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.
That’s like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.
I haven’t seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.
Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don’t speak up, I would conclude we don’t have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?
Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.
I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.
We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.
Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.
See my other comment examining where the top 10 instances by userbase get their funding from and how well they’re doing
Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.
Their problem is that they allowed themselves to become too big and unsustainable in the long run.
It’s not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.
Donations alone on the biggest instances aren’t enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won’t make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.
If the instance becomes so big, that it depends on donations, then it is too big.
Exactly, I’m surprised how little I’ve seen this pointed out in this thread. There’s essentially zero reason for instances to grow beyond basic sustainability.
@petunia @Spzi Some are not about money: mastodon.lol is purely a personal decision; switter.at is not gonna lobby against governments that want to censor queer voices (which is what “online safety regulations” are really about). For Pawoo, Pixiv certainly had the money to keep it running, so this might be profitability concerns (given that at that time Pixiv also phased out other less-popular services to focus on its main platforms); CrossGate/Russell could be financial and liability concerns.
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Yes, because even with federation it is inherently advantageous for a user of a social platform to be among the largest pool of people they can identify, to make random stumbling into discussions and groups as likely as possible.
It’s a weird thing where we want the federation to provide a network of smallest scale platforms, yet we do this for social media, where the experience is naturally best when it starts with a single giant platform you filter down not an ocean of individual bits you have to glue together.
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Geezus. I’m old enough to remember how the Internet was before the Internet. Sorry. 😅
You however completely missed the point. Social media in its nature benefits from centralized approaches. As a use case. Independent of who operates it. Users have it easier the more central it is. It doesn’t need to be walled. Of course not. But it should be centralized.
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Like I said above, specifically for the “I want to socialize” use case of social media sites, there’s no upside to federation. It makes discovery harder, and a giant portion of what made Reddit so amazing was the random stumbling into things.
And yes, sure, federated systems can be made to more closely emulate such a centralized approach, but that’s why I said it that way: A centralized pool of social media content (for a given social media platform) is beneficial to the user, they can randomly stumble into topics and groups, and filter things down to what they desire.
In an ideal federated system, that is in turn exactly how the content would look for the user: They’d not even realize the content isn’t all on whatever instance they’re on, it’s fully transparent. Because that’s easier for the user. No matter how low the barrier to finding federated content is, there’s still no upside for the user having to take that step and go hunt for federated concept. From the perspective of the user, that is.
It’s not a big issue of course, but it does mean that by default, more users flock to where there are already more users.
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The hell there is.
When “I want to socialize”, I don’t have to go march up at the UN headquarters, the Vatican or whoever “controls people” and ask for consideration. I can literally just walk out my door and walk to my local plaza. Or maybe the local grocery market. If I’m feeling lucky I can take the first googelbus and go to the nearest stadium, anime store or vintage disco bar. None of those needs to rely on the fact that other supermarkets or stadiums exist to provide socialization.
I disagree… as a user you want relative proximity, but not centralisation. Which is exactly what federation provides.
Think of it like stores:
The centralized social-media is a bit like those big-box stores that have a little of everything. Hard to navigate and find the stuff, usually they only offer the items with broader appeal, and the entire experience is just unpleasant.
The Fediverse is more like a mall with many smaller shops. Small niche shops can survive because the many other shops drive foot traffic and if you are not interested in tools for example, you can just not enter the hardware store.
I agree with your overall sentiment but am I crazy or is RSS more popular than ever?
I doubt it is overall, but I’ve certainly seen more talk about it lately than I ever have. Not surprising considering how many reddit refugees I’ve been chatting with.
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If you include podcasts, which are delivered via RSS by definition, undoubtedly RSS is more popular than ever.
It’s a little disingenuous to do that though, so in this context we probably shouldn’t count it.
Have you considered that it isn’t the price but the subscription? Many people I know have a real aversion against subscription services with this constant threat of being cut off and arbitrary price increases.
I am pretty sure an up-front single “life-time” price would have more takers, even if such a promise is obviously still subject to many caveats.
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Before we revert to ads surly we try medals. Set a standard price on each. Then when a comment/post recieves such a thing divide that reward between user, user instance, post user, post instance, community, and community instace. That way servers, admins, and high quality content creators all have an incentive. It could theoreticaly be weigted however wanted. Only issue I see is it would need some sot of blockchain to ensure no fuckery goes on.
Point where I said we should run ads
I didn’t care so much about specific wordings but answered to the gist of it. Yes, I cannot strictly quote you on that, but so what?
“Many are opposed to ads” gave the impression it would be worth considering to have ads.
Anyways, that’s like the least interesting angle, to discuss what specific words you used.