We will need small and independent commercial providers for the Fediverse.
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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.
This is exactly what I’ve been wondering, with a non profit you could have ways of generating revenue without the constant aggressive profit seeking that tends to cause the problems of the tech giant social media platforms.
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).
I use many services, including this one, from a donation-driven business that has been around since the 80s.
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.
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.
Except that the hosting costs of Wikipedia are neligible. Have a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
You’re agreeing with me.
What are they doing with all the money and why do they keep asking for more of it? Why don’t they take some of that money to support the rest of the staff that has asked for help?
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.
It’s true, thousands of cheap instances will add up, and probably to something bigger than what a server farm would have. Unless we start hosting something heavier than text extensively I expect the bill per user is still going to be tiny, though.
I think it’s definitely the first one. Very unlikely things have any reason to shift to an all paid model. Even still the cost of a single user is almost negligible. The cost to support thousands of those “free riders” is still probably on the order of dollars.
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.
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 think it’s interesting that we have absolutely no problem with a with an army of volunteers in the form of Reddit mods but it seems unthinkable to imagine instance admins would work for free, maybe even for the love of the community.
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”.
Ok. Fair enough, moderators usually are also part of the community, so they also have the incentive to keep it going well even if unpaid.
Yet, the point stands. Remove “moderators” from the previous comment. Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of admins and developers.
Why aren’t admins considered part of the community? When it comes to the mastodon developers, they’re making 30,000 USD a month. I think they’re fine.
That money is to cover everything: servers, designers, developers. Eugen gets maybe 10% of that money. A developer making $3k/month (without any employment benefits) is something completely unthinkable. People can make more money than that by just being able to spell Javascript.
It’s not unusual for employees of charitable non-profits to earn less than their for-profit counterparts. Again, I refer back to my soup analogy.
Also, digging around, I found out that patreon is not the only source of fund-raising and that they have received a 50,000 EUR bug bounty grant.
I don’t mean to imply that Mastodon devs are rolling around in a pool of gold like Scrooge McDuck, but they are getting funded.
sounds like “ Show me a soup kitchen that’s able to pay market rate for chefs”.
What would happen if the masses realized how fast food is bad for them and stopped eating at McDonalds? Would they go to eat on a soup kitchen, or would they be expected to buy/grow their own food?
Exactly. Non profit. I don’t recall seeing that in this article. I don’t think it matters what the business model is. If your social media is a for profit company their interests aren’t the same interests as the user.
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.
I would imagine a LaaS (Lemmy as a Service) would work. You pay a subscription fee, instantly get your own instance. People do it often to setup dedicated game servers for Arma 3 etc.
I’m genuinely curious how low-spec a server for this could be. If you only allow links to off-site media (only host text), I wonder if that would help with fitting a lot of people on a cheap low-spec server. Hypothetically specific apps instead of using a website could also move a lot of server work onto client devices. Lastly if there could be a way to securely dedicate part of your pc to server hosting the way mining crypto works, the server could provide extra perks that require extra server power (such as animated avatars, higher resolution posts, etc.).
All I’m saying is there are a good few options before we need corporate sponsors.
The issue is not so much with amount of data, it’s bandwidth. Mastodon has seen that already: if you have someone on your server with thousands of followers and they post something with a link or anything that can have a embedded card, any single post from them will trigger immediately to your server being flooded with requests related to that card. You can get a server effectively DDOS’d even if you are not hosting a lot.
I see. Thanks!
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?
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
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 see corporations as a people-eating machine. That is to say, they are a system of parts whose functions are to obtain profit, and if proverbially “eating people” is necessary to do so, the machine will do so. As they’re smaller, well meaning people will still be in control of the machine, but the machine will still want to eat people (again, figuratively).
There’s many things we can do to help offset that risk. Having many small competing businesses is a great way, so long as we can keep them small, and keep them competing. Introducing public options that are free is another way. Should the machine start eating people, there’s nothing stopping people from going to the no-frills one provided to them.
This is also the idea behind a “public option” for internet and telecoms - not to completely get rid of ISPs and telecom companies, but to make ISPs and telecoms compete against a cheap or free option that works only to exist and give the basic needs of the service to people. This has worked out in spades for the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, whose crown corporation Sasktel has ensured the province has the best rates for phones and internet in the country, regardless of what provider you go with.
Sorry for the rant!
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.
I’m simply suggesting it as an option, not as the entire thing. Nothing would stop people from having their own instances, and as far as the local governments front, they would likely each have their own criteria for joining, if any.
This is the only way I could realistically see an actual “public square of the internet”
To be fair… it is not like this is a brand new thing. Traditionally email and other services like hosting and nntp were included with your hosting account. Although webmail and the tv crowd broke those expectations, I think we can expect a similar solution.
I have a mastodon account on a server hosted by a podcast that we all support. I can see a similar solution for all the many other interests and groups we involve ourselves in. Such as local LUGs, or any other number of groups/clubs that already are funded by their members and provide services for them.
At scale, I can’t imagine it will cost much.
