I’ve had three glasses of wine after a long day at work, and I’ve began thinking about the slow shift towards federalization/decentralization.
I find myself concerned about the question of incentives. What motivates the owners and maintainers of federated services to continue their efforts over the years? Donations alone are unlikely to cover the costs of servers, let alone the time required for code/infra maintenance, along with community moderation.
It is evident that most successful open source projects have found alternative avenues to sustain Incentivisation. One common approach is offering enterprise packages or services, which generate revenue to support ongoing development and maintenance. Additionally, some projects find support as subsets of larger corporations, such as Canonical, HashiCorp, Apache, MongoDB, k8s, Chromium, Android, Red Hat, and many more.
I am sure that many of us have witnessed many donation-based or entirely free and open-source (FOSS) projects lose traction over time. In my observations, this can be attributed to core maintainers losing interest or facing limitations in dedicating themselves to the project in the long run. The absence of financial incentives can make it challenging to sustain motivation, as maintaining and developing projects require significant time and expertise, and a genuine interest in the product.
What can be done to address these problems? Is it something like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)?
DAOs provide token-based incentives, allowing contributors to earn tokens representing ownership or value in the project. These tokens can be exchanged or redeemed for various benefits within the decentralized ecosystem. By aligning the interests of contributors with the success of the project, DAOs offer a sustainable incentive structure, while maintaining their decentralized nature.
Although incentives pose a valid concern for a decentralized future, it is important to acknowledge that sustainable models exist. Through the exploration of alternative mechanisms such as DAOs and hybrid models, we can create incentive structures that attract and retain contributors over the long term. I strongly believe that for decentralized projects to thrive and maintain momentum, it is crucial for them to embrace alternative models that effectively retain talented individuals. As these projects continue to innovate and adapt, exploring diverse incentive structures becomes essential to ensure their long-term success.
Thoughts?
Get that crypto shit out of here lmao. The answer is just building strong communities that give a shit about building good internet spaces. It’s political, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s not hard, and it doesn’t need to be profitable to work.
Ehm, it is hard to make social platforms work. I work in technology, as a software engineer and am paid to keep our core services running. It is a full time job with some of the best minds around me.
Luckily, I work in a sector that mainly sees traffic 9-5 m-f, but social platforms need hands on deck 24/7/365.
The answer is just building strong communities that give a shit about building good internet spaces
Like I said in my post, interests fade. Most open source projects I’ve seen fail. What keeps a core team around over the years, most of the time, isn’t giving a shit.
What keeps a core team around over the years, most of the time, isn’t giving a shit.
It absolutely is.
Of course money is important and we need to support our communities, infrastructures, and so on, but if it’s money is what’s keeping a person working on a thing, they will get a better offer and move on. Like all the cryptobros who’d been pushing web3/DAO crap for years and now switched to pushing AI hype without batting an eye.
Or they will start exploiting their project for profit, to the detriment of the community, as we’ve seen with so, so many DAO-based cryptocurrency projects.
Most closed source, profit driven projects fail or end eventually too. Customers find other things to buy. Employees look for other lines of work.
Incentivizing behaviour don’t usually lead to motivated people, just obligated ones.
What is it then?
Interests fade and so some communities/instances will die off and others will grow. We shouldn’t try to fight organic growth and death. That leads to unnatural centralization and making the purpose of an organization simply that organization’s continued existence.
Absolutely not. Cryptobros showed that the whole cryptocurrency scene is either in on the scams or at least not bothered by them. Just consider Web3 Is Doing Great: for every promise “web3”/DAO people make, there is at least one story there how “web3”/DAO does not deliver and cannot deliver.
Here are some additional resources about why any suggestions of cryptocurrency/NFT/web3/DAO-related actions need to be pushed back on with full force:
- https://doctorow.medium.com/moneylike-d20f8279a72e
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
- https://strangematters.coop/web3-vs-fediverse-decentralized-internet/ (full disclosure, I wrote this one)
Cryptobros had all the time to build sustainable, equitable, decentralized communities, and failed to do so. Instead, they scammed a lot of people out of their money, and a lot of artists out of their work.
Letting them in on the federated social networking action is letting in foxes into the hen house.
Donations, Liberapay, etc are the right way to support these federated social spaces. DAOs and other cryptocurrency scams are absolutely, positively not the right way to support them. Relying on them will let cryptobros benefit financially from it, while destroying the movement.
Any kind of governance that fundamentally relies on how much wealth the participants have (like DAOs) is completely unworkable.
And completely unacceptable.
True, you’d just be extending the problem of wealth inequality into the digital realm
At best DAOs are simply an extension of shareholder capitalism with less regulation.
This. 👆 👆 👆
Signal is doing just fine with donations only.
Debian is one of the biggest free software communities and it isn’t going anywhere.
Most projects have a limited lifespan, this is not just limited to open source projects. The good thing is that when there is a need, people get together and start building. For example music players on Linux have come and gone, but I will always be able to listen to my stuff comfortably.
Money is needed to survive, but these projects exist because we want more than that, to live satisfied and happy lives. This is something that goes beyond money or survival, but is still a very strong and genuine incentive.
Thank you for opening up this discussion!
Wikipedia is another example. One of the most heavily visited websites, operated as a nonprofit. Obviously they don’t only rely on donations from visitors, as they have a whole foundation. But they are a great example IMO.
The idea of introducing web3 to the fediverse makes my skin crawl. Realistically this is more like a return to web 2.0 principles and codifying them into a modern framework than something new. I remember those communities dying and largely it was because of those people moving to social media which sent activity and interest into a death spiral. There are ways to gamify activity but theyre largely the sleazy underhanded methods that people here rightfully hate.
Keep individual servers small and cheap. That’s all we really need. Federation can provide the communities.
That’s my stance on it.
Once the cross-instance community discovery in Lemmy becomes easier, more integrated, and polished, you could just subscribe to a handful of SelfHosted communities and interact with them all in your feed just like you would a big, monolithic one. You can do that now, though the discovery process is still a bit rough around the edges.
What could be more r/SelfHosted than 30 moderately sized Self Hosted communities all being self-hosted?
Honestly, I know we hate this practice in video games but it could actually help federation. Microtransactions for cosmetics. It can be hard to convince people to donate money, people don’t even want to pay a subscription to use a service. You know what people do like though? Customization options and ways for them to stand out.
There are basically limitless options that could be sold for fundraising purposes. Colored user name, profile borders, etc. None of the cosmetics would boost that persons posts in any way but it would help their profile stand out/be more unique (if they want it to be) and most importantly raise additional funding.
People like to feel like they are “getting something” for their money. (Even if donating is technically them getting to use the instance)
Donate $5 to keep fediverse instance running? :drake_no:
Buy $5 profile border that looks like it was ripped from GeoCities? :drake_yes:I’ll vote for this, with the addendum that Roblox is always held as the quintessence of what NOT to do with incentives.
This is how Reddplanet (my last main reddit app before shit went down) did things.
All the functionality was free, but if you wanted full theme support gotta pay. It was probably my favorite payment method ever.
No. Just no. Do not bring cryptobro ideas here, we don’t need them.
It was bound to happen. On a related note, I feel like the word “fediverse” is too gimmicky and might invite more cryptobro/NFT noise. What’s wrong with just calling it federated social media?
As long as capitalism rules the world it’s inevitable that free or mostly alturistic projects will fail. Unless you have a wealthy benefactor or find other sources of income.
The original Flattr was a good idea, but the non-success and shutdown shows that people are absolutely not interested in donating without getting something in return.
The original Reddit gold, although flawed, was a good way to support a platform and show appreciation to a certain contributor.
Maybe a similar system can be implemented where the owners and maintainers get a small cut each time a “gold” is bought and given? But then the question becomes, who will administer that…Crypto/token-based incentives in any form will likely fail because of value speculation.
Perhaps voluntary paid subscription is the right way to go? Get a nice acknowlegement on your profile, and the ability to double upvote a limited number of posts and users? Perhaps access to advanced (own)user statistics? Customizable interface? Templates? Basically cosmetic DLC with a couple of perks.
Wish I could upvote this again!
Has therebeen any successful implementation of a DAO?
This podcast about the Spice DAO is educational/entertaining:
We need corporations to get on the ActivityPub protocol, like smtp, imo.
I’ve noticed that as technology has progressed over the last few decades, it has gotten progressively cheaper - like, it used to cost some serious $$$ to host your own website/community back in the day, but now you can easily get away with it for less than ~$100/yr.
people that like to create things have a vested interest in maintaining their creations - presumably they’d pay some small amount in order to have their creations (or a digitally archived copy) preserved for posterity.
not familiar with DAOs, but it sounds sort of like a form of currency. if everyone adopts it, or recognizes its value (much as American currency is valued in countries with weak economies), and the tokens are redeemable across multiple platforms (or have a real world value), then that, along with other sources of remuneration (crowdfunding, donations, etc) could easily pay for the cost of hosting content long term.
like, it used to cost some serious $$$ to host your own website/community back in the day, but now you can easily get away with it for less than ~$100/yr.
Sure, at a small scale. But if you want to run a highly available, horizontally scalable platform that will cost $$$.
I agree with your other points!
There’s no need to be large though. There can be many many small servers.
Small servers also tend to disappear, though. As far as I know, federated content simply goes away when the server does.
I think some of the content, like comments on other instances, remains. Overall, a small server disappearing shouldn’t have a major impact on the network as a whole.
Until enough small instances fail/disappear. It’s kind of like with users, if you have a bunch of users that only comment twice a year…if one leaves, meh not a big deal. As more and more of them leave that is 2^n less comments you are getting. At first the drain isn’t noticeable but by the time it is it’s likely too late, too many people are gone and your website is a shell of what it used to be.
People keep saying to push people into a bunch of smaller servers but the same thing will happen. Especially since the person that started the server will be likely footing the bill from their own income. If they lose interest or don’t feel like paying for it anymore, poof there goes their server and users. (Yes their users can make new accounts on new instances but how many times do you think people are going to put up with losing their account)
“How to fund fedi” is an important, valid question.
“Use DAOs/cryptocurrencies to fund fedi” is a completely wrong answer.
On the other hand, this situation would alleviate the reddit influx, especially with users accustomed to having throw-away accounts for 2-4 weeks and deleting them to create new ones.
You can always try it on a private instance I imagine if your having funding issues.
Cost of servers and maintenance is really not that much, last I saw lemmy.world pays around 350€ per month.
