this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.
Of course it's not trying to take over Amazon, but that's probably not a realistic goal anyway.
Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn't realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that's where the userbase and money is now.
Bad analogy. A library in isolation can still exist and it does not require the network to have value to its community. An instance in isolation is useful, but the real value comes from its ability to participate in the larger network.
Libraries also are not the drivers of content generation. The motivation for an author to write a book is not "oh, I really want to get my book in the local library!". They want to reach an audience. They rely on a whole cottage industry of agents, publishers, marketing, distributors, etc. The same for Hollywood movies.
To their credit, what tech companies did was to remove a lot of these middlemen. But to their fault, the main reason they were so successful at doing this is that they managed to do that by taking their revenue from their "main business" and running these operations at a loss, forcing their competitors out of existence.
The focus was on volunteering projects lasting a long time.
Which is the wrong focus.
I can bet that there are kitchen soups that are operated for decades already, but this means shit to me and to most people who don't want to live in a world where fast food chains and ultra-processed crap is the main source of "cheap, universally available" food.
As usual, agree to disagree
"agree to disagree..." On what, exactly?
Do you think that the value of the Fediverse is the "community" in itself? Is this why you are participating here and not on Reddit? Is all your effort on the communities and in promoting Lemmy/kbin as alternatives because you are defending some ideal where social media can be run strictly by volunteers?
You want the Fediverse to replace Twiter/Reddit/Facebook, so billions of users.
I want a Reddit alternative to reach 100k monthly active users. I don't need the Fediverse to be used by everyone, I just want a place to discuss with enough people.
If you can find a way to finance the Fediverse to pay full time jobs to admins, kudos to you. I just don't think that's realistic (we touch on that on another comment thread https://feddit.org/post/6620726/4078921 )
We have that already. The Fediverse as a whole has 1M MAU. Absolutely nothing stopping you from using kbin to follow discussions via groups and/tags.
My point is: the actual number doesn't really matter. What matters for us to have this place feel "alive" is that it needs to become an actual hub for global conversations. We have achieved that for some groups (e.g, tech and urbanism) but for everything else is mostly a desert, and this is only going to change when we get rid of the current incumbents.