OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
I agree donating to instances and to things you believe in is a good idea.
But declaring that paying for things means they aren’t going to be controlled by shitty corporations is just ignoring every other aspect of the global economy.
I don’t know that I agree. Paying to support a site that supports your community isn’t sufficient, by itself, to protect you from enshittification. But it’s a necessary first step. Because sure as hell a website run by a for profit corp, that doesn’t charge you to use it, is making its money off you. And if you want to lessen the percentage of your life directly controlled by corporations you need to get away from corporate social media.
I’m excited by looking at Lemmy instances over the past few months and seeing how many of them are openly and transparently discussing finances with their communities - this is how much running the instance costs, this is how much the community has given us, this is who makes decisions about our site and this is how we make decisions, these are our future goals and plans for the future, etc, etc. Sure they have to work with Amazon Web Hosting etc in order to function at all but making decisions that actually put users first and being transparent in both finances and decision making is a huge improvement from the FaceTwitTokGram monolith.
Well, first of all, this is capitalism - if people suddenly were okay with paying for the big online services that are currently completely free but harvest a lot of user data, they’re just going to put the paywall up AND harvest your data at the same time. Why choose between one option or the other for monetization when you can combine them and make more money from both?
Besides, speaking of the fediverse - due to its decentralized nature, it can’t really be paywalled or monetized. If some instance decides to put up a paywall or ads for some reason, you can just hop to another instance and have access to pretty much the same content.
No. I would be fine with the Internet returning to a bunch of little passion project sites. I hate the internet as it is today.
Paying for website access will only make things worse, not better, because the major players are so extremely malevolent.
Spot on!
As soon as the disgusting tendrils of capitalist greed get a taste, the whole game is cooked. It’s better as a hobby project. Just donate to your instance to help cover costs!
@stabby_cicada I think digital public space is as important as physical public space. A lot of this communication space is well provided by private people and companies, but to ensure freedom nation states must also invest in it. Just like physical public space, it is a common good, a res-publica.
i mean there is many good arguements as to why digital public spaces should not be run by governments. But if they are not government run but funded, then that creates a new can of worms. It is best the governments ensure the freedom of digital public spaces and that these are run in a federated way, based on volunteer and non profit activities.
@tryptaminev Why? It would not take away anything from volunteer infrastructure, but would add safety options.
Volunteer servers need users to trust their admins with no grounds for that, but the fact that they “want to run a community”, which also implies that they have personal politics and power over you. Fedi should not be only for existing communities. Also, there’s financial stability as noted above.
And there are some grounds to trust your democratic representatives, aren’t there.
Given that the democratic representatives in my country are trying to implement authoritarian surveillance since decades and try time and time again, despite being slammed by the constitutional court, no i dont trust them.
They dont care for and dont understand the meaning of these spaces and the necessary rules.
Of course you are right that private entities are not free from it either. That is where federation seems to be the best way to adress it.
I’m broke, and have no capacity to make money in a capitalist society. This isn’t to say what I do doesn’t have value, it’s just not valuable to rich people.
Am I just FUBAR in this purely-transactional NWO?
Not necessarily in the fediverse world. If server costs are being covered by donations from 4% of users, a volunteer admin will probably be quite happy whereas a commercial operator will undoubtedly think “damn I have 96% freeloaders, that’s leaving money on the table”.
Unfortunately I’d say yes.
U ain’t got holes?
Edit o man what a comment lol
Those who have money can afford better than what I got.
It’s not a matter of having nothing to offer, it’s that what I do isn’t bought by people with money. Value ≠ What people pay for. Case in point: Funko-Pop figurines.
Counterpoint: In this day and age hosting and sharing text can be done on donated resources, we have basically reached post-scarcity there .
My opinion is that if the fediverse would set up an online shopping page where people can sell things and the site owners would get a cut of the proceeds that that would kill two birds with one stone.
One, the fediverse could be profitable for the site owners, and two, we could break our reliance on sites like eBay and OfferUp and let go and Facebook and Amazon for selling goods to one another.
You wouldn’t even have to worry about payment processors because the United States government now has an instant money transfer service that you can utilize instead of MasterCard and Visa, and if that failed zelle would be another good option.
I have the idea and it’s essentially worthless without implementation so if anyone wants to take it on it would be much appreciated because that is a change I would love to see in the world.
Idk with money come certain responsibilities to customers and taxes. Makes starting an instance much more of a headache. +1 for the idea though.
I sometimes pay for things and still end up being the product. Smart TVs sell tons of data, and you may still pay buckets for one. YouTube Premium is no guarantee that Google won’t use your data in other ways. A modern luxury car has tons of ways to spy on you.
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Hard pass.
There’s two parts to this problem often overlooked, that on one side, is down to whomever runs an instance and two, the larger hosting industry (and by extension, the developers of kbin/lemmy/mastodon/etc).
The admins often have a tendency for vying for their instance to be the biggest and bestest. Stop that, grow the communities you have an interest in supporting instead of just wanting to be the biggest instance. Don’t use this as a penis extender. You’re not helping. And this idea of being the biggest just gives us another Reddit or Twitter instead of a federated network of systems.
The hosting industry is milking the ever living daylights out of servers and resources. Cheaper hosting will make hosting new instances much less reliant on sponsors and the like. Add to that that domain registrars are also milking the ever living daylights out of domain registrations.
Ofcourse, the developers of the fediverse apps optimizing their code as much as can be done without falling behind on general development, which reduces the resources needed to host an instance, helps in that regard too.
Just saying people need to foot the bills, without first looking if those bills are actually necessary and just, just shifts the blame on the users.
blahaj.zone provided an example of this recently. They reported that their finances are no longer sustainable but reassured their users that things will be fine because the fix was straightforward … move everything off of AWS to a cheaper hosting provider.
Adding to the problem is ISPs.
I personally was part of putting fiber in the ground in my country from 2007-2011, there has been fiber in the ground up to peoples doorsteps and fiber connections between all street level hubs, since then.
It’s only now, since 2022, that for an obscene premium compared to cable and copper, you can get fiber as a domestic subscriber, STILL limited to 1/1G and with fair use limits (going over 100GB in a day gets you throttled to a snails pace).
And even though the technology is present and available to go well beyond 1/1G, no ISP will provide.
There’s plenty people with hardware at home capable of hosting substantial sized instances for federated systems. They just can’t get the bandwidth to do so.
And with can’t, make sure to understand this is in no way a technical limitation.
It’s 100% down on restrictions by ISPs and “the industry”, they don’t want people to have that capability to host content themselves.
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Internet Giant: “You need to pick one:”
a) pay for the service,
b) accept we’ll sell your data,
c) accept we’ll show you ads.
Consumer: “Er, okay… I pick (a)”
Internet Giant: “So (d) then. All of the above.”
And apparently all car companies
I’m a Kbin Patreon for this very reason.
Just want to add to the discussion here a critique of some sort of the fediverse:
I don’t think the fediverse has settled on a stable and/or healthy culture when it comes to money, finances and support. And realistically, the sooner it does so the better off or more sustainable it is likely to be in the future.
I think there’s an odd cultural mix here … of people accustomed to the “everything online is free” culture/world, people like in the OP snippet that believe everything should be paid for, people who are actually happy with ads and no privacy and people who are vehemently anti-capitalism to the point that they start to get upset the moment there’s any exchange of money toward any sort of centralised organisation.
IMO, you can see this in the way that the whole fediverse relies entirely/mostly on donations (and volunteers, a lot) and yet the state of finances are often not transparent at all and the process of providing donations is not front and center almost as though the fediverse wants to keep the appearance of the “everything is free online” social media era. I think it’d be fair to say that this is in large part because many admins don’t want to deter users and are operating their instances out of passion and a certain degree of privilege they have that allows them to do so out of their own pocket/time.
But the question hanging over the whole ecosystem is how sustainable is it. It’s probably very useful to keep in mind that the previous (or still current) “era of social media” has been long lasting … with Twitter, Reddit and Youtube being “go to” places online for over a decade (and now basically the historically definitive era of the internet). Many, I’d argue, are accustomed to online places lasting a long time. I’ve spoken to some moving from twitter to masto (where there’s a more personal investment and “settlement” or identity) who are also trying to get their communities to come over … and they’re not even aware just how much they are presumptuously thinking about masto/fediverse on “twitter” time scales (ie 10-15 yrs) without realising how shaky the fediverse’s foundations for longevity might be (at least without some great hassle caused by having to re-route around failed instances and forked platforms etc).
I see co-ops and non-profits on the rise (lemmy.world’s recent announcement being an example) … but overall the culture on the fediverse has by no means “solved” the problem of financial stability and sustainability and I personally would like to see more discussion around what that can and should look like.
