rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news

Posts

39

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1,812

Joined

2 yr. ago

Read again, he is not asking to pay the server bills. It's 1400€ (so, less than $0,10/active user/month) and he got it fully covered.

You can cut that 5x. You can cut that 10x. You can cut that 100x. It doesn't matter. You can bet that if he brought down the prices to zero there would still be people saying "why are you asking for money then, it doesn't cost you anything to run it!" and at the end of the month, he will still be short to make rent.

I understand it pretty well. What I don't understand is why some people only want to participate here if it means they can get to free ride on "volunteers".

In a sibling comment, you say "if providing the service is too much, the solution is to stop doing it". Fine, I fully agree with it. But do you realize that this implies that sooner or later we are going to run out of people with the capacity (or willingness) to do this work?

We are not talking about any small-time instance. It's the third largest instance by active user count. Above it, only mastodon.social and mstdn.jp. If the third largest instance has an admin that might have to stop providing the service in order to find another job so that they can make fucking rent, isn't that a sign that this is not sustainable?

• the fact that you think that "creating a business" is bad says more about you than me. And I don't want a business "just for me". I am looking for a sustainable way where many people can work in tech and create technology that does not exploit the users, but this will never happen if the people working are expected to do it from free and still figure out how to make rent.
• not quite, see above. I don't particularly care about the individuals and I certainly wish to change the prevailing culture. I am not here to have any significant impact on people individually and I am not concerned about "being nice". I do care about finding one platform that can be sustainable and universally accessible, though.
• no, but I think that the LW users do have the resources to allow Ruud to work full-time on Fediverse stuff, but for some reason there are 18k users there who think it is okay to exploit his free labor.
• pick a lane: do you think that "community building" is a job, or not? Are you participating here as a service to others or do you out of personal enjoyment? If you want to be paid for it, then state your value and tell me how much you think your work is worth.

And each one of them should be commended for having a better understanding of ethics than you and all others who are only interested in participating if they can exploit free labor.

Yeah, you made it clear that you:

• do not value the work of the admins
• can only see meaning in a "free" social media platform if it means "free of charge"
• think that a small business provider providing hosting for open source systems is as bad as Big Tech/Corporate/VC funded ones
• see volunteered work as as opportunity to excuse yourself from giving a meaningful contribution
• think you should be paid for participating

unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating

It is quite realistic to get 100% of your users to pay. Just make registration conditional on the payment.

$10, $20 or even the $29 per year that I charge at Communick is not a significant amount of money for the average user. It is mind boggling that we got so used to "free stuff" offered by Big Tech that now anyone saying "Everyone using the service needs to pay for it" is seen as an heretic.

What is stopping an admin unwilling to "give away their labor for free" from doing so?

Again, you are going at this backwards.

Instead of asking yourself why the network can reach a few million users even when admins are unpaid, you should be wondering how much bigger the network would be if the current users appropriately invested in the ecosystem.

Yes, of course. Sysadmins, developers, moderators, Fediverse advocates, active posters, even commenters deserve something, as every of those roles make the platform alive.

Amazing. By equating the value of the work provided by admins and developers (which you can not do) to the work of "Fediverse advocates and active posters" (which you want to do) you create a false equivalence that you think excuses you from giving full credit to others.

You said you did not respond to the original statements because "it would take too much time". Now, you spent more time trying to find a reasonable justification for your unwillingness to acknowledge the higher value of someone else's contribution and you still didn't give a straight out answer and resort to rhetorical tricks.

Where is this money we supposedly all deserve going to come from?

First: who is "we", here? Are you really implying that you should be getting money by participating?

Second: the money exists. You and many others can pay $10-20 / year for the service being provided to you. The problem is that you (and many others) do not want to acknowledge the value of the work and refuse to contribute beyond "covering the cost of hardware".

Again: hosting costs is the least of the concerns. The problem is that users are not willing to pay for the labor of admins.

I do support admins

Again, paying out to cover hardware costs is not the same as supporting the admins.

Now do I think Lemmy admins should be able to make a living out of managing an instance? Based on what we see (...) it seems unrealistic.

Holy $%&! what a contortionist way to avoid the response! You are sounding like a Monty Python comedy sketch.

I'm not asking what you think is "realistic". I'm asking whether you think admins should be compensated for their work.

Should I try again, or can I just assume that your answer is "no, I do not think that admins need to be compensated for their work." ?

Sorry to tell you, but you’re here with the crabs.

Speak for yourself, then. But at least you are starting to show some honesty and admitting that you rather pull people down to your level instead of acknowledge the value of the work done by admins and developers.

If you can’t see the difference between employees of companies providing millions to stakeholders and 50k monthly active users

You are getting at this exactly backwards.

It's not the employees of tech companies who complain about poor pay. Quite the opposite.

And the reason that Lemmy can not grow past 50k users is because the Fediverse is stuck on a horrible culture where they refuse to even acknowledge that the work of admins and developers is valuable, so those with the skills that could take the Fediverse to the next level are not going to be sacrificing themselves to serve a bunch of people who think they are entitled to free work from others just because they themselves are not able to do it.

You are right. These types of discussions are beyond silly. But you might not be aware that this back-and-forth between me and Blaze is going for months already and whenever he is asked about how he values the work of admins and FOSS developers, he goes full gas-lighting mode and refuses to answer.

Whether something is funded by donations or fees is separate from whether the cost of people’s time should be included in the revenue target.

Yeah, but where are the admins who dare to say "I think my work is worth $15k/month, so I will only keep the instance open if we collect that much money"?

There aren't, because the majority of users will see that "profiteering" and flat out refuse to contribute. Or they will come up with the worst excuses to diminish the work of the admins, which in the end translate to "I don't make that much money, how could I justify accepting that your work is more valuable than mine?" crab mentality.

I’m trying to just end this conversation

Yeah, you keep trying to end the conversation because you painted yourself to a corner and you refuse to publicly admit that you do not want to support admins and FOSS developers.

Is the previous comment not true anymore?

The whole comment is true. Including the part where I say

I’m honestly tired of this crab mentality. People think it’s a sin to be upfront about their work and how much they value their time. It’s also quite ironic that I can see the huge overlap: those who are always virtue signaling and complaining about bosses who don’t pay enough to their employees are the same ones who refuse to patronize a small independent business

Why couldn't you highlight this part instead?

Are we stuck in a loop? Because it seems that yet again you are bringing things out of context and using it as a shield to avoid giving out your opinion.

You have the time to chase things around and select clips of whatever supports your worldview, but you do not have the time to say "I don't think admins should be compensated for their work".

You want to make a living out of the platform, to make a business out of it. I prefer it to be run by volunteers.

This right here is a good example of you taking things out of context and not caring about "nuance" when it is convenient to you

the difference is quite obvious

Is it? Then why is it so problematic for you to say:

• "No, I do not agree that admins should be compensated for their work"
• "No, I do not agree that developers of free software should be compensated for their work"

You called me dishonest when I said that you were evading to answer your opinion on the value of the work from admins. I ask you then to make it as clear as possible, to remove any chance of doubt.

You put a bunch of links to past conversations, but you highlight things that are not the main point of the argument and take things out of context, and you have the audacity to claim you are doing it "for context".

Now that I got wise about your games and decided to ask you to provide receipts, you continue to evade the answer and are showing you'd rather play the victim than owning up to your opinions.

Start with the top 3. A simple "yes" or "no".

That would be nice, but the cost of hosting is not the issue. The problem is that people expect to have free software being developed and services being offered but they don't want to pay for the labor of developers and admins.

Thanks for making it clear that you are evading giving your straightforward opinion for the following statements:

• Free Software Developers deserve to be paid for their work, regardless of the "price tag" or license fees.
• People working in free software should treat their craft as a hobby.
• The work of system administrators (setting up the systems, ensuring it is secure, managing backups, keeping it up to date, implementing improvements, etc) is valuable and should be properly compensated.
• If someone is offering to run and manage a server without asking a priori for any form of payment, then this means that all their work is altruistic and they should not be compensated for it.
• One Individual using a platform and actively promoting it is as important as one developer of the platform.
• One individual using a platform and actively promoting it is as important as the admin of one server running the platform.
• If there were no "volunteer run" instances, I would run my own and bear all the costs to operate it.
• People that are still using the traditional social media networks should know better. If they haven't left yet, they deserve everything bad that happens to them there.
• It's perfectly acceptable and ethical for any company that provides an utility (water, heating, electricity, phone, internet) to expect a profit.
• It's perfectly acceptable and ethical for a indie game developer to charge a monthly fee from the users while they are working on it.
• In a world where the big social media companies (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) were provably serving the interests of the users and not its investors (no data exploitation, no promotion of corporate agenda, using and promoting open standards for interoperation, no forced walled garden and artificial scarcity) and changed their business model to a simple monthly subscription fee, I would still not use them.
• In a world where the big social media companies were provably serving the interests of the users and not its investors, I would only use it if I did not have to pay and they relied on other forms of revenue to run their service, e.g, non-invasive advertisements.

No, thanks. I will not engage in any further discussion with you until you explicitly answer those statements.

Please start with the yes or no, the nuances can come after you plainly state your opinion about how much the work of admins is valuable to you.