rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news

Posts

189

Comments

2,196

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

@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?

My point is that if I am to be in al “alternative” economy is not to make rich a cool San Francisco dude instead of Jeff Bezos,

That is the perfect display of crab mentality that is so prevalent in the Fediverse.

We're talking about one guy that is building a service that is 100% FOSS, and who currently has (according to the article) 300 musicians on the platform. Even if them all become paying subscribers, we are talking about something on the order of $3000/month. No one is going to become a "rich dude in San Francisco" because of that.

Even if he gets 10 times as many people paying, we are still talking about income that is less than what a senior developer would be making by slinging code at Big Tech. And if he got to the point where there that many people using his service, you can bet that would also mean more competition in the space. With the difference that no one would be able to build a monopoly around it because the service is FOSS and built on top of open protocols.

Voluntary donations are more than enough to keep it on float.

"Keeping it afloat" is not the same as "thriving". The Lemmy developers have made this their full-time job, but they could be making more money by doing deliveries by bike than what they get by donations. This is pathetically little for all the value that they have produced. There is so much potential in the Fediverse, yet we don't get to realize 1% of it because people like you keep this silly idea that an "alternative" economy is only fair if everyone is piss-poor broken.

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!

Dealing with the stress of a job is completely different than the stress of some volunteer work, and "keep finding fresh job applicants" is a lot easier (and dare I say, more ethical) than "keep finding fresh volunteers".

There is the co-op model. Membership on https://cosocial.ca/ requires a $50/year contribution and every member has the right to participate in discussions regarding governance. Because of the steep admission price, the instance is relatively small in size and it does not demand a lot from the people working on it.

"Joga Bonito" is a verb, not a noun. It translates to "Play it beautifully".

But I'd rather have the cleaner domain than the one with the cheat.

I do agree though that .news is not ideal. @UlrikHD@programming.dev, can you change the option for jogabonito.news to jogabonito.community ?