We will need small and independent commercial providers for the Fediverse.
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.
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.
Like probably most reading this headline in light of why many of us are here in the first place, I cringed at the headline. That being said it’s something we must consider. These sites are not magic, they are on physical servers consuming resources to persist. Upkeep of some kind is necessary.
Is the solution a commercial business one? Maybe in some cases. The author themselves acknowledges that this is how the problem we’re fleeing began in the first place, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be so. Considering the nature of business which I am all too familiar with, involving commercial influence has a much higher potential to corrupt good intentions than we may want to believe however careful we are. There do exist small businesses who place their work above profit (I’d like to think my business included among these) and can be run putting the interests of people first. It can be frustrating to watch less ethical and more exploitative peers zoom past and leverage their resources to get more business even though their service can’t compare, but people are not rational actors unless they have been primed to be. Perception is reality in many cases.
I have heard some discussion to make this instance into a non-profit, which could also be a solution. I also recall working for a non-profit who had to depend on laundering the reputation of massive corporations for chump change because that was the only dependable source of revenue. This isn’t to say that a non-profit is inherently a bad idea, only that they have their own challenges and are uniquely vulnerable due to having to always re-invest profit and not necessarily being prepared for fluctuations in capital as a consequence. It’s a unique set of challenges.
Optimally I would like to see the instances I interact with to be run ideologically by a corps of contrubutors committed to social responsibility and positive freedom as it appears Beehaw is run now. I really like how this instance is run and the values it has demonstrated. I’ll most likely be around to discuss when changes need to be made, because the world changes and we have to change with it unavoidably.
Community is enough. The Fediverse allows for small servers that do not cost a lot to run.
Due to the lack of economies of scale, they cost more per user than centralized alternative. Either we will have thousands of people who don’t mind footing the bill of the free riders, or we all will have to pay our share.
We need non profits who will monetize ethically just enough to sustain the operations. Particularly cooperatives. Social media doesn’t need to be profitable. It just needs to exist and serve it’s users.
