Major social networks aren't even remotely close to being in the same niche.
There are no algorithms, no friction with accounts, no obtrusive interfaces or feature bloat, no likes, no post ratings, content is completely ephemeral. This is a common and fundamental misunderstanding I see people make when trying to understand why 4chan exists. The people who post on 4chan aren't doing it because they can't help but post edgy content, they're doing it because its web 1.0 approach to social media completely erases a whole load of annoyances and anti-patterns that are endemic in the modern web.
Just like Usenet, it will probably never die despite the antisocial controversies. Or at least in the case of 4chan, it will be replaced with another board-type system. As Twitch streamers are the contemporary version of AM radio, 4chan is the contemporary version of BBSes. You should be extremely skeptical of the idea that you could ever compete in the same space with a heavily commercialized product like a modern social network. Twitter is not a replacement, it never will be.
Most people in websites like HN have absolutely no idea what 4chan is, how it works, and what kind of things people post in there. It shows because every time you read a comment here about 4chan you are confused as to what website they may be talking about.
Always has been. A lot of prominent Twitter accounts in my primary language, especially the old ones, has telltales of having been on 2chan. net. There must be something to that format that installs a basic social media amplification skill in your brain that do not develop otherwise.
There are places more toxic than 4chan but skill levels don't compare, and 4chan and 2chan also share nothing culture wise, so it must be in the architecture.
My guess would be that to be on 2chan/4chan "back in the day", you need to be terminally online. And being terminally online is a soft prerequisite to being really good at posting interesting things online. Excellence isn't an act - it's a habit.
There was also 2ch. net that was a lot bigger, but 2ch "alumni" aren't as good. It's not just cohort, it has/had better action-reward loop than other systems.
4chan doesn't manipulate the feed, so far as I know. Nor does it require a phone number to use.
It blocks mainstream vpns, but that's about it. Behind the scenes, who knows, but it's not as obviously full of low effort bait as Twitter, and no account is necessary.
the emergent behavior from ephemeral posting has become a feature by this point. and while it does technically have accounts, they don't at all work like a normal social media account. they aren't published, and using the "this is for sure me" tripcode feature is socially frowned upon.
Listen. The lies, the culture relativist lies, they are so tiresome.
We now all have ghaza at home- and we see through it all now. You do not have the slightest idea of the world, you just have that approximation made out of your own feelings and you yank on all social levers to make it real.
Im sorry the world made you unable to appreciate complexity and handle it especially when its hostile to western values.
But the grown ups have to clean up your mess now.
Why not go and play in your corner, with the other problems, you could play "nazi and revolutionary" all day long. Thank you..
Unlike Simple Analytics (the post authors), you deploy Counterscale to your own Cloudflare account and control the code + data end-to-end. It also uses no cookies, has no browser fingerprinting, and has no monetized SaaS offering.
It only has 90 days retention though, which could be viewed positively.
> However, it's not meant to be a community project or used commercially for free.
But they can?
Source available can mean everything from "proprietary, you can look but you can't touch" to "this source code is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0".
Creative Commons projects can be used in commercial projects, for free, provided you adhere to the license terms - but they do not meet the open source definition.
This is exactly the problem. "Source available" refers to such a massively wide gamut of possible licensing scenarios that it may as well be meaningless.
> Which is exactly why they now need to switch licenses and put newer features behind more restrictive terms so users are forced to pay
Sentry switched to BUSL in 2019, almost 5 years ago.[1]
Most of the aforementioned fundraising occurred after the license change (e.g. the $90MM round you mention from 2022, and another $60MM round in 2021).
The "restrictive terms" - which again, were introduced in 2019 - are that you can use the software but not use the code to compete against the software's authors. For 99.99% of users, this has been a non-issue, because most people have no interest in doing so.
> Is it possible to run Counter scale on-prem against logs from HAProxy, Nginx, or Apache?
Probably. But it's not for that use case (for example, Counterscale intentionally strips IP addresses).
> There's also a newcomer called Plausible which has a FOSS Community Edition [1] which can be self-hosted.
One of the goals of Counterscale is that you can deploy it "fire and forget" with a single terminal command.
Contrast this to Plausible CE, which makes it clear you need some basic adminstrative skills to operate the software:
> you should have a basic understanding of the command-line and networking to successfully set it up
The point is that Counterscale is designed differently than traditional "self-hosted" solutions in order to promote ease of deploy. It comes with serious constraints (like a dependency on Cloudflare). But some people may prefer those tradeoffs.
Plausible is great (I use it at Sentry), but I want to clarify that only Plausible Community Edition is open source, and it note it differs significantly from their paid SaaS offering:
It makes sense, otherwise their business will be at risk.
For my analytics platform [0], I chose to go only with a paid self-hosted version. This way, the business model is aligned with the success of the self-hosted product. It's also nice to be able to provide support for self-hosting, to those who need it.
Self-operated makes some sense, but if the idea is that you don't have anything to operate maybe self-deployed is better?
I'm not sure where to draw the line to differentiate it from a SaaS. For example Salesforce is clearly SaaS, but is also an application platform with a built-in database.
Maybe self-operated is better terminology -- that's fair. (Though I think one of the key points is that there is almost nothing to operate.)
For me, the fundamental issue is whether I am controlling what code is out there, I'm paying the pure infrastructure costs, etc. So whether it's self-hosted or self-operated doesn't matter.
For some it sounds like if you aren't managing it at the operating system level then it isn't self-hosted.
