OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
I agree donating to instances and to things you believe in is a good idea.
But declaring that paying for things means they aren’t going to be controlled by shitty corporations is just ignoring every other aspect of the global economy.
I don’t know that I agree. Paying to support a site that supports your community isn’t sufficient, by itself, to protect you from enshittification. But it’s a necessary first step. Because sure as hell a website run by a for profit corp, that doesn’t charge you to use it, is making its money off you. And if you want to lessen the percentage of your life directly controlled by corporations you need to get away from corporate social media.
I’m excited by looking at Lemmy instances over the past few months and seeing how many of them are openly and transparently discussing finances with their communities - this is how much running the instance costs, this is how much the community has given us, this is who makes decisions about our site and this is how we make decisions, these are our future goals and plans for the future, etc, etc. Sure they have to work with Amazon Web Hosting etc in order to function at all but making decisions that actually put users first and being transparent in both finances and decision making is a huge improvement from the FaceTwitTokGram monolith.
I pay $10/mo for Kagi search. If they stop satisfying what I want from them, or they start misbehaving, I’ll cancel it.
The problem is if you pay for it you still end up without privacy.
Bingo.
Pay in crypto.
Devil’s advocate here - as soon as you introduce monetization to the use of a service you have locked in it’s potential as an income stream which will inevitably lead to the downside you are afraid of.
Fediverse services being distributed means no central host has to bear the entire weight. I could probably take on all of the server load that I use if I repurposed my PleX server:
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1592223884107218944
This is not about money, it is about control.
Monetization of users will never be enough. They will also want to sell ads and paid promotional content.
Source: Back in the day, Imgur was a paid service. You paid $2/mo and you could upload more than 200 images, you could link directly to them, and they did not expire. End of transaction. I paid for imgur and used it as described. But they wanted more. Instead, they cancelled paid accounts, and made it free*. No more direct linking, instead you had to go to their ad-riddled site and also be exposed to the community comments on any image. Eventually they changed the UI to ‘trap’ people into doomscrolling through images while showering them with ads.
Yep. It’s simply not how greed works.
They’ll never say “Oh since we’re making millions of dollars a month, we don’t need to sell user data”. They’ll just do both, because there’s always greedy people at the top pushing for every penny of profit.
It would be nice to run some nodes attached to your favorite instance to distribute the bandwidth cost.
Well, first of all, this is capitalism - if people suddenly were okay with paying for the big online services that are currently completely free but harvest a lot of user data, they’re just going to put the paywall up AND harvest your data at the same time. Why choose between one option or the other for monetization when you can combine them and make more money from both?
Besides, speaking of the fediverse - due to its decentralized nature, it can’t really be paywalled or monetized. If some instance decides to put up a paywall or ads for some reason, you can just hop to another instance and have access to pretty much the same content.
Your first paragraph is what the website formally known as Twitter is doing. There’s an option to pay $8 a month for various perks, yet the site continues to harvest their data. Yet, a lot of people are paying that $8 for whatever reason.
Oh, Lemmy can be monetised really well.
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No. I would be fine with the Internet returning to a bunch of little passion project sites. I hate the internet as it is today.
Passion projects still cost bandwidth, if not hosting fees.
Also, major news and media sites are not going anywhere. Little passion project sites will not replace a platform like YouTube. Serving video is expensive.
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Have you heard of pied piper?
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From the silicon valley show
They did exactly what you described
That would be the case already, if we were all still watching stuff in 480p. As tech improves, so do the demands.
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Probably no time soon.
@stabby_cicada I think digital public space is as important as physical public space. A lot of this communication space is well provided by private people and companies, but to ensure freedom nation states must also invest in it. Just like physical public space, it is a common good, a res-publica.
i mean there is many good arguements as to why digital public spaces should not be run by governments. But if they are not government run but funded, then that creates a new can of worms. It is best the governments ensure the freedom of digital public spaces and that these are run in a federated way, based on volunteer and non profit activities.
@tryptaminev Why? It would not take away anything from volunteer infrastructure, but would add safety options.
Volunteer servers need users to trust their admins with no grounds for that, but the fact that they “want to run a community”, which also implies that they have personal politics and power over you. Fedi should not be only for existing communities. Also, there’s financial stability as noted above.
And there are some grounds to trust your democratic representatives, aren’t there.
Given that the democratic representatives in my country are trying to implement authoritarian surveillance since decades and try time and time again, despite being slammed by the constitutional court, no i dont trust them.
They dont care for and dont understand the meaning of these spaces and the necessary rules.
Of course you are right that private entities are not free from it either. That is where federation seems to be the best way to adress it.
US and EU are both racing to implement an array of anti-freedom, authoritarian internet bills. What stable nation-state are you willing to fully entrust indefinitely with regulation of what you do online?
I do think the transmission infrastructure of the internet should be publicly funded and owned, but not what happens on the wires.
Okay, I might be super ignorant. But how am I Lemmy.world’s product if I’m not paying anybody any money and I’m not seeing any ads? Is there something to this that I don’t know about? I can’t see how my participation in this is getting monetized by anybody.
And in extension, how does paying prevent you from being the product then?
Worst case: You pay and are still the product. Less worse case: You pay to prevent being the product, but never would have been the product anyways.
At the moment it’s probably still paid by donations and by the people hosting it, but like any site, it may need to be monetized to keep going, or even just if its owners decide to. It’s not like there’s any guarantee of privacy just because it’s in the fediverse.
Well, if you’re not paying, someone else is. That might work now, but if Lemmy ever grows really large it will likely get tougher. Because a larger percentage will resonate just like you.
It’s also much harder to scale. You can only have very few people working full time (if any). Thus a lot of the work has to be outsourced to people doing it for free. I’m guessing that’s not you either.
So basically, if everyone thought like you there would be no Lemmy.
Lemmy servers aren’t meant to be “big”. I left lemmy.world for a smaller instance. If the admins of Lemmy.World want to just keep growing and thus increasing their costs, that is their choice. It doesn’t mean all the users need to cough up money. THAT is capitalist propaganda. If the person who runs an instance can’t afford to run it, then don’t run it. You can escape from the system that is stacked against you, the system that demands you pay for every little experience you have, every little resource you use. You do that by giving and sharing with each other and quit acting like a vulture looking for scraps.
Exactly. This is the reason I run my own instance. Of course that comes with its own issues but I will never have to worry about it disappearing randomly one day. Learned my lesson early with FMHY.
If Lemmy would ever have 1/10 of Reddits user there would have to be larger instances. And even the “small” ones, would have to be large just in order to keep up with the amount of federated content. That’s not something you’d host on your 5 year old laptop.
Well they only need the content their users are subscribed to, not all content on the fediverse.
Sure. But most, if not all would need to fetch something like the 100 most popular communities, because they’re given to be subscribed to. Given a size of 1/10th of Reddit, that would be no small feat.
Add to that a couple of thousands of other communities (I mean I’m a single user subscribed to 150 communities). And my point is somewhat clear.
Paying for website access will only make things worse, not better, because the major players are so extremely malevolent.
Spot on!
As soon as the disgusting tendrils of capitalist greed get a taste, the whole game is cooked. It’s better as a hobby project. Just donate to your instance to help cover costs!
Yup, they’ll take membership money and then still put ads on.
I’m broke, and have no capacity to make money in a capitalist society. This isn’t to say what I do doesn’t have value, it’s just not valuable to rich people.
Am I just FUBAR in this purely-transactional NWO?
Not necessarily in the fediverse world. If server costs are being covered by donations from 4% of users, a volunteer admin will probably be quite happy whereas a commercial operator will undoubtedly think “damn I have 96% freeloaders, that’s leaving money on the table”.
Unfortunately I’d say yes.
U ain’t got holes?
Edit o man what a comment lol
Those who have money can afford better than what I got.
It’s not a matter of having nothing to offer, it’s that what I do isn’t bought by people with money. Value ≠ What people pay for. Case in point: Funko-Pop figurines.
That is what taxes are for. The Constitution enables the government to establish “post offices and postal roads”. Those purposes are served these days by the equipment that comprises the backbone of the internet. There is no reason it shouldn’t be federally funded.
Ok can we also regulate the infrastructure like a utility, please?
Absolutely makes sense to me. On top of that it should be treated as necessary as water or electricity with it universally provided to all citizens for a nominal fee supported by tax revenue.
Interesting correlation I hadn’t thought of or heard before.
There’s been plenty of support for Internet access being treated as an essential utility.
What’s the equivalent of a postage stamp in this case?
But if I understood you correctly, that only deals with the problem of paying for your internet connection. By far the biggest cost for servers is the power consumption and probably hardware second. Making internet usage free wouldn’t do much.
Usually, it is paid by the people who use it, and that is also typically the taxpayers and extra from selling products or services as individual options, packages, or contracts. (Like postage stamps or shipping costs)
The above statement was to your comment, but I went on a rant about subscription models and didn’t feel like deleting it. Please ignore or take as a grain of salt. I didn’t revise what I said or finish my thoughts on subscriptions:
Most have taken the monthly subscription approach because it is easier to take money automatically monthly vs. selling individually. The downside is that consumers lose freedom as subscriptions are just bundles with a monthly contract or license. Sometimes, it is cheaper as a subscription if there is heavy enough use of the service as the cost is usually spread out to all subscribers. This, unfortunately, incentivize you to be using the bundle more than everyone else. Usually, companies limit you to prevent subscription costs from being overshadowed by the cost of doing business with outliers/power users. This is worse for capitalism markets as there is an incentive to offer limited cheap products instead of a free market where there is a variety of product ranges to choose from. It is a sort of natural homogenized process that makes each competitor similar. To combat this, tiers are offered with bundled higher limits and/or more features. A downside to tiers is that the lower tiers are slowly gutted of features to transition more users to higher tiers. further increasing the companies profits artificially as bundles muddled what was demanded vs. what is supplied.
That’s the dumbest idea ever. Worked really “well” in the UK, lol.
Worked just fine in Switzerland and Spain which are both comparable in speeds to the US while being significantly cheaper. It’s also worth mentioning that these countries provide universal broadband service to all citizens.
There’s no point comparing anyone to Switzerland. It’s an exceptional country with an exceptional economy and politics. It’s like saying that Vatican is doing good because 100% of the population is a devoted Catholic, so the whole world should become Catholic.
As for getting high speeds cheaper, you need to look at countries like Latvia, where you’re easily getting unlimited full duplex 1Gbps for €18 per month https://balticom.lv/lv/internets
That’s what happens when the government is not involved in any way, shape or form.
The reason Latvia has fast Internet is the state owned telecom invested in fiber and private companies had to step up to compete. The government also heavily regulates to prevent monopolies so there is ample competition to bring prices down.
Internet in the US is what happens when there isn’t enough government involvement in the telecom market.
No, the reason why Latvia has a great and cheap internet is because Latvia didn’t have any regulations for a very long time. This allowed small groups of people to go to the roofs, install their equipment there and throw cables between buildings with zero resistance from either people or government. I know it because I was there, working at two ISPs in the early 2000-s.
This complete lack of regulation created a very competitive market where literally every high schooler could create an ISP and run a successful business.
Also state owned Lattelecom didn’t have shit until it was too late. They were only providing regular 10-18Mbit DSL until 2013 if I remember correctly.
Fuck government involvement!
Latvia has the Competition Law which prevents monopolies and anticompetitive business practices. Government involvement is literally the only reason Latvia has good internet.
Lack of government involvement results in what happened in the US where a few large ISPs buying up all the others leading to a total lack of competition or innovation.
Fuck the “free market” myth.
WTF are you talking about, lol?
Counterpoint: In this day and age hosting and sharing text can be done on donated resources, we have basically reached post-scarcity there .
That’s just text, not video or audio.
Text can be done stupidly and wastefully. Sharing videos, for more than a decade, has been doable thanks to P2P. I remember the early days when everyone was sharing everything with everyone, the amount of stuff and the speed at which we got it was unrivaled.
Noawadays peertube works and any good torrent will have more speed than netflix.
We could run most of the internet on donated resources. We just decided we preferred ads-funded centralization, which is a shame.
itd be nice if the usa had a public free hosting service that was paid for by a 25 or 50 dollar flat tax.
Flat taxes are regressive and a really, really, really bad idea. We have too many of them as it is.
I used to believe in that ideal, but any government product that Republicans can possibly ruin, either by destroying or criminally defunding, will be either destroyed or defunded.
The horse is out of the barn. It would take 200 years before we could cleanse the stain of the GOP and their shareholders from this world, so it’s never going to happen.
tbh yeah its sad. probably not going to be fixed ever though. When people wanted to do society differently you used to be able to just talk about how things aught to be , gather similarly minded people , and fuck off and make a new town somewhere else. Itd be nice if that freedom still existed in the world.
I absolutely do not care enough about any site I use to be willing to pay. If it disappeared, I’d find something else to do with my time, just like I did reddit. I accept that I am the product, and simply do not care.
This is nothing but eBegging. The internet was forcefully taken from the people who created projects out of passion, and now those people who forced their way in are like “yOu MuSt PAy Us!”. How about no?
yeah but I care enough to maybe self host a social media and plex server for my friends / family which is the same thing. If everyone did that and or chipped in for their friend/family to do it, we could rebuild some community structure
I sometimes pay for things and still end up being the product. Smart TVs sell tons of data, and you may still pay buckets for one. YouTube Premium is no guarantee that Google won’t use your data in other ways. A modern luxury car has tons of ways to spy on you.
This is why I refuse to bow down and accept monetization, because it’s never enough money for them. they want all of your money. All of it. Any money that you have that they don’t is evil to them.
If Lemmy stops being ad free or charges money I’m gonna leave here just as fast as I did reddit.
Lemmy is different I think. I was donating until they started defederating from stuff like piracy groups.
They should ask for more money to fund servers / lawyers to make the community stronger which will attract more people and money.
For as long as selling user data is still profitable, it will continue regardless of whether users pay to access the site or not.
