We have to solve the money problem!
rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news Posts 39Comments 1,808Joined 2 yr. ago
rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news
Posts
39
Comments
1,808
Joined
2 yr. ago
- This is not how the fediverse works. Each server keeps a whole copy to themselves of all that they've accessed in the federation.
- Cost of hardware is only a fraction of the total cost. Even if we solved the issue of running the Fediverse at scale with negligible costs, we still are not accounting for all the labor of volunteers, instance admins and developers.
The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.
If it was an exceptional case, I'd be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.
Let's get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:
- Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
- Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
- Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
- Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
- Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
@jerry@infosec.exchange , I'm sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?
If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don't you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?
paying music hosting services a p2p network
Hosting the files is the least of the problems. Accepting payments online is. Dealing with fraud is. Managing exclusive access and features for paying customer is. Getting one place where you can point your fans to go and buy your music or merch is.
self hosted searxng instance.
How is that free? Even if you are self-hosting, you still need to pay for your server, the electricity to run it and your time that you spend troubleshooting, making sure things are up-to-date, etc. Not to mention that you are also not accounting the labor of the developers of libre projects: FOSS does not grow in trees, they require people working for it as well.
I don’t think there would be a lot of people really willing to spend that for a service others provide for free with a bigger platform
TANSTAAFL. If people refuse to understand this very basic principle and if we don't collectively start putting our own resources on the line to invest in ethical alternatives, we will never be able to have a sustainable alternative that is not dependent on Venture Capitalists. Everything wrong with Surveillance Capitalism can be traced back to the point where people started expecting to get things for free when they should be asking themselves "What is the catch?".
The world's income per capita is around $10000 a year. In South Europe is 25k€/year. In Northern Europe, 55k€/year. In the United States, $80k/year.
120 dollars per year is 0.5 percent of the income of the average citizen living in the (relatively) poorer part of developed world. That means that are plenty of people who can afford it, and it's not just the top of the top.
(just a placeholder for my usual rant about how federation is the wrong unit for scaling social media)
Longer than that. The GNU project started in 1983. Linux first release is from 1991.
And they would be nowhere if it was not for IBM, Sun and Google pouring billions into it.
Let's stop with the slacktivism and start putting money on the table, and professionals of all specialties will show up and change this reality.
I'd argue that if you can't afford to pay for a $10/month service and if you are so unproven that no one would be willing to back this up for you, "looking for ways to start a career in music" should be waaaay down on your list of concerns.
musicians are not really "any type of venture".
If they are looking for a way to make money out of their work, it is. And it is totally fine.
If they could find ways in which both them and the artists could profit from music published on the platform that lacks the commercial potential to justify a €10 subscription, this would be a win/win
Flip the equation here. The subscription is something to fund development of the platform. So anyone that wants to have a viable libre alternative to Spotify that can be useful to all indie artists should consider paying for it, even if they are not intending to sell stuff.
as smaller artists would lose money every month by trying to position themselves in the market.
They are not "losing money", they are making use of the service anyway. Any type of venture you are building incurs costs and risks, why should it be different for someone that is running an online presence?
If the developers of bandwagon were to carving exceptions for other users, pretty soon they would be taking the risks themselves of dealing with loss-leaders customers and would have to find other ways to make up for it. 10€/month is an absolute bargain for a service that will provide you a storefront and a distribution channel that can reach anyone in the world and demands absolutely nothing in return from you.
The menu has a link to the repository.
Maybe this kind of discussion will get more interested people on !activitypub@programming.dev .
It's for django, but take a look into my ActivityPub Toolkit. It is designed to be compliant with ActivityPub and not with any particular implementation, so it should be easy for you to adapt to your own needs.
I call it commitment and willinness to place your nuts on the line.
What skin in the game is required from someone to create an account on lemmy.world or mastodon.social? Conversely, what type of "bad consequences" is there for some admin that sets up an instance and fails to manage it properly? There isn't any.
Instances provide governance in a natural, organic way
There is nothing organic about instances because there is no natural limit to how big they can get. The cost per user on an instance grows sub-linearly with the amount of users in an instance. This is why we are ending up with this power-law distribution and the majority of users go to the "flagship" instances and the minority spread around on micro-instances.
You are joining a social group. This is the natural order of things.
Social connections and the relationships are only meaningful if they have some shared context. Your family/extended family, the people you've went to school with, your swimming team mates, your co-workers, your neighbors, etc. But once we go past a certain scale (Dunbar's Number) people start seeing individuals and just treat everyone else as interchangeable masses of crowds.
Don’t like it, or want to tinker? Spin up your own.
The absolute majority of people are only looking at social media platforms as a means to something. They don't care whether they found the information they were looking for on Reddit, or lemmy.world or piefed.social. They don't care if they are avoiding boredom at the subway by scrolling videos on Instagram, TikTok or loops. If we keep demanding people to understand the power dynamics each instance just before joining or tell them, they will just turn their heels over to the status quo.
Thank you for creating a community in a topic-specific instance!
Not necessarily "Lemmy matures". It could also be:
- ActivityPub software starts supporting DID to allow migration of identities.
- ACtivityPub adopts some ideas from nostr and turns the server into a simple message relay.
Which then could let the lemm.ee admins to bring back the server - or offer a way for users to checkout their actor keys, etc, etc...