Such a valid point; success should not be measured only in dollars. I began explaining the basics of the Fediverse with some of my friends and the first question they asked was, “How do people even make money on there then?” It’s a bit disheartening to see how money-driven things are for some people.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Them: “How do people even make money on there then?”
You: "The same way I'm making money off of you now." (pause) "I don't. We're just friends."
Them: "What do you mean? Like friends... with benefits?" [unfriended]
Yeah, the best social networks are designed to prioritize…socializing. It’s like building a public park and people start asking where the money comes from. The point is that it’s made for people to use.
Parks require maintenance that’s paid with tax dollars. They go to shit really fast without it.
I don’t think this needs to be profitable but there are real costs that need to be covered somehow, and it’s not going to be taxes.
Or volunteers. Don’t know about where you are, but near me, town gardens, flowers, woods and rivers are maintained for all by community-minded volunteer groups.
Sure, but there’s a distinction between maintenance and profit.
If that requires a maximum ratio of active users to average donation, then it’s feasible, and has the potential to survive with a more invested userbase than a site that’s severely bloated with lurkers.
I personally think the model of the old style ISP actually made a lot of sense here, but I'm guessing it might never come back. Back in thr 90s, you paid your ISP for Internet service. But that was more inclusive than just a data pipe. You also got space for a small personal website, text usenet, and email.
This made a lot of sense and back then the services didn't need to have ads or tracking, you paid monthly for the bundle of services.
I don't know if federation will actually take off, but I can imagine needing some sort of paid hosting for large groups of people on large style services. Maybe that will be some ISPs, but more likely it'll be either "federated services" companies that for a monthly fee run a bunch of the popular fediverse tools like Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix, Pixelfed, and maybe Peertube. Possibly through in email too idk. Or you'll end up needing a per tool subscription to a company. Maybe donations will work, that'll really depend on how this scales.
Exactly! Not everything one does needs a dollar figure attached to it.
Well I can kinda see where they are coming from. How do you know it’s gonna stick around if it can’t make money? It isn’t even about making a profit either, but covering costs.
There are costs associated with hosting all this stuff. Right now donations are how instances keep the lights on (most of the time).
What happens when there is more and more users joining?
when I used mastodon for a while, people would talk about how great not having ads was, but there were a lot of people asking how they were supposed to sell commissions without an algorithm making people see their posts as if they didn't consider that advertising.
Those are people that came to the fediverse thinking that it was the exact same thing as corporate social media and that is where they were wrong. I heard the same quips and gripes from social media influencers. The whole point of the fediverse is to get away from ads, influence, toxicity and all that other crap.
Mastodon does have an algorithm that makes people see their posts: it's called following someone. How does one make others follow them? Well, maybe post something they'd like to see more of.
Mastodon absolutely does have a weakness of making it more difficult to find people that you want to follow based on what you have already engaged with.
And from a purely user perspective, that is a weakness.
But it's also a very distinct choice. Because having enough data to be able to meaningfully make such recommendations means having a central database of every user interaction by every user.
And it also means making choices and value judgements which, almost by definition, can not be value neutral.
If the creators of the algorithm are good, they will actually be aware of the choices and value judgements being made, if not, well... They will still be making them, just not in nearly as educated of a way.
On the whole, I really hope that we eventually come up with answers to these problems that make it possible for a user to make those choices, and to have the amount of recommendations that they want, while somehow not having anyone have the huge database of user interactions. I'm not sure if that's even possible, most especially if you assume that there will be entities on the fediverse that are fudging their data to get recommended in ways that other users don't want.
But it sure would be interesting to try.
Ah, recommendations... hm.
Just thinking out loud: what if, anyone who wanted to, could take a hash of their username, and make public all their interactions by listing the hashes of the usernames they interacted with. Maybe store it in a distributed database. So everyone could make a graph of anonymous hashes to run a recommendation algorithm in any way they wanted, but each one would only know their own username's hash, so they could find out which hashes they could find personally interesting according to their chosen algorithm. Then, have people who wanted to be discovered that way, publish their user along their hash, so someone who found their hash through the graph of anonymous hashes, could find out which user it belongs to, and see them as a recommendation.
I do also wonder how a website makes money before I make an account. It is because I want to know how secure my data would be, now and in the future. If they don't have a viable income source, the could get sold to someone else and the new owners would own my data. If such a possibility exists, I need to be careful on what I post or share with the site.
Even worse, just making money isn't enough: you also have to become a fucking global monopoly.
To be fair, often times that question is code for “how can someone contribute to that platform while also paying rent, feeding their kids, etc.”
I think that’s a fair question and IMHO, for a fedi project to succeed, we need some people who can get paid a reasonable wage to focus their full attention on the work.
We’re likely going to continue to see folks who ask for Patreon donations and set up fedi hosting businesses, like Ruud at Lemmy World. We’ll also probably see more folks like the Tapbots gang selling fancy clients for a price.
Individual people will make money so they can live life, but cash cow corporations likely won’t be a thing.
Agree with a lot there.
Actually, it feels like at this point there should be at least a couple social media platforms operated as utility services, not as for-profit organisations specializing in selling user data and/or providing access to users’ beliefs and worldviews to the highest bidder.
As much as people might not like it, SM services seem to only grow in relation to importance for a healthy well-functioning society, and reclassifying at least something as a public utility/human right/something in that vein is long overdue imo.
Not sure if it’s even possible though in current enterprise/governmental structures :(
Btw, that’s partly why I’m trying to participate a lot more here than I ever did on Reddit. I know fediverse probably isn’t going to be the next big thing, but if we can build some sizeable foundation here it’s at least worth trying. I’m sure as shit that large companies won’t even try.
Not sure if it’s even possible though in current enterprise/governmental structures :(
Yeah... sadly, it's already difficult enough getting governments to even agree that internet infrastructure itself should be a public utility. Even though it has long been at the point where you absolutely need it to participate in society (depending on where you live, of course) and largely been funded by the public through taxes.
I guess the first thing all people needed to do is self-hosting (Yunohost, Nextbox, or the like), and the second thing is paying for Open Source software they use (if they can pay, as digital communication should be free very much like the commons -fresh air, drinking water- but those who can should pay imo.)
Self-hosting is probably more affordable to do when ran out of your own home. I run my lemmy and mastodon servers out of my home on 16GB of RAM and 300MB of storage space. This would cost a small fortune to pay a cloud hosting provider for.
Self hosted at home really depends on what sort of Internet you can even get. You might be metered, you might only have a couple mbps upstream, it probably is against TOS.
It's definitely against the ToS for me ISP. I doubt they'll ever really find out because the bandwidth I'm using isn't as crazy as the other customers which regularly stream from Netflix, Hulu, etc. I can kind of hide in plain sight. Also, my internet connection is fiber to the home. I have the lowest tier of service at 300MiB up and down. So I guess I realize I'm coming from a situation of relative privilege. I wish most people had this capability.
If you mean cloud as in EC2 or it's ilk, probably. But in a case where scalability isn't as much of a concern, an appropriately spec'd server can be quite affordable on KimSufi/SYS (maybe 30/month?)
My server in my home costs me a lot less than 30/month to operate. Since this is a hobby for me I don't assign a monetary value to the time I spend working on it. I built the server with second hand components that I got at a swap meet for less than 700 dollars. Now knock on wood things have been running smoothly and I do a lot with this server. It doesn't just power Lemmy and Mastodon, but it also does my Jellyfin and NAS. It's probably overspec'd for my needs but that means I can use it for a long while.
Depending on the provider, you can get 16GB or 96GB of RAM for less than $50/month on bare metal, which includes repairs, power, and a 1Gbps unmetered connection. Pure cloud tends to be more expensive.
I pay far less than that in actual utility usage to operate my server which has 128GB of RAM and 16TB of storage space. I've just allocated 300GB of that for Mastodon and 300GB for Lemmy for now.
The big cost to doing it yourself is maintenance.
There is, for a lot of people, a fairly large amount of value in never having to worry about hardware dying. If it does, that's someone else's problem, and it will be fixed, as far as you are concerned, rapidly and without any interaction with you.
How much any given person values that is going to vary wildly, but it means that you don't risk having stuff go down at a moment when you can't do anything about it. Maybe you're on vacation, and you don't have any hands that can do anything. Maybe you're sick, or just extremely busy that week.
You're not wrong that this comes at a fairly substantial monetary cost, but it is wrong to say that this isn't, in many cases, a cost that people are more than willing to pay in exchange for the benefit.
I see maintenance as a part of the joy and learning of the hobby, much as a gardener enjoys the hard work of moving heavy bags of soil around. It's all very much up to the individual. Some hobbyists have a deeper passion for it than others and that is perfectly okay.
Fair point, if you've factored in the full TCO for both hardware and utilities... and/or if you're using it for other stuff too.
To be honest, the homelab for me is not completely a cost/benefit analysis. Sure, I'd save money if I calculated my time spent. But for me this is a hobby so I don't put a monetary value on my time spent. Everything I am doing is learning so I am actually getting value from it. The hardware I obtained second hand from a local swap meet. My utilities have gone up much less than the cost of renting a VPS.
I think of money as one form of contribution. People should contribute more instead of simply asking from a place of entitlement.
I agree there are many forms of contribution (e.g., writing code if you're a developer), it must not necessarily be money, but am not sure whether I understand what you mean.
Seems a bit disingenuous to compare the niche of tech folks that used Google+ to the niche that use WeChat, with the later "niche" being... China...
Not everyone has to agree that dominating a country's social media usage is a good goal, but it clearly is the goal for many companies, and they're going to continue to persue it. Perhaps users of social media should redefine success, but for creators of social media platforms there are absolutely clearly defined measures of success and failure.
Why was it linking to web archive instead of the source?
Future-dystopian-proofing
Let's just hope archive.org doesn't itself go down.
Truth.
From his own website?
Full time prepper
I define success of a social network proportional to the level of fun in having there. So far Mastodon and Lemmy are the most successful for me.
Great article. When I came to lemmy/kbin a few weeks ago (I'm an old time now, right), I thought it will become great when most of those on Reddit realize that this is the place to be and come here in droves. That would be greatness. After reading this and thinking about it, I'm fine with the way it is now. There are lots of interesting posts like this one and interesting feedback to them. If anything having several million members in this community would make it worse.
Nothing ever replaced Google+, which was really popular in my own tech circle.
Except Slack and LinkedIn already kind of fed that niche.
Regardless...the article is pretty much spot on. It's fairly obvious that social networks are going to come and go; we've seen that over the past few decades. Every iteration of social media will revolve around the tech of the hour. I like ActivityPub and Federation because it brings additional options to the user base. It's an exciting shift.
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