Fediverse sustainability
Fediverse sustainability
I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
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You could test out your idea by spinning up an instance that offers curated ads, or probably better yet go entirely ad-free and have a subscription service. Some people may be interested in sustainability, especially if you speak in a language that resonates with them, like explain the value-added benefits of being on a sustainable server vs. a "free" one. e.g. the devs get a salary there and also contribute to the overall Lemmy codebase, beyond that instance so that it benefits the entire Fediverse. But it would be up to you to be the change that you want to see in the world, and make it happen. Also, I am guessing those kinds of discussions won't happen so much on the Fediverse itself, but rather in Matrix or Discord (or Slack?) servers were the actual developers of the Fediverse hang out.
I'm doing that for 4 years already and I'm arriving at the sad realization that no, not enough people care about "sustainability", "privacy" and even less about the actual benefit of using a social media platform that doesn't exploit user data and their attention.
Yep ... the whole "this giant platform is free (because you're the product)" era has done some serious damage that the internet may never truly recover from. Genuinely, with whatever AI is going to do to the internet, that moment we had of people freely associating and building their own spaces online may never return to any mainstream degree.
In many ways, some of the user-friendliness issues the fediverse has had is people being so accustomed to being able to just sign up to free stuff and expect it to be awesome without any work on their part. Now while the fediverse does have genuine user-experience issues IMO, it's obvious by its very nature that it requires effort on the part of users and organisers etc to make it work ... becuase it is literally a "by the people for the people" type of situation. That so many can't even recognise that this is true of the fedi let alone compute what it means and requires is a loss for the internet and in many ways the actual "front-line" of this movement.
Your posts here are also the very first time I ever heard of "communick", so take from that what you want.
Back in August I wrote a post about it which was pretty well received but the LW mods banned me for "advertising". I think it was a pure crab-mentality move, but I won't delve too deep into it.
Anyway, now that you know about it, what are you going to do something with it?
Then you are definitely adding more to this conversation than me: actual evidence trumps mere armchair theorizing every time:-).
There is nothing new under the sun it seems, and so many people are so very short-sighted, that your story makes perfect sense, unfortunately.
Yes, there’s the Matrix spaces and ActivityPub forum where these types of conversations are had, but the masses don’t know about them and or aren’t involved. I like getting the people that will be directly impacted opinion. I don’t care about ads, it was a post to explore options. You bring up very good points and I appreciate that.