I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it’s a matter of time before it’s enshittified.
I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there’s a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than “big tech” and get more done than just donation based development.
It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?
What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?
How do you decide “what they deserve”? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?
This is a great question and something we shouldn’t shy away from considering.
As far as hosting a mastodon instance? That’s something that should be done for free with the only income being donations.
These people do it because they want to. It’s not necessarily “work” for them, which is why they do it for free anyways. It’s also sustainable. As more users join their instance, costs for hosting will increase but so should donations. It’s not that expensive to host servers, despite what some conpeople and their useful idiots may have told you. (don’t assume you know the costs of hosting if you’ve never done it yourself.)
Admins get a lot of power that they have no problem abusing, either. This alone would make me a moron for even considering paying them for it.
“Yeah bro, I’m gonna pay you to host your instance where you have absolute control and can censor anything you don’t like.”
This is fun for them. That’s why they do it.
There is not a single Mastodon &server out there that have increased donations or reach a sustainable level after they reach a few thousand users.
Also, there are not enough admins around “doing it because they want to” if we want the Fediverse to grow a few millions users.
Instagram has 2 billion users, Pixelfed largest instance has less than 200k active users. We would have to get 10 THOUSAND admins in order to compete with Instagram.
Are you referring to active users, or just accounts-made? If you’re referring to active users, then can you point to any Mastodon instance with thousands of active users and the donations they receive?
If you’re referring to accounts made, then you don’t really have a point because thousands of accounts are unlikely to substantially increase server costs unless they’re all active (see above).
Are you joking? There’s no “shortage of instances” going around. As more people join the Fediverse, more admins will start instances. This is a non-issue.
In fact, I’d wager the vast majority of instance-owners are bored, twiddling their thumbs due to their lack of users.
See above.
Newsie.social has (had) 20k active users, mostly professional journalists. It has been threatening to shut down due to lack of funding for two years already. Every month their admin needs to beg around for people to donate.
Fosstodon started with enough donations that they could even send some of their money to upstream projects. Nowadays they are invite-only because they don’t get enough funding to sustain infinite growth.
Moth.social was active while they were sponsored by Mozilla, they are shutting down in March 12th due to lack of funding.
I could go on.
This is just wishful thinking. Go ahead and open an instance with open registration, see how long it will take for you to regret it.
And there is a huge number of admins that got users and then burned out due to harassment, spam, entitled users asking for/against federation due to petty drama…
Removed by mod
I mean we’ve determined what a living wage is, right? Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?
There are plenty of jobs similar to the roles that would be needed that we can compare to you. I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly. It’s not rocket science.
I also don’t think mods have to be paid. They can be, but I don’t see it as necessary. I’m talking about the instance maintainers.
…have we?
Yes. It just hasn’t been properly implemented nation wide in the US. We’ve studied it to death and know what we need.
What does “implemented” mean?
If you’re going to waste my time with bullshit bait I’ll waste your time with lazy answers.
If you have a point to make just make it. Stop this ridiculous song and dance.
Buddy theres no song and dance unless it’s the one you’re doing where you’re refusing to answer basic questions about things you’ve said.
Dude my point is simple. The concept of a living wage is well established and defined. Including how it can be calculated. There are countless studies and reports and estimates to the point where we could easily establish it as a minimum wage at the very least at the municipal and state levels depending on income needs to “live.”
This is not complicated. It’s a decades old, well established concept. Unfortunately it has not been implemented in to law in the US in any meaningful way beyond a handful of cities and states. I don’t Know if you were just playing dense or truly do not understand the concept, but there you go. Use fucking Google I don’t care. I don’t need to defend the existence of this concept and how thoroughly researched and thought out it already is.
Are you going to actually respond substantively or are you going to keep up your lame song and dance? Make your fucking point. What are you trying to say?
I don’t see why you’re being so hostile to him. I also didn’t know this about a livable wage. I didn’t know we were doing studies on it and thought that it actually referred to a subsistence wage.
I would actually usually say I don’t like the term livable wage and think we should say “respectable wage” instead. It looks like they mean the same thing, though.
I don’t know why you’re treating me like a piece of shit for nothing more than trying to understand more about the words you wrote but I suppose I’ll stop doing that.
In a centrally-planned system? Yes, it is very hard.
I assume you mean that you had to give a quote to a client?
If that is the case, your client has sole decision-making power and has “only” to evaluate whether the price you were asking for your labor is lower than the value you’d be bringing them.
How does this compare with a coop, where (presumably) the member-owners have all to agree on the price of labor? Are they going to accept to pay market rate for the people working there? Are they first find whoever is willing to work for the cheapest and then set the price on that?
Dude you’re acting like this is some Herculean feat when coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations. This is a very strange hill to die on.
The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.
IOW, I’m not arguing that “coops” can not exist. What I am arguing is we will never get rid of Big Tech if we keep forcing the idea that only community-owned services are acceptable models of governance.
When it comes to hosting instances, yes, I do believe we have to universally keep investors/a for-profit structure out.
Putting these two in the same bag is a mistake, this is what OP and I are saying.
Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend “on profit”, the methods they use and incentives that drive them are wildly different.
That’s a ridiculous statement. Context is just a malleable term you can use for whatever. Nobody is saying context is irrelevant, you can’t remove context from any statement.
Scale however does not matter.
Of course the scale of the business matters. If scale doesn’t matter, a bunch of farmers selling their produce at a local market would be bad for their local community as Walmart.