I guess it depends on what your goals are. When I was building https://spoilerfree.gg last summer I was able to get enough data to figure out where users were falling off the site for about $100 of Reddit ads. I think I got over 1000 users to come through the site.

I feel like ads before you have product market fit are useful for learning what is and isn't working (although they are inferior to user interviews). After product market fit they become useful for driving revenue/adoption.

I think it's worth experimenting with. Throw fifty bucks at it, see how much the needle moves.

I like the marketing pattern of making a page on your marketing site titled “Flotilla for Discord users” that specifically talks to people looking to leave Discord. Great for humans and SEO.

Also there have been a lot of threads about Discord alternatives on Reddit.com/r/selfhosted lately. Maybe I’ll comb through those today and suggest Flotilla and I can ask on Nostr for upvotes.

Any plans for voice channels to court Discord users specifically?

I’m running https://github.com/v0l/route96 on my home server. It is built to be multi-tenant but it has a whitelist feature.

I'm getting a 504 Gateway timeout from Cloudflare when trying to view that link :(

For me it's mainly that to Google I am ultimately a product to be sold, to Apple I'm still a customer. I know about Graphene and I actually plan switch one day. But it's a lot of friction for ultimately a pretty similar threat model.

Hah, yes, solarpunk is more of a mindset for me. I'm currently hooked up to the grid in Indiana powered by coal and natural gas 🙃. Solarpunk is a hopeful vision of what technology could do for humanity. The idea is that if we can achieve energy independence on a personal or community level through solar or other renewable sources then we could start to make more progress on the big threats to human thriving like climate change, information warfare, centralization of corporate and nation-state power. It's an optimistic alternative to cyberpunk, where technological advances lead to further consolidation of power by elites and increased oppression for the rest of us.

I'm having new waves of imposter syndrome when it comes to AI use. I'm building in a less familiar ecosystem (Flutter) and AI is letting me do that way faster than if I didn't use it. Horcrux is quite literally software that wouldn't exist without AI, because I wouldn't have been able to squeeze the project into the timeline that got funded.

I like to think that I'm experienced enough to know where the tradeoffs are, where my code is weak, and what needs more attention. But until I have a successful product in the hands of users it's going to be hard to know whether the AI was a net positive. It's so hard to know anything objectively about software development and when it comes to AI there is all this concerning research about developers perceiving speed increases where there are none. I guess on some level I just believe I'm smarter than most other devs. That's the problem with us developers, isn't it 😓.

Wow I forgot to remember about sublime text for 10 years or so.

I hope this isn't a subtweet from my Horcrux demo today 😅