We will need small and independent commercial providers for the Fediverse.
One of the best things about the internet is that so much of the content and experiences we get are free, but the internet age has also driven down the price of content to almost nothing and forced a lot of providers to rely on ad based content.
The problem that the author is laying out is one that a lot of print media have been having to contend with for the past few decades now as the internet has made news and articles free and replaced newspapers and magazines.
Personally I dont think there is inherently wrong with sponsorship and advertising as long as it’s transparent and isnt intrusive. From the early days internet ads were straight trash. Popups that lead to more popups, adware, malware, distracting videos, distracting interactive content, and of course lots of data and processing power and battery wasted on it. Thats not even getting into the more modern trends of hyper tracking and targeted advertising. But I wouldnt be bothered by vetted non obtrusive, not animated banner ads on a site that needs the cash.
For sites and instances that want to be independent a subscriber tier or donator tier could probably do wonders as well. I mean look at how much money random youtubers and twitch stars are able to make with patreon. So while I agree that the current market is a tricky one to weave I think in the case of running a website you can probably go a long way using a free model.
It’s a valid point. We can’t expect to be free of corporations and also expect people to maintain servers for free. Running a service costs someone somewhere, and running a massive service can’t easily work relying on just donations. I’d be happy to pay a small monthly/yearly fee to a nonprofit to guarantee an independent server, rather than to be a product to be traded.
Why can’t it rely on donations? People poo-poo this, but I’ve yet to hear a substantive reason as to why.
Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of the moderators, admins and developers.
Is that an apples-to-apples comparison though? To me, that sounds like “Show me a soup kitchen that’s able to pay market rate for chefs”.
Also, by that logic, Reddit is a failure. They don’t pay mods either.
Are they going to go to appeal to “your donation is very important to us” and expect that a few generous souls make up for the free-riders?
While the author seems to think this is unrealistic, it seems to work well for Wikipedia and even more so for F2P games that are massively profitable (although ethically questionable as they intentionally exploit gambling addicitons… maybe an argument could be had about social media doing the same though).
The Hacker News discussion that sparked this post also argued that Wikipedia was a reasonable counter-argument. My response then is the same as it is now:
- Wikipedia has a different usage model. Content there is read a lot less than it is written and a lot more permanent. You can store all of wikipedia in a small hard disk.
- When people make a change on Wikipedia, they are doing for their own good as well as others. Moderators on Social media are doing it solely to combat trolls and harassers.
- Wikipedia is not a business. They are a foundation and they’ve used that position to do questionable things as well. (not sharing their actual revenues, no financial support for their moderators, etc)
Wikimedia is raking in millions from donations. That money could easily also finance a social media site.
Wikipedia is also actively used by practically anyone that has a connection to the internet, too. Something like Lemmy has way higher costs per user (both financial and computational), and a significantly smaller user base.
I think Beehaw and many other instances have golden hearts for their goal to start a stable, friendly community. However, like the article says, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, when an instance gets big enough, someone needs to be on watch to ensure things are running smoothly, someone needs to be working on updating, expanding, and improving the service. On top of the cost to run the service, it’s unrealistic to expect it to be free. You can’t expect the admins who have busted their ass to get this much done for free. Call it human nature or the ills of capitalism, but the fediverse can’t run on community and goodwill alone. I saw another post a bit ago saying to expect to pay for internet services from now on. I think, at least in the realm of user-focused and FOSS-based stuff, that may be the paradigm. Donations or subscriptions should be expected, at least for some portion of users, to keep the lights on and compensate the folks keeping things moving.
Same can be said about Reddit, which is free to use. Having to pay to use Lemmy increases the barrier to entry even further
I think the deal is, you either pay cash or you pay with your data. While it definitely does increase friction for new users (and even existing users as finances fluctuate), a donation based system might be worth it. Something like wikipedia, archive.org, and other NPOs do. Incentives might be possible too, creating goals for getting X amount of donations to fund a specific improvement. It increases interest by defining a product or improvement, and increases buy-in by giving the donor the sense that they’re directly improving the site through their donation.
The web3 community (and the area that I specialise in) hasn’t really gotten deep into the fediverse yet, but there is actually some decent room for opportunities here.
An obvious one will be users sign up by locking up collateral to access a Lemmy instance, with the yield going to the admins. Users lose access by pulling out their principal and moving on.
I wonder if it’d be feasible to get local governments to fund instances of these platforms as a sort of public square 🤔 It’s a total fever dream, but would be really interesting to see!
A quick test for cases where you might think “the Goverment” should be involved: do you think it would be a good idea regardless of who is power? If you are in the US, would you like to have an instance where Trump accolades are moderators? If you are in Turkey, would you feel comfortable joining a community controlled by Erdogan?
I think he means “local” like the local town / city. We have a local government funded physical town hall, it’s not so crazy an idea IMO. I don’t think it’d be a great place for your general purpose instance or whatever, but we also right now only have any participation in local government by those who have the time and inclination to wander down to the hall on a Tuesday Night.
I mean, everyone wants a public digital “town square” - the obvious answer is for the public, i.e. the government, to provide one. At least in the US the idea of forcing private or public companies to follow first amendment rules or judicial processes is a bit of a non-starter. One that I actually agree with.
Local governments, so the city. Or even coming out of a local fund to a third party entity who handles administration and moderation. Moderation should be established and guided by third party audits of this entity.
I don’t think the government should have a direct hand in deciding the moderation guidelines, but should leave this to other entities, preferably non-profits and cooperatives.
Granted I’m just spitballing here, don’t hold me to the fire over this lol
Having local governments would definitely be better, but I for one just don’t see what’s so bad about just having equally-smaller business performing this function. We’ve grown so used to hating on “capitalists”, but to me the real issue is about Corporations and their scale.
I can’t help but think that the censorship would be way way worse if local governments were hosting. Not to mention that they would be most likely to require having people’s true identities when creating accounts.
Doesn’t this apply regardless of whether the owner is the government or a private organization? All types of owners have their pros and cons, so I’d prefer a healthy mix so that users can pick the one they prefer.
There is also a need for governments to setup their own instances for their employees and institutions to avoid them having to sign up to a third party service if their work involves communicating on the fediverse, which also makes it clear that messages sent from this instance are official government communication (like governments have done with email for a long time). That’s how the EU’s Mastodon instance is setup: https://social.network.europa.eu/about
