I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
Maybe Facebook has bigger problems because they’re so huge; like being a bigger target for attack by hate groups.
Maybe they just really like their fancy offices and cafeterias.
Maybe it’s just better for the world if online speech is diversified over lots of small services instead of one monopoly service; and this is reflected in the way the world actually behaves towards these different services.
Maybe Facebook has bigger problems because they’re so huge; like being a bigger target for attack by hate groups.
Conversely, the fact that they are one single corporation lets them achieve economies of scale and reduce their operational costs per user.
Maybe they just really like their fancy offices and cafeterias.
Yeah, so what? Do you think that the developers of free software, the admins of the instances and the moderators putting in time to make this work don’t deserve recognition/compensation for their work?
You are basically saying that only martyrs should be doing work on FOSS, the Fediverse and anything that is based on a good ethical foundation. It’s basically giving the middle finger to the people who can actually make a difference.
better for the world if online speech is diversified over lots of small services
Absolutely agree. The more decentralized, the more resilient we become. However, the cost per user does not go down, in fact it goes up. Running the infrastructure to serve 2 billion people (like Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp) requires massive resources already in a centralized/highly optimized corporation, on a decentralized structure it will cost even more. The question is: are the people willing to bear these costs? So far, the data says “no, they are not”.
