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Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent

Then we can stop talking for a while, I have other priorities. For people reading this, here’s the content of my last comment.

I’m having trouble parsing this. How exactly do we disagree? You think being an admin is not work? I don’t get it.

Nothing. I am not expecting people to pay nothing there. Whatever it costs me to keep those instances running should be seen as an investment into the ecosystem. The more the ecosystem grows, the bigger the TAM and the more potential revenue my business can make.

You want to run a business.

Other admins are giving their time and energy without expecting to be paid. Ruud below just said it in an “If every active user would pay 1 euro per month, I could quit my dayjob and focus on the Fediverse fulltime”, but that seems to be more like hypothetical scenario consideration than actually looking for this. Evidence: lack of recurring posts calling for funding on LW.

The fact that some people do it pro bono does not make it any less valuable. When it is not pro bono, people still need/should/want to be compensated for what they do. Same thing with software development.

That’s what I meant with the disagreement. Are you managing your instances pro bono or not? It seems like you are not, and you’re the only admin who wants to create a business out of instances.

I don’t think I’m going to answer the list of questions now because they require longer answers. Maybe later if I have some time.

Also, we’ve had that conversation many times. I see the local volunteers run library, or the hiking club, you want to make the system profitable so that admins and developers can make a living out of it.

I’m one self-funded developer who is stubborn enough to run this at a loss for almost 5 years now, and my greatest ambition here would be to maybe get 10-15k customers to pay me $30/year to be able to live with minimal comfort, provide for my family

lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27053532/13176946

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rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Thanks for making it clear that you are evading giving your straightforward opinion for the following statements:

Free Software Developers deserve to be paid for their work, regardless of the “price tag” or license fees.

People working in free software should treat their craft as a hobby.

The work of system administrators (setting up the systems, ensuring it is secure, managing backups, keeping it up to date, implementing improvements, etc) is valuable and should be properly compensated.

If someone is offering to run and manage a server without asking a priori for any form of payment, then this means that all their work is altruistic and they should not be compensated for it.

One Individual using a platform and actively promoting it is as important as one developer of the platform.

One individual using a platform and actively promoting it is as important as the admin of one server running the platform.

If there were no “volunteer run” instances, I would run my own and bear all the costs to operate it.

People that are still using the traditional social media networks should know better. If they haven’t left yet, they deserve everything bad that happens to them there.

It’s perfectly acceptable and ethical for any company that provides an utility (water, heating, electricity, phone, internet) to expect a profit.

It’s perfectly acceptable and ethical for a indie game developer to charge a monthly fee from the users while they are working on it.

In a world where the big social media companies (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) were provably serving the interests of the users and not its investors (no data exploitation, no promotion of corporate agenda, using and promoting open standards for interoperation, no forced walled garden and artificial scarcity) and changed their business model to a simple monthly subscription fee, I would still not use them.

In a world where the big social media companies were provably serving the interests of the users and not its investors, I would only use it if I did not have to pay and they relied on other forms of revenue to run their service, e.g, non-invasive advertisements.
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- Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Sorry for not having answering a 12 questions form as my top priority
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Start with the top 3. A simple “yes” or “no”.
    
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    Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    That’s borderline harassment
    
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