this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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Do you really think your comment is as valuable of a contribution as those made by the ones running the servers and ensuring that the place is not run over by trolls and spammers?
Are you seriously that entitled to someone else's time and work?
It was an attempt at humor. :)
Ok let me say it in a better way. People who work in IT do it because they like it. Many of the first world wide web pages or YouTube videos were made without anyone wanting any money for it. There was no profit motive or expectation whatsoever.
That's why I thought it was funny to read how instance owners are doing labor without getting paid, as if that was the purpose of the instance. To get paid for running it.
To me that's funny. It's a bit like me painting a painting and putting it out there, and asking people to pay for my labor. The hours I spent making it. Because now the painting exists in the world. Who is gonna pay for it?
I believe instance admins are more than happy running the instance without profit motive. Because it's nice to be part of giving something to a community of people.
https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/
Yes. Communities cannot exist without community members.
In the grand scheme of things, community members are individually easier to replace than those keeping the service running. E.g, take any community with more than a few hundred users and lose half of them, randomly. Now, take half of the instance admins. More likely than not, the instance will simply stop existing.
A Thanos in the making, I see...
Humans are not interchangeable components... that's a disgusting take, honestly...
Every community I've been in can feel through loss in some way, of a member.
This attitude is exactly why you cannot fathom why maybe small instances, ran by volunteers for the community is a viable concept.
Its also why BBSes started their death spiral: people trying to commoditize the community.
We are talking about different things. Very different things.
I am not saying that small communities are not viable. I am saying that without substantial financial support, all we are going to get is small communities, and we are not going to be able to compete with the corporate mainstream.
If your ambition is just to keep some obscure corner of the internet, fine. If you want to take back the internet away from Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Reddit, then we need to get a lot more help than just a dozen people pitching in to cover server bills. It will require work. It will require coordination. It will require resilience. It will require sacrifices.
Being upset at Zuckerberg, or making campaigns to "Boycott Threads" is not going to do anything if our side is orders of magnitude smaller than theirs. They will still be exploiting their users. And even if you personally don't use it, or your "community" doesn't use it, there are still plenty of people that I care about that do.
I dunno if I speak for everyone else, but all we need are small.communities.
We are not "competing" with anyone or anything.
That's the root of your issue, and it's based on a false premise.
You are definitely not speaking for the billions of people that are still in the large networks. Do you think they prefer to use Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok because it's somehow better, or because of network effects?
And then the people will move elsewhere
Isn't that the point of federation, to be able to use another node if needed?
No. Being able to move is an advantage compared to centralized platforms, but it is not the "point" of it. It makes the system overall more robust, but it doesn't guarantee or protect the individuals that are part of it.
Do you think that the world wide web would reach the size that it has today if websites had such a short shelf-life? Of course not. It would remain just a geeky curiosity, just like Lemmy or Mastodon. There is a reason why Bluesky is adding one million users per week while we are here counting the same dozen of active people since summer 2023. People generally do not care about how the system works, they just want to something that helps them achieve their goals or solves their problems.
I know you like hyperboles, but Bsky's growth slowed quite a bit:
The main reason it's much more successful than Mastodon is content discoverability
Agreed. And the problem Reddit and Lemmy solve is becoming a niche issue
What a silly remark. Yeah, of course (percentage-wise) they slowed down. Do you think that would see 190% growth every month?
You are talking about the symptoms, but you are ignoring the diagnostic. The reason that Bluesky has a superior product at the moment is because they HAVE MONEY. They can go and hire people, they can invest in infrastructure, they can spend on marketing, they can go cut out deals with other service providers.
Meanwhile, the Mastodon devs are all sharing the belief that they are saints who are working "for the community". Sorry, it's not enough. We are not going to amount to much if our ambitions are that low.
It doesn't matter the format. This is not (specifically) about Reddit, or Twitter, or Instagram or TikTok.
This is a discussion about a model that can keep sustainable development and operations of an open web. ActivityPub as whole allows us to think in much broader terms than "replacing Reddit" or "replacing Youtube. The format of "popular social media" may change, but the fact that people will always have an interest in consuming, creating and sharing content will always be there.
You were saying "one million every week". They hit 25 million users on 13 December. We are 4 weeks later, they still haven't reached 27 millions. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.
Bsky having money gives them an advantage, nobody is denying that. But Mastodon had a huge opportunity the first time Musk messed up with Twitter. They were never able to create an easy enough to use solution for people to jump over, especially when microblogging relies on "high profile" posters. If Mastodon had managed to solve the discoverability issue, and convince people that it's as easy to use as Twitter, the outcome could have been different. We'll never know.
Okay, let's go that route. As I said above, short video/"stories" format is king with people below 29 years old, be it Snapchat, Tiktok or BeReal https://www.statista.com/statistics/1337525/us-distribution-leading-social-media-platforms-by-age-group/
How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way? And if your answer is "make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network", you'll never get adoption.
At the end, that's an unfair competition. We are competing with actors who can sell data and ads to make money. Most users don't care. Those platforms make money, get more users thanks to the network effect.
I don't really see how to solve this issue.
Because it depends on what you are using as your point of reference. In the end of November, they were just 15 million users. On average, they are getting one million users per week.
Hosting video is not the expensive part. It's the distribution part that worries most people, but people forget that we have the technology to distribute large static files for decades already.
Please, stop using others as an excuse to your own behavior. You don't want to pay 5€ a month. You have expressed many times you think a $29/year service is "expensive", and you have said that you think that contributing to cover server costs is enough, which means that you don't see the value of a professional hosting provider. If you are a grown, functioning adult, you are more than able to choose for yourself what you value. Your behavior is not determined by what "teenagers" will or will not do.
Why is that "every teenager" is fine with paying their phone bills, their Steam subscription, Spotify, Netflix, etc, etc... but not to pay for a service that is useful to them?
It doesn't have to be between the two extremes of "free, but you get your data exploited" and "user pays everything". Alternative business models will show up. Brave's model of sharing the revenue from the (privacy-preserving) ads that users see (opt in) is one model. Bundling with services ("Sign up to Vodafone and get one a family package with 5 activitypub accounts!" "iCloud now supports ActivityPub") is another. But for these alternative models to become interesting, first we need to make ActivityPub valuable as strong contender for an application protocol.
Where there's a will, there's a way.
If we go back 20 years ago, people would never believe that we would have a personal computing environment based on Free Software, and most would believe that Microsoft and Intel would dominate forever. Today we have Linux-based systems reaching almost 5% of the global market, and in some places going as high as 13%. But we didn't get there overnight, and surely we did not get there on "community" alone.
Then why isn't PeerTube more popular, especially with the amount of ads YouTube shows nowadays?
Why are you attacking me personally? Is it supposed to convince me to pay 29$/year for your service? If yes, sorry to say, but that's not very effective, and I will keep donating to other instances like lemmy.zip, feddit.org or sopuli.xyz
If tomorrow a phone operator would provide the same service for free everyone would go there and leave the existing providers alone.
Steam has no subscription, what do you mean?
Spotify and Netflix are usually used in a family bundle because their parents find it convenient. But with the rising prices of streaming services, I see more and more people cancelling them and pirating content.
Did we get there because every Linux user paid a subscription to use the operating system?
Because those ads also provide revenue for the content creators. Content creators also need to be paid for their work.
It's not an attack, but it is curious that you feel it is. I am using you as an example because you are one of the most active users here, you are frequently found promoting the Fediverse as an alternative, yet you don't find it important to support the people that are working to keep the whole thing running.
I am using you as an example to show this common behavior here of people complaining about the state of the social media and exploitative companies, while at the same time exploiting the goodwill of the dozen people who are volunteering their time and money to put up this alternatives.
It's pure hypocrisy. I don't care whether you specifically sign up to Communick or not, but I do care about the fact that people do not understand basic economics and go around expecting that the Fediverse can succeed without paying the people that work to make it happen.
Only those who are completely financially illiterate would fall for such a ridiculous proposition.
Seriously, I don't know anymore if you are arguing in the good faith.
The point is that we got there by having professionals being paid to work on it.
Content creators get paid via Patreon. There are several channels who use that way to sustain themselves. Patreon is a donation-based model, not a subscription.
It is, especially with the bold emphasis on "You". You saying it's not doesn't deny that fact.
According to you. The day other admins will tell us that they can't make the projects live anymore without additional donations, we can discuss this again. In the meantime, there is no indication that your statement is correct.
There is no free lunch, but in Facebook/Reddit/Twitter case they sell ads and user data to make money. And the vast majority of the population seems okay with that.
Professionals who got paid because they were delivering a product or a service to companies.
Which company is going to pay to get more features or a professional version of Lemmy or Piefed?
Lemmy is for personal use, not corporate, and that's the main difference with Linux or Firefox. It is closer to something like https://gnucash.org/ than to a Linux distribution.
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Contributing_to_GnuCash
To get to the point where creators can get meaningful in income from Patreon, they already spent years producing content on YouTube or some other mainstream channel.
And even then, they still stay on YouTube because they get more money from YT (or their sponsorship deals, which is contingent on the size of their audience and thus dependent on YT) than from their supporters.
Funny you mention gnucash, because it is going around for 20+ years, yet it still has not made a dent on Intuit business. Even after all this time, anyone in the US who needs to file taxes still pays through the nose for QuickBooks.
So, yes, the fact that it exists does not mean that it is successful. And its failure is both due to a lack of ambition ( no one there pushing for ways to grow the organization) and for this cultural issue where the commons are not willing to financially support R&D if they don't have to.
Indeed, so how would you plan to move enough people to PeerTube for this to change? As long as Youtube is a viable product, there is no real space for any other video website.
Linux has been around for 30+ years, is it making a dent on Microsoft and Apple's business for personal computers?
Could you show me an example in the tech/dev/opensource space where end users countered the "tragedy of the commons"? Because after discussing all this time with you, it seems more due to human nature than anything else.
Yes! Android is Linux based and dominates market share worldwide.
For desktop, Linux has 4-5% of usage share worldwide, going up to 13% in India. If you include ChromeOS (which is also Linux based) the figures get close to 10% worldwide. Also, the fact that companies like Dell and HP have Linux offerings available give them bargaining power against Microsoft, which certainly counts as "creating a dent on their business".
It's not "human nature". It's a cultural issue. High-trust societies (e.g, the Japanese) are a lot more inclined to support the commons even when not directly required to do so. Low-trust, heterogenous societies become increasingly reluctant to help others unless coerced by authority or when they see direct personal benefit.
Also, blaming things on "human nature" is a cop-out. It removes agency from individuals and leads us to apathy. It's the exact kind of thing that powerful figures wants us to feel.
Android is led by Google, with all their resources, both in terms of devs and money.
https://source.android.com/
It comes back to what I said before: Linux and Android are useful to companies because they can use it, especially in the case of Google, it allowed them to compete with Apple in the mobile OS market, with the play stores and ad revenues.
https://www.androidauthority.com/how-does-google-make-money-from-android-669008/
What interest would any private company to invest in a Reddit-clone? Reddit itself had to enshittify to hell to make profit.
Where is the Japanese open-source Reddit clone? You also haven't provided the example I asked above about an open-source project where end users countered the “tragedy of the commons”.
Disregarding human nature leads to unrealistic expectations. I'll take an example I know well as I post a lot around here.
When I post to a community, I do not expect anything in exchange. I am aware of the 1-9-90 rule , and I know that due to the current population of Lemmy, I won't find that many other people posting. But that's okay, I'm fine with that, and I know that over time some other people might come, first to comment, then to post themselves.
Now if I completely refuted that rule, I would be very frustrated. "How come that in a community with 2600 active users per month I am the only one posting?". I would start making meta post, calling out people "You should post more if you want the community to survive! You not posting is hypocritical as you do not put your time and energy in the platform but just want to use it!". And that would probably chase people away, without making them post more.
I think I am ready to give up on this conversation.
The worldviews are too different. It makes no sense to make this distinction about "beneficial to companies" and "beneficial to communities" and it actually seems to me like a misunderstanding of why corporations exist in the first place.
Also, sorry if this is harsh, but you are repeatedly showing an inability of abstract thinking. I talk about the Japanese and your reaction is to ask "where is the Japanese Reddit"? Really? Are you expecting that different cultures will converge to the exact type of equivalent artifacts, just with different colors?
(Anyway, I'd posit that the "Japanese Reddit" is misskey, but I already dread the thought you will respond with some silly pontification about how misskey looks more like Twitter than Reddit)
Maybe it is time for to cut my losses and accept that this whole discussion is a waste of time.
Which is correct. Misskey doesn't have subreddit/Lemmy communities, it's a microblogging format.
Edit : still no example of an open-source project where end users countered the “tragedy of the commons”.
Trust me, bro. I am not moving the goal posts, bro. All I need is one example that fits exactly what I want so that I can bring myself to contribute with a few dollars per month. No, paying a small business provider that can reinvest the resources to keep the ecosystem open is not the same, bro... If "the commons" don't help, why should I, bro...