A reminder in the age of the Fediverse: if you're not the customer, you're still the product.
A reminder in the age of the Fediverse: if you're not the customer, you're still the product.
OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
I agree donating to instances and to things you believe in is a good idea.
But declaring that paying for things means they aren't going to be controlled by shitty corporations is just ignoring every other aspect of the global economy.
I don't know that I agree. Paying to support a site that supports your community isn't sufficient, by itself, to protect you from enshittification. But it's a necessary first step. Because sure as hell a website run by a for profit corp, that doesn't charge you to use it, is making its money off you. And if you want to lessen the percentage of your life directly controlled by corporations you need to get away from corporate social media.
I'm excited by looking at Lemmy instances over the past few months and seeing how many of them are openly and transparently discussing finances with their communities - this is how much running the instance costs, this is how much the community has given us, this is who makes decisions about our site and this is how we make decisions, these are our future goals and plans for the future, etc, etc. Sure they have to work with Amazon Web Hosting etc in order to function at all but making decisions that actually put users first and being transparent in both finances and decision making is a huge improvement from the FaceTwitTokGram monolith.
I pay $10/mo for Kagi search. If they stop satisfying what I want from them, or they start misbehaving, I'll cancel it.
Devil's advocate here - as soon as you introduce monetization to the use of a service you have locked in it's potential as an income stream which will inevitably lead to the downside you are afraid of.
Fediverse services being distributed means no central host has to bear the entire weight. I could probably take on all of the server load that I use if I repurposed my PleX server:
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1592223884107218944
This is not about money, it is about control.
Monetization of users will never be enough. They will also want to sell ads and paid promotional content.
Source: Back in the day, Imgur was a paid service. You paid $2/mo and you could upload more than 200 images, you could link directly to them, and they did not expire. End of transaction. I paid for imgur and used it as described. But they wanted more. Instead, they cancelled paid accounts, and made it free*. No more direct linking, instead you had to go to their ad-riddled site and also be exposed to the community comments on any image. Eventually they changed the UI to 'trap' people into doomscrolling through images while showering them with ads.
Yep. It's simply not how greed works.
They'll never say "Oh since we're making millions of dollars a month, we don't need to sell user data". They'll just do both, because there's always greedy people at the top pushing for every penny of profit.
It would be nice to run some nodes attached to your favorite instance to distribute the bandwidth cost.
Well, first of all, this is capitalism - if people suddenly were okay with paying for the big online services that are currently completely free but harvest a lot of user data, they're just going to put the paywall up AND harvest your data at the same time. Why choose between one option or the other for monetization when you can combine them and make more money from both?
Besides, speaking of the fediverse - due to its decentralized nature, it can't really be paywalled or monetized. If some instance decides to put up a paywall or ads for some reason, you can just hop to another instance and have access to pretty much the same content.
Your first paragraph is what the website formally known as Twitter is doing. There's an option to pay $8 a month for various perks, yet the site continues to harvest their data. Yet, a lot of people are paying that $8 for whatever reason.
Oh, Lemmy can be monetised really well.
Permanently Deleted
No. I would be fine with the Internet returning to a bunch of little passion project sites. I hate the internet as it is today.
@stabby_cicada I think digital public space is as important as physical public space. A lot of this communication space is well provided by private people and companies, but to ensure freedom nation states must also invest in it. Just like physical public space, it is a common good, a res-publica.
i mean there is many good arguements as to why digital public spaces should not be run by governments. But if they are not government run but funded, then that creates a new can of worms. It is best the governments ensure the freedom of digital public spaces and that these are run in a federated way, based on volunteer and non profit activities.
@tryptaminev Why? It would not take away anything from volunteer infrastructure, but would add safety options.
Volunteer servers need users to trust their admins with no grounds for that, but the fact that they "want to run a community", which also implies that they have personal politics and power over you. Fedi should not be only for existing communities. Also, there's financial stability as noted above.
And there are some grounds to trust your democratic representatives, aren't there.
Okay, I might be super ignorant. But how am I Lemmy.world's product if I'm not paying anybody any money and I'm not seeing any ads? Is there something to this that I don't know about? I can't see how my participation in this is getting monetized by anybody.
And in extension, how does paying prevent you from being the product then?
Worst case: You pay and are still the product. Less worse case: You pay to prevent being the product, but never would have been the product anyways.
At the moment it's probably still paid by donations and by the people hosting it, but like any site, it may need to be monetized to keep going, or even just if its owners decide to. It's not like there's any guarantee of privacy just because it's in the fediverse.
Well, if you’re not paying, someone else is. That might work now, but if Lemmy ever grows really large it will likely get tougher. Because a larger percentage will resonate just like you.
It’s also much harder to scale. You can only have very few people working full time (if any). Thus a lot of the work has to be outsourced to people doing it for free. I’m guessing that’s not you either.
So basically, if everyone thought like you there would be no Lemmy.
Lemmy servers aren't meant to be "big". I left lemmy.world for a smaller instance. If the admins of Lemmy.World want to just keep growing and thus increasing their costs, that is their choice. It doesn't mean all the users need to cough up money. THAT is capitalist propaganda. If the person who runs an instance can't afford to run it, then don't run it. You can escape from the system that is stacked against you, the system that demands you pay for every little experience you have, every little resource you use. You do that by giving and sharing with each other and quit acting like a vulture looking for scraps.
Paying for website access will only make things worse, not better, because the major players are so extremely malevolent.
Spot on!
As soon as the disgusting tendrils of capitalist greed get a taste, the whole game is cooked. It's better as a hobby project. Just donate to your instance to help cover costs!
Yup, they'll take membership money and then still put ads on.
I'm broke, and have no capacity to make money in a capitalist society. This isn't to say what I do doesn't have value, it's just not valuable to rich people.
Am I just FUBAR in this purely-transactional NWO?
Not necessarily in the fediverse world. If server costs are being covered by donations from 4% of users, a volunteer admin will probably be quite happy whereas a commercial operator will undoubtedly think "damn I have 96% freeloaders, that's leaving money on the table".
Unfortunately I’d say yes.
U ain't got holes?
Edit o man what a comment lol
Those who have money can afford better than what I got.
It's not a matter of having nothing to offer, it's that what I do isn't bought by people with money. Value ≠ What people pay for. Case in point: Funko-Pop figurines.
That is what taxes are for. The Constitution enables the government to establish "post offices and postal roads". Those purposes are served these days by the equipment that comprises the backbone of the internet. There is no reason it shouldn't be federally funded.
Ok can we also regulate the infrastructure like a utility, please?
Absolutely makes sense to me. On top of that it should be treated as necessary as water or electricity with it universally provided to all citizens for a nominal fee supported by tax revenue.
Interesting correlation I hadn't thought of or heard before.
There's been plenty of support for Internet access being treated as an essential utility.
What's the equivalent of a postage stamp in this case?
But if I understood you correctly, that only deals with the problem of paying for your internet connection. By far the biggest cost for servers is the power consumption and probably hardware second. Making internet usage free wouldn't do much.
Usually, it is paid by the people who use it, and that is also typically the taxpayers and extra from selling products or services as individual options, packages, or contracts. (Like postage stamps or shipping costs)
The above statement was to your comment, but I went on a rant about subscription models and didn't feel like deleting it. Please ignore or take as a grain of salt. I didn't revise what I said or finish my thoughts on subscriptions:
Most have taken the monthly subscription approach because it is easier to take money automatically monthly vs. selling individually. The downside is that consumers lose freedom as subscriptions are just bundles with a monthly contract or license. Sometimes, it is cheaper as a subscription if there is heavy enough use of the service as the cost is usually spread out to all subscribers. This, unfortunately, incentivize you to be using the bundle more than everyone else. Usually, companies limit you to prevent subscription costs from being overshadowed by the cost of doing business with outliers/power users. This is worse for capitalism markets as there is an incentive to offer limited cheap products instead of a free market where there is a variety of product ranges to choose from. It is a sort of natural homogenized process that makes each competitor similar. To combat this, tiers are offered with bundled higher limits and/or more features. A downside to tiers is that the lower tiers are slowly gutted of features to transition more users to higher tiers. further increasing the companies profits artificially as bundles muddled what was demanded vs. what is supplied.
Counterpoint: In this day and age hosting and sharing text can be done on donated resources, we have basically reached post-scarcity there .
That's just text, not video or audio.
Text can be done stupidly and wastefully. Sharing videos, for more than a decade, has been doable thanks to P2P. I remember the early days when everyone was sharing everything with everyone, the amount of stuff and the speed at which we got it was unrivaled.
Noawadays peertube works and any good torrent will have more speed than netflix.
We could run most of the internet on donated resources. We just decided we preferred ads-funded centralization, which is a shame.
I absolutely do not care enough about any site I use to be willing to pay. If it disappeared, I'd find something else to do with my time, just like I did reddit. I accept that I am the product, and simply do not care.
This is nothing but eBegging. The internet was forcefully taken from the people who created projects out of passion, and now those people who forced their way in are like "yOu MuSt PAy Us!". How about no?
yeah but I care enough to maybe self host a social media and plex server for my friends / family which is the same thing. If everyone did that and or chipped in for their friend/family to do it, we could rebuild some community structure
itd be nice if the usa had a public free hosting service that was paid for by a 25 or 50 dollar flat tax.
Flat taxes are regressive and a really, really, really bad idea. We have too many of them as it is.
I used to believe in that ideal, but any government product that Republicans can possibly ruin, either by destroying or criminally defunding, will be either destroyed or defunded.
The horse is out of the barn. It would take 200 years before we could cleanse the stain of the GOP and their shareholders from this world, so it's never going to happen.
tbh yeah its sad. probably not going to be fixed ever though. When people wanted to do society differently you used to be able to just talk about how things aught to be , gather similarly minded people , and fuck off and make a new town somewhere else. Itd be nice if that freedom still existed in the world.
I sometimes pay for things and still end up being the product. Smart TVs sell tons of data, and you may still pay buckets for one. YouTube Premium is no guarantee that Google won't use your data in other ways. A modern luxury car has tons of ways to spy on you.
This is why I refuse to bow down and accept monetization, because it's never enough money for them. they want all of your money. All of it. Any money that you have that they don't is evil to them.
If Lemmy stops being ad free or charges money I'm gonna leave here just as fast as I did reddit.
Lemmy is different I think. I was donating until they started defederating from stuff like piracy groups.
They should ask for more money to fund servers / lawyers to make the community stronger which will attract more people and money.
For as long as selling user data is still profitable, it will continue regardless of whether users pay to access the site or not.
There's two parts to this problem often overlooked, that on one side, is down to whomever runs an instance and two, the larger hosting industry (and by extension, the developers of kbin/lemmy/mastodon/etc).
The admins often have a tendency for vying for their instance to be the biggest and bestest. Stop that, grow the communities you have an interest in supporting instead of just wanting to be the biggest instance. Don't use this as a penis extender. You're not helping. And this idea of being the biggest just gives us another Reddit or Twitter instead of a federated network of systems.
The hosting industry is milking the ever living daylights out of servers and resources. Cheaper hosting will make hosting new instances much less reliant on sponsors and the like. Add to that that domain registrars are also milking the ever living daylights out of domain registrations.
Ofcourse, the developers of the fediverse apps optimizing their code as much as can be done without falling behind on general development, which reduces the resources needed to host an instance, helps in that regard too.
Just saying people need to foot the bills, without first looking if those bills are actually necessary and just, just shifts the blame on the users.
blahaj.zone provided an example of this recently. They reported that their finances are no longer sustainable but reassured their users that things will be fine because the fix was straightforward ... move everything off of AWS to a cheaper hosting provider.
Adding to the problem is ISPs.
I personally was part of putting fiber in the ground in my country from 2007-2011, there has been fiber in the ground up to peoples doorsteps and fiber connections between all street level hubs, since then.
It's only now, since 2022, that for an obscene premium compared to cable and copper, you can get fiber as a domestic subscriber, STILL limited to 1/1G and with fair use limits (going over 100GB in a day gets you throttled to a snails pace).
And even though the technology is present and available to go well beyond 1/1G, no ISP will provide.
There's plenty people with hardware at home capable of hosting substantial sized instances for federated systems. They just can't get the bandwidth to do so.
And with can't, make sure to understand this is in no way a technical limitation.
It's 100% down on restrictions by ISPs and "the industry", they don't want people to have that capability to host content themselves.
i'm being the best product that i can be!!!
Hard pass.
My opinion is that if the fediverse would set up an online shopping page where people can sell things and the site owners would get a cut of the proceeds that that would kill two birds with one stone.
One, the fediverse could be profitable for the site owners, and two, we could break our reliance on sites like eBay and OfferUp and let go and Facebook and Amazon for selling goods to one another.
You wouldn't even have to worry about payment processors because the United States government now has an instant money transfer service that you can utilize instead of MasterCard and Visa, and if that failed zelle would be another good option.
I have the idea and it's essentially worthless without implementation so if anyone wants to take it on it would be much appreciated because that is a change I would love to see in the world.
Idk with money come certain responsibilities to customers and taxes. Makes starting an instance much more of a headache. +1 for the idea though.
Yay for supporting sites you want to stick around!
Gentle reminder to watch out for places that take your money for a product and still treat you as a data factory. Such as the three largest US based tech companies.
Internet Giant: "You need to pick one:"
a) pay for the service,
b) accept we'll sell your data,
c) accept we'll show you ads.
Consumer: "Er, okay... I pick (a)"
Internet Giant: "So (d) then. All of the above."
And apparently all car companies
Who pays for the data stored on the Blockchain?
Who pays for those server costs?
Regardless of what you think of crypto, there is some self-sustaining 'business model' there where storage and compute is paid for by the user (transaction fees).
It is starting to look like a universal basic income that motivates people to continue participating in the community, for which the people using the service pay a small tax/fee that nobody can avoid. 🧐
The server costs can be quite modest. The one big exception is streaming video. If you're willing to give that up, a bunch of Raspberry Pis will get you pretty far. Even further by bumping up to old desktops running Linux.
I've had a project in the back of my head about laying out what a Solarpunk Internet might look like. If you're willing to drop streaming video (or even just drop down to 480p), that version of the Internet becomes a lot easier to setup on very modest hardware that's otherwise considered e-waste.
Just want to add to the discussion here a critique of some sort of the fediverse:
I don't think the fediverse has settled on a stable and/or healthy culture when it comes to money, finances and support. And realistically, the sooner it does so the better off or more sustainable it is likely to be in the future.
I think there's an odd cultural mix here ... of people accustomed to the "everything online is free" culture/world, people like in the OP snippet that believe everything should be paid for, people who are actually happy with ads and no privacy and people who are vehemently anti-capitalism to the point that they start to get upset the moment there's any exchange of money toward any sort of centralised organisation.
IMO, you can see this in the way that the whole fediverse relies entirely/mostly on donations (and volunteers, a lot) and yet the state of finances are often not transparent at all and the process of providing donations is not front and center almost as though the fediverse wants to keep the appearance of the "everything is free online" social media era. I think it'd be fair to say that this is in large part because many admins don't want to deter users and are operating their instances out of passion and a certain degree of privilege they have that allows them to do so out of their own pocket/time.
But the question hanging over the whole ecosystem is how sustainable is it. It's probably very useful to keep in mind that the previous (or still current) "era of social media" has been long lasting ... with Twitter, Reddit and Youtube being "go to" places online for over a decade (and now basically the historically definitive era of the internet). Many, I'd argue, are accustomed to online places lasting a long time. I've spoken to some moving from twitter to masto (where there's a more personal investment and "settlement" or identity) who are also trying to get their communities to come over ... and they're not even aware just how much they are presumptuously thinking about masto/fediverse on "twitter" time scales (ie 10-15 yrs) without realising how shaky the fediverse's foundations for longevity might be (at least without some great hassle caused by having to re-route around failed instances and forked platforms etc).
I see co-ops and non-profits on the rise (lemmy.world's recent announcement being an example) ... but overall the culture on the fediverse has by no means "solved" the problem of financial stability and sustainability and I personally would like to see more discussion around what that can and should look like.
This goes for news media too. Yeah, there are shitty established players that are glorified ad mills, but (at least in Canada) we're getting smaller independent outlets that are supported by consumers directly.
So, if you have the chance, pay for your local news outlet.
We reinvented the Minitel. Fortunately we can still build Internet.
I'm a Kbin Patreon for this very reason.
I would rather be the product than pay for each site I use.
I'd appreciate the hbr or medium model of so many free uses and then you have to pay a minimal fee to use the platform
The problem is that paying for these things doesn't really help in the modern hellscape. I pay for Windows and Office and Roku and Spotify and they're still mining the shit out of me, selling my privacy and feeding me ads. It gets worse with every release and the prices still go up.
When can I sign up for ProtonFediverse?
Doesn't have to come to an end if people are just less weird about their data.
I didn’t mind my data being used to get free high quality products. Then they started selling it to governments. It’s one thing for an advertiser to know I’m a woman in tech. It’s another thing for a government to know when you’re ovulating so as to enforce abortion bans
weird about their data
explanation needed
Indeed.
Weird like, I'd rather seventy three companies and all world governments not know what I'm literally talking about in my bedroom with my wife, so I'm weird?
Yikes.
If Google finds a way to profit off my inability to spell the word 'definitely' without checking, or my desire to learn the fourth king of Brunei at 2am, more power to 'em.
Being "my data" doesn't automatically grant it "private", "valuable", or "meaningful" status. I'm fine if Google wants to start showing me ads for lightweight jackets. Fall is coming and I am probably gonna need one.