this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Non-profits only IMO. Pay folks what they deserve, all the rest goes back in.
Investors can’t go near it. They’re always the problem.
I agree. Commercials get in, you get what happened to the Internet. We need something new.
How do you decide "what they deserve"? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?
I mean we’ve determined what a living wage is, right? Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?
There are plenty of jobs similar to the roles that would be needed that we can compare to you. I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly. It’s not rocket science.
I also don’t think mods have to be paid. They can be, but I don’t see it as necessary. I’m talking about the instance maintainers.
...have we?
Yes. It just hasn’t been properly implemented nation wide in the US. We’ve studied it to death and know what we need.
What does "implemented" mean?
If you’re going to waste my time with bullshit bait I’ll waste your time with lazy answers.
If you have a point to make just make it. Stop this ridiculous song and dance.
Buddy theres no song and dance unless it's the one you're doing where you're refusing to answer basic questions about things you've said.
Dude my point is simple. The concept of a living wage is well established and defined. Including how it can be calculated. There are countless studies and reports and estimates to the point where we could easily establish it as a minimum wage at the very least at the municipal and state levels depending on income needs to “live.”
This is not complicated. It’s a decades old, well established concept. Unfortunately it has not been implemented in to law in the US in any meaningful way beyond a handful of cities and states. I don’t Know if you were just playing dense or truly do not understand the concept, but there you go. Use fucking Google I don’t care. I don’t need to defend the existence of this concept and how thoroughly researched and thought out it already is.
Are you going to actually respond substantively or are you going to keep up your lame song and dance? Make your fucking point. What are you trying to say?
I don't know why you're treating me like a piece of shit for nothing more than trying to understand more about the words you wrote but I suppose I'll stop doing that.
Cue the pearl clutching and jaqassery.
You open with a sarcastic comment, ask me what the meaning of the word “implemented” is, and then act like you’ve just been sweet and asking innocent questions? You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little incredulous.
Who hurt you?
Now you're trying too hard
In a centrally-planned system? Yes, it is very hard.
I assume you mean that you had to give a quote to a client?
If that is the case, your client has sole decision-making power and has "only" to evaluate whether the price you were asking for your labor is lower than the value you'd be bringing them.
How does this compare with a coop, where (presumably) the member-owners have all to agree on the price of labor? Are they going to accept to pay market rate for the people working there? Are they first find whoever is willing to work for the cheapest and then set the price on that?
Dude you’re acting like this is some Herculean feat when coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations. This is a very strange hill to die on.
The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.
IOW, I'm not arguing that "coops" can not exist. What I am arguing is we will never get rid of Big Tech if we keep forcing the idea that only community-owned services are acceptable models of governance.
When it comes to hosting instances, yes, I do believe we have to universally keep investors/a for-profit structure out.
Putting these two in the same bag is a mistake, this is what OP and I are saying.
Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend "on profit", the methods they use and incentives that drive them are wildly different.
That’s a ridiculous statement. Context is just a malleable term you can use for whatever. Nobody is saying context is irrelevant, you can’t remove context from any statement.
Scale however does not matter.
Of course the scale of the business matters. If scale doesn't matter, a bunch of farmers selling their produce at a local market would be bad for their local community as Walmart.
You’re making a lot of inferences that allow you to be as myopic or broad as you want. You do not have a consistent view that has been laid out here. You’re just speaking in grand terms that are easy to defend no matter what. I didn’t say “local farmers at the farmers’ market” are the same as corporations, I’m saying scale is irrelevant because profit motive corrupts other values. You’re falling into the same hand wavy bullshit that people who go “but small businesses” fall into, as if those businesses aren’t exploiting people just as frequently as large corporations
Make an actual point.
And OP and I are saying that this generalization is shortsighted. You end up putting on the same bag:
By treating them as equal because "both of them are seeking profit", you are left with an economic system that is unable to grow to match the demands of the people.
I did, many times. It's just that you don't want to hear it.
The point is "Community is not enough" (I did link to the blog post, didn't I?) and I've been saying since 2022 that the Fediverse will not be able to grow until is dominated by this belief "that every profit-seeking business is bad and therefore should be rejected".
You can be mad at me all you want, you can be upset at this sad reality all you want, you can cry in a pillow all you need, but you can not say that the Fediverse has been a success story. We've had so many opportunities handed out to us to take this place and grow to become a viable alternative for everyone but we squander it every time because the loud minority of ideologues keep screaming "no businesses here!".
OP can speak for themselves. I am talking to you.
Yes farmers and Walmarts have some features they share. Same with everyone on that list. Are you saying they don’t? That they are completely different top to bottom?
I didn’t want to make those absurd arguments but you keep doing this nonsense. You keep being completely absolute in your language and trying to make me sound unreasonable. But I can easily paint you as someone doing the exact same thing in the opposite direction. So do you want this conversation to be productive or not?
I am not angry so I’m not sure what I’ve said that deserved that patronizing aside. We are both using the same tone. Do you need to calm down? Are you angry?
If you are not angry, you are certainly reading as someone who is facing an amygdala hijack. Your responses do not seem as someone who is collected and you do not seem willing to listen to what others are trying to express.
Case in point:
You are right, we are talking only about the features they share (i.e, profit-seeking) and whether this means that they should be treated equally. I didn't say they were completely different. But do they have to?
Let me try again: you are asserting that a small-scale farmer who works out on their own volition and makes a living by selling their produce at a higher price that it cost them (i.e, seeking profit) is a net-negative to society and as unethical as a huge corporation like Walmart. You are saying "the scale doesn't matter, any one working looking for profit is bad". Is this correct or am I misrepresenting you?
I’m not going to continue chatting with someone giving me absurd diagnoses just because I disagreed with them on the internet.
This is a very inappropriate and offensive thing to say to someone just because you disagree with them. It’s a strange conclusion to jump to as your top explanation and I sure hope this isn’t something you say to people’s faces and is just the result of how you behave online.
Have a good one. Don’t bother responding to me unless having the last word is that important to you. That was messed up and you are a very rude person to do something like that.
Look, I am sorry. I didn't mean to offend you and I didn't mean to "diagnose you". You asked me why I was responding as if you are angry, and I tried to illustrate how your responses are sounding on this side of the conversation. I might be completely wrong, but this is how I am perceiving it.
You are wrong and that was fucked up. I don’t just tell people “something is wrong with your brain/emotional regulation” a few sentences into a conversation. That was a shitty thing to do and I don’t care what your “perception” was. You need to really step back and recognize how wrong you were to do that.
I’m out dude. I wasn’t mad before but I sure am now.
Look, I already apologized and I mean it. I will just ask you now to reread the thread. You are stating that any independent service provider is as morally bankrupt as a large corporation like Meta. Don't you think that is also not at all insensitive and offensive?
You could do a for profit without investors. Any profit goes back to employees and paying users. Make it the operating agreement from the get go and no one could come in.
Non profit in many places means you can’t sell a service. So you rely on donations. Which means you’re constantly asking for donations.
Leadership changes. Employees change.
Look at valve: when Gabe dies it could become an absolute shitshow for us. We cannot depend on generosity and benevolence. It has to be a non-profit to limit the potential damage and force transparency.
FIFA is a non-profit. Doesn’t exactly make them a good organisation.
Didn’t say being a mom-profit makes it good
Yeah I regret commiting to a pc steam library, its just as bad as going console
Even non-profits aren't immune to hostile takeovers. OpenAI is a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit, and that hasn't stopped them from turning into something indistinguishable from a regular for-profit company. They've also been making noise about abandoning the fig leaf of the non-profit.
Mozilla is another one where nominally they're a for-profit controlled by a non-profit, but they're now getting into shoving ads in your face just like any other company.
It is harder to turn bad when you're a non-profit but not impossible, without something of a poison pill that makes it unacceptable to for-profit takeovers.
Didn’t say they were immune.
Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.
I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.
To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on...
Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.
Yeah but Valve is centralized ownership still. One guy has majority and that makes a difference. A coop could be customer led from get go. 51% customers 49% employees or something like that.
The point being if you structure it as for profit you can charge for things and build a good product. You can make rules that says 100% of the profits have to be redistributed and no one can change that. It’s how many farm co-ops work.
You just described a normal non-profit, but doomed. Lol.
Organizational committment to remaining non-profit seems to be critical to the recipe.
I think there's a difference in definitions, as well as difference between non-profit/not-for-profit and charities. As far as I know what your described is a non-profit and a non-profit can sell services.