Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Big-tech is evil but could Fediverse benefit from more small/medium for-profit companies? (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it's a matter of time before it's enshittified.

I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there's a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than "big tech" and get more done than just donation based development.

It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?

What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

This is a great question and something we shouldn't shy away from considering.

As far as hosting a mastodon instance? That's something that should be done for free with the only income being donations.

These people do it because they want to. It's not necessarily "work" for them, which is why they do it for free anyways. It's also sustainable. As more users join their instance, costs for hosting will increase but so should donations. It's not that expensive to host servers, despite what some conpeople and their useful idiots may have told you. (don't assume you know the costs of hosting if you've never done it yourself.)

Admins get a lot of power that they have no problem abusing, either. This alone would make me a moron for even considering paying them for it.

"Yeah bro, I'm gonna pay you to host your instance where you have absolute control and can censor anything you don't like."

This is fun for them. That's why they do it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

There is not a single Mastodon &server out there that have increased donations or reach a sustainable level after they reach a few thousand users.

Also, there are not enough admins around "doing it because they want to" if we want the Fediverse to grow a few millions users.

Instagram has 2 billion users, Pixelfed largest instance has less than 200k active users. We would have to get 10 THOUSAND admins in order to compete with Instagram.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

There is not a single Mastodon &server out there that have increased donations or reach a sustainable level after they reach a few thousand users.

Are you referring to active users, or just accounts-made? If you're referring to active users, then can you point to any Mastodon instance with thousands of active users and the donations they receive?

If you're referring to accounts made, then you don't really have a point because thousands of accounts are unlikely to substantially increase server costs unless they're all active (see above).

Also, there are not enough admins around “doing it because they want to” if we want the Fediverse to grow a few millions users.

Are you joking? There's no "shortage of instances" going around. As more people join the Fediverse, more admins will start instances. This is a non-issue.

In fact, I'd wager the vast majority of instance-owners are bored, twiddling their thumbs due to their lack of users.

Instagram has 2 billion users, Pixelfed largest instance has less than 200k active users. We would have to get 10 THOUSAND admins in order to compete with Instagram.

See above.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Newsie.social has (had) 20k active users, mostly professional journalists. It has been threatening to shut down due to lack of funding for two years already. Every month their admin needs to beg around for people to donate.

Fosstodon started with enough donations that they could even send some of their money to upstream projects. Nowadays they are invite-only because they don't get enough funding to sustain infinite growth.

Moth.social was active while they were sponsored by Mozilla, they are shutting down in March 12th due to lack of funding.

I could go on.

There’s no “shortage of instances” going around. As more people join the Fediverse, more admins will start instances.

This is just wishful thinking. Go ahead and open an instance with open registration, see how long it will take for you to regret it.

the vast majority of instance-owners are bored, twiddling their thumbs due to their lack of users.

And there is a huge number of admins that got users and then burned out due to harassment, spam, entitled users asking for/against federation due to petty drama...