artlu's Bear Blog

A Lindy Tech Stack (For Reference Only)

no judgement, just facts

guess which project is built on this stack

answer below the fold

Clues: 13+ years, ~2500 MAU and constant, controlled growth. No ads, no outside funding. Many novel social curation features1. Transparent but gatekept (permissioned, curated).

source


first, an Aside

about the recent blowups at Bluesky, with CEO Jay Graber amplifying a known racist and transphobic account and users wanting to cancel her for troll-y responses including memes of WAFFLES2, my friend netopwibby wrote:

Something these platform owners have in common is constantly saying, "If you don't like it, go away."


the Reveal

The project mentioned up top is Lobsters.

They're invite-only, with opinionated and explicit social norms.

They say upfront:

If you dislike the content or moderation policies here, you may prefer Y Combinator News, r/programming, Slashdot, Tilde News, or comp.*. Or you could use our codebase to start your own site.

It's the opposite of self-serve curation, but it allows sovereign self-identification of people who agree with the transparent policies laid out upfront.


When I first read netopwibby's observation, I thought the key concept was the GFY 'tude. No, the key word in there is "constantly".

When you have many individual human beings with freedom, it's good to set clear, simple, transparent expectations (and stick to them!). The attention economy is self-regulating: users go where appeal outweighs drawbacks.

When the platform owner is constantly telling interested, invested users to go away, it's a sign of:


FWIW, the thinkers I tend to get the most satisfaction from following, do NOT operate well within such highly restrictive norms. Call it, an underappreciation of the delights of "polite society".

However, the Lobsters norms do seem to provide an effective structure and safe space for serious communication, as well as cozy conversations.



  1. including, but not limited to: tagging, invite tree, flag explanations, story merging, story hiding, hats, mailing list mode, RSS

  2. the waffles meme is a terminally online deep-cut callback to a comment about toxicity on X