likes and feedback. And I believe that people would like a business network which is nothing else than a business network - no space for bursting egos and self promotion, but a space for connection and serious discussion.
Fediverse would be the ideal space for this. But as we know, if business networks are successful, they require more and more attention, more ressources, more money. And at this is the problem. When you need money to run your social network, it's tempting to ask yourself how you could generate money by using the ressources you already have, which are user data...
I don't see a solution for this now, just sharing some thoughts.
#shutdown #activityPub #fediverseMoments #digitalCommons