rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news

Posts

39

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1,814

Joined

2 yr. ago

The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not.

Mastodon has a 5 year headstart over Bluesky. Bluesky has more users, large players already getting into it and is raising money and is not ashamed to to be actively looking for a business model.

Meanwhile, Mastodon completely blew the opportunity it got when Musk bought Twitter and keeps repeating the same mistake of preaching to the converted.

What makes you think that more money would solve it? Their problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of ambition.

but unless you’re going to point to particular issues you have with Mastodon’s then, again, I fail to see the relevance.

The "particular issues" I have with Mastodon (or rather, with its leadership) are rooted in its cultural values.

I think that presenting itself as the saviors of civil online discourse is ineffective. It sounds good for this tiny majority that is already here, but does nothing to bring the masses that are still stuck inside the walled gardens of Big Tech.

1. The money wasn't donated yet. This is their stated goal.
2. Yes, I am saying that we would be better off by having this money put somewhere else.

I wouldn’t try to run a social media company with less than that.

Then don't make a "social media company". Change the game.

The goal is not to "compete" with social media companies. The goal is to build tools and digital infrastructure that can let people communicate with each other (a) cheaply, (b) without intermediaries and (c) with robust protections against malicious actors of varying scale.

Give me 5 million euros and one single year, and I can definitely build it. Fuck, give me half a million and I'll do it.

Surprised to see you of all people question why a project needs money to pay for things

I am not questioning the need for money. I am questioning the amount.

And yes, the reason I am asking this is precisely because I don't believe the "not-for-profit" leads to better outcomes than any for-profit one, and I do not share the belief that all for-profit endeavors are bad.

To illustrate the point: I'd take good old Craigslist making more than $600 million per year as a tool against Big Tech and unethical corporations than any of these feel-good initiatives from Mastodon.

I know. The second question is meant to cover this...

Sure. But at the end of the day, economics is just a big game of resource allocation. 5M€ can get you quite a long way, and I'm wondering if we could have better use of those resources than by putting it on Mastodon.

We need to grow our annual operating budget to €5 million in 2025.

What for?

How many active users are going to be served by mastodon.social and mastodon.online? Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?

How many more users are going to join the Mastodon network of servers thanks to the missing features that are planned to be released this year?

Trust me, bro. I am not moving the goal posts, bro. All I need is one example that fits exactly what I want so that I can bring myself to contribute with a few dollars per month. No, paying a small business provider that can reinvest the resources to keep the ecosystem open is not the same, bro... If "the commons" don't help, why should I, bro...

I think I am ready to give up on this conversation.

The worldviews are too different. It makes no sense to make this distinction about "beneficial to companies" and "beneficial to communities" and it actually seems to me like a misunderstanding of why corporations exist in the first place.

Also, sorry if this is harsh, but you are repeatedly showing an inability of abstract thinking. I talk about the Japanese and your reaction is to ask "where is the Japanese Reddit"? Really? Are you expecting that different cultures will converge to the exact type of equivalent artifacts, just with different colors?

(Anyway, I'd posit that the "Japanese Reddit" is misskey, but I already dread the thought you will respond with some silly pontification about how misskey looks more like Twitter than Reddit)

Maybe it is time for to cut my losses and accept that this whole discussion is a waste of time.

Linux has been around for 30+ years, is it making a dent on Microsoft and Apple’s business for personal computers?

Yes! Android is Linux based and dominates market share worldwide.

For desktop, Linux has 4-5% of usage share worldwide, going up to 13% in India. If you include ChromeOS (which is also Linux based) the figures get close to 10% worldwide. Also, the fact that companies like Dell and HP have Linux offerings available give them bargaining power against Microsoft, which certainly counts as "creating a dent on their business".

Because after discussing all this time with you, it seems more due to human nature than anything else.

It's not "human nature". It's a cultural issue. High-trust societies (e.g, the Japanese) are a lot more inclined to support the commons even when not directly required to do so. Low-trust, heterogenous societies become increasingly reluctant to help others unless coerced by authority or when they see direct personal benefit.

Also, blaming things on "human nature" is a cop-out. It removes agency from individuals and leads us to apathy. It's the exact kind of thing that powerful figures wants us to feel.

I want a Reddit alternative to reach 100k monthly active users.

We have that already. The Fediverse as a whole has 1M MAU. Absolutely nothing stopping you from using kbin to follow discussions via groups and/tags.

My point is: the actual number doesn't really matter. What matters for us to have this place feel "alive" is that it needs to become an actual hub for global conversations. We have achieved that for some groups (e.g, tech and urbanism) but for everything else is mostly a desert, and this is only going to change when we get rid of the current incumbents.

Content creators get paid via Patreon.

To get to the point where creators can get meaningful in income from Patreon, they already spent years producing content on YouTube or some other mainstream channel.

And even then, they still stay on YouTube because they get more money from YT (or their sponsorship deals, which is contingent on the size of their audience and thus dependent on YT) than from their supporters.

It is closer to something like https://gnucash.org/ than to a Linux distribution.

Funny you mention gnucash, because it is going around for 20+ years, yet it still has not made a dent on Intuit business. Even after all this time, anyone in the US who needs to file taxes still pays through the nose for QuickBooks.

So, yes, the fact that it exists does not mean that it is successful. And its failure is both due to a lack of ambition ( no one there pushing for ways to grow the organization) and for this cultural issue where the commons are not willing to financially support R&D if they don't have to.

When you show me one instance that is able to handle a large number of users (more than 10k) and that is financed by voluntary donations, and that the people working on it are paid appropriately to their role and time spent on it, I will gladly concede that the model works.

Until then, we have about 15 years of history since Diaspora, and every attempt at keeping a "free as in beer" community has failed, and in lots of cases spectacularly so. From admins who got doxxed by their own "community", to people outright giving up on the whole idea (like the feddit.de) to cases where they felt so pressured to keep supporting the people that led them to commit suicide.

Then why isn't PeerTube more popular, especially with the amount of ads YouTube shows nowadays?

Because those ads also provide revenue for the content creators. Content creators also need to be paid for their work.

Why are you attacking me personally?

It's not an attack, but it is curious that you feel it is. I am using you as an example because you are one of the most active users here, you are frequently found promoting the Fediverse as an alternative, yet you don't find it important to support the people that are working to keep the whole thing running.

I am using you as an example to show this common behavior here of people complaining about the state of the social media and exploitative companies, while at the same time exploiting the goodwill of the dozen people who are volunteering their time and money to put up this alternatives.

It's pure hypocrisy. I don't care whether you specifically sign up to Communick or not, but I do care about the fact that people do not understand basic economics and go around expecting that the Fediverse can succeed without paying the people that work to make it happen.

If tomorrow a phone operator would provide the same service for free everyone would go there and leave the existing providers alone.

Only those who are completely financially illiterate would fall for such a ridiculous proposition.

Did we get there because every Linux user paid a subscription to use the operating system?

Seriously, I don't know anymore if you are arguing in the good faith.

The point is that we got there by having professionals being paid to work on it.

Bluesky is only marginally better. Just like every other startup that has not achieved a dominant position, if/when they reach critical mass they will become a rent-seeking player, just like every other VC-funded company.

Their protocol is open, but not really decentralized. It is very clear that they want to become a single global indexer of the whole social web.

So what? The donations are also supposed to pay for the salaries of the people working there!

The argument is not "no for-profit system is sustainable", but "no instance is receiving to sustain those working"

Holy crap, arguing here sometimes feel like fighting an army of strawmen... Please stop putting your own ideology and how you think things should be and let's talk about what how things really are operating.

"agree to disagree..." On what, exactly?

Do you think that the value of the Fediverse is the "community" in itself? Is this why you are participating here and not on Reddit? Is all your effort on the communities and in promoting Lemmy/kbin as alternatives because you are defending some ideal where social media can be run strictly by volunteers?

You were saying “one million every week”. They hit 25 million users on 13 December. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.

Because it depends on what you are using as your point of reference. In the end of November, they were just 15 million users. On average, they are getting one million users per week.

How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way?

Hosting video is not the expensive part. It's the distribution part that worries most people, but people forget that we have the technology to distribute large static files for decades already.

And if your answer is “make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network”, you’ll never get adoption.

1. Please, stop using others as an excuse to your own behavior. You don't want to pay 5€ a month. You have expressed many times you think a $29/year service is "expensive", and you have said that you think that contributing to cover server costs is enough, which means that you don't see the value of a professional hosting provider. If you are a grown, functioning adult, you are more than able to choose for yourself what you value. Your behavior is not determined by what "teenagers" will or will not do.
2. Why is that "every teenager" is fine with paying their phone bills, their Steam subscription, Spotify, Netflix, etc, etc... but not to pay for a service that is useful to them?
3. It doesn't have to be between the two extremes of "free, but you get your data exploited" and "user pays everything". Alternative business models will show up. Brave's model of sharing the revenue from the (privacy-preserving) ads that users see (opt in) is one model. Bundling with services ("Sign up to Vodafone and get one a family package with 5 activitypub accounts!" "iCloud now supports ActivityPub") is another. But for these alternative models to become interesting, first we need to make ActivityPub valuable as strong contender for an application protocol.

I don’t really see how to solve this issue.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

If we go back 20 years ago, people would never believe that we would have a personal computing environment based on Free Software, and most would believe that Microsoft and Intel would dominate forever. Today we have Linux-based systems reaching almost 5% of the global market, and in some places going as high as 13%. But we didn't get there overnight, and surely we did not get there on "community" alone.

Which is the wrong focus.

I can bet that there are kitchen soups that are operated for decades already, but this means shit to me and to most people who don't want to live in a world where fast food chains and ultra-processed crap is the main source of "cheap, universally available" food.