Comment on Mastodon Exit Interview
rglullis@communick.news 1 week agoThis leads to burnout of the volunteers, over-streched infrastructure and people that soon leave again because someone lied to them about what the Fediverse is.
You don’t need to tell me that the community-funded model is broken. I’m saying that for years already.
But there are two separate forces at play, here. Yes, there is this aspect of not having enough infrastructure and not enough manpower to support a larger group of users (which I agree, though I think it’s entirely self-inflicted) but there is also this strong cultural aspect of Fedi that equates being on the fringe as “cool” and that actively pushes Fedi to be a tiny, niche space that should be treated as some sort of secret club to keep the plebs away.
For this crowd, even if OP was running the bots on their own server, they would still be met with scorn because “they are using a microblog to send notifications”. It’s this culture that is pathetic. It’s this culture that pushes “normies” away, and if we don’t change the this culture then there is no amount of funding or goodwill that will make the Fedi a nice, fun, place.
You can’t put a Mc Donalds sign in front of a farmers market and expect that will magically bring customers and solve all of the farmers market’s funding issues.
This here is not a farmers market. I wish this was a farmers market. People don’t go to a farmers market and tell the farmer they only need to cover the cost of the feed in order to get a whole chicken like people do here.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
To quote from one of your links:
Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.
If the idea that drives the Fediverse wants to succeed we need to build 60.000 volunteer run Pixelfed etc. instances, and that is not an unrealistic number at all, but it takes time.
You can’t shortcut this process with more funding and commercial companies, because if you try, you end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
You’re arguing with a right-libertarian, FYI. This should explain some of their positions and arguments better.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
You have no idea how wrong you are, but if this is what you need to believe to sleep at night, I won’t be able or interested in changing your mind.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
If it quacks like a duck, and it walks like a duck…
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
I once had this conversation with some other “indie entrepreneur” who was arguing something along the lines of “I don’t care about VC funding because my competitors all come and go, and my business still endures.” When I asked “Does this mean that you can make out a living out of your business?” and his response was “no, but I have a full time job, so my business is default alive”
He wasn’t too happy when I pointed out (a) he had a hobby, not a business and (b) cockroaches are also optimized for survival, but outlasting your competitors mean jack shit if they are playing a different ball game. He spent all this time pretending to have a business while his competition was actually out there fighting for customers.
All of this to say: there is no consolation in being “right” in my death bed. I am not interested in something that “takes time” if in the mean time my kids are growing up in a world dominated by Big Tech. Anyone who understands how bad Big Tech is bad for society should be rushing and actively accelerating to build an alternative.
It’s is basically impossible to create a monopoly around FOSS services. It’s a commodity with high R&D costs but zero cost to distribute and replicate. You can only jack up the prices of commodities if you collude with your competitors or create a cartel.
The main thing holding back the development of a healthy cottage industry of hosting providers, consulting services, app customization, etc is not the Big Tech players, but precisely this “culture” of people expecting services for free.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
There are plenty of examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology. Especially in social media it is more about network effects and having enough funds to buy up any potential competitors. Facebook could be FOSS and it would not change anything.
The culture to expect this for “free” is not exclusive to the fediverse, and while it has been exploited by adtech companies to build large surveillance advertisement monopolies, it is by itself not wrong for people to expect that basic services are not held behind a paywall. It just needs another organisational model to function, and comercialisation is not going to work.
And besides those general considerations, your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream. Digital services have a fundamentally different economic basis that leads to huge efficiency gains at scale. If you do not actively work against that, any cottage industry will quickly consolidate around a few big players and you will basically have replicated the current system.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
Citation needed?
I have no doubt that you point out some markets and see a large corporation dominating it. But a de facto monopoly? Not so much.
I’m sure you know that there are plenty of small businesses making a living out of email hosting, even if Google and MS account for 80% of the market.
In pretty much the same way that lots of local business just ditched their own web pages to go to Facebook, but this didn’t kill all the other website builders companies out there.