Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you’ve been invited into.
It has been said that “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
Right here and now, you’re neither the customer nor the product.
You’re a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You’re using a service that you aren’t being charged for; but that service isn’t part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you’re participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You’ve probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it’s one of the most popular websites in the world, but it’s not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don’t imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They’re not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they’re also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
I know a lot of people hate it but I wonder if crypto/digital donation would work. All you would need is a separate wallet setup to pay the host every month. Maybe even have a graph/chart showing how much is in the wallet vs how much the monthly bill is.
I like this for the transparency but crypto is an open ledger, anyone can see the balance of any address at any time as well as see where the addresses where money was sent. Plenty of hosts now take crypto and most larger exchanges are tagged on explorers for btc, ltc, etc. That makes it easier for the public to keep an audit on what’s going on.
I know you can see how much is in a wallet, I would prefer a visualization of amount in the wallet vs how much the server costs.
One problem with cryptocurrency is that instead of being coupled with mainstream banks (where workers get their pay deposited) it is instead coupled with speculative assets employed by criminals. As such, choosing to work on accepting cryptocurrency instead of working on accepting real-money donations ties the service to a crime economy instead of a mainstream economy.
Good thing criminals never use cash, otherwise you could call the world economy criminal.
So you are saying that HSBC getting caught helping launder cartel money at the teller is fake news?
USD Is still the preferred currency of criminals across the world and even more so they use assets like paintings to facilitate non traceable payment and smuggle extremely large dollar amounts. They also use art work to launder money.
I’d suggest you pull your head out of your ass and get on the crypto train because it’s leaving you behind. Look at btc, ltc, dash and others.
To add. USD hasn’t been backed by a real asset in nearly a century. It was once backed by gold but now the only thing backing it is full faith in the USA. At the moment that means something, it might not always.
You need to educate yourself on this stuff because you sound like a moron.
The USD, just like any other fiat currency, is backed by the trustworthiness of its central bank and the economic base of the currency area.
In other words: Euros are backed by the fact that if you’re in Italy and have a Euro, you can exchange it for an espresso. You can trust the ECB that it will do its darnest to keep prices stable, and you can trust Italians to continue making espresso, which means that the Euro indeed is a hard currency.
