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Comment on lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

kichae@wanderingadventure.party ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Weirdly enough, community might actually be enough, but the Fediverse doesn't really have much in the way of communities. As I think you yourself point out elsewhere, the Fediverse is lacking the connective tissue of shared ideology, goals, or even interests. It's also both too large to create the familiarity that binds people socially, while also being too small to sustain itself off a donation model that makes sure there are professional admins and server mods. It's too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

Aping the aesthetic of commercial social media is a significant issue here, because form follows function, and the function of commercial social media is not community, but convincing end-users to be content generators. People on Reddit and Twitter are accustomed to an endless stream of input generated by nameless, faceless entities that they don't give two shits about, with some celebrities and internet-famous people interjecting from time to time. That requires tens of millions of users fighting for fleeting attention from fickle consumers. We have tens of thousands of people who -- as far as I can tell, based on the types and volume of posts -- are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

These are not the people who fund these kinds of endeavours. Neither group is -- the content generators are no more interested in paying to get attention than the content consumers are to give it. So, without the firm social ties that motivate keeping the lights on, there is only burnout for the few who are willing to materially support the place, and gradual decay for everyone else.

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rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

Facebook allegedly extracts $14/month of value from each of their US-based users, ~$12/european user, $7/month for Latin America and $4 from Southeast Asia.

If each active user contributed $1/month for their instance and $1/month for the developer of the software they use, the Mastodon developers would have an operational budget of ~$800k per month, the Lemmy developers would have $50k/month.

I don’t think that the problem is we’re “too small to be a job”. I think that the problem is that the average “enthusiast” is an hypocrite. They will profess their hatred of the business practices of Big Tech, but they will look for any and every possible justification to excuse themselves to contributing to the pool.

We have tens of thousands of people who (…) are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

Sure, but what I don’t get is this: why is that people are absolutely fine with paying 10-20€/month (or $50-$70/month in the US) for their mobile phone service but expect that the server hosting service and software development service to fall from the sky?

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- kichae@wanderingadventure.party ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Touche. I guess what I should have more rightly said was, given the level of contribution users have shown themselves willing to make, it's too small to be a job.
  
  But in the end, I believe people aren't willing to pay because we look like other spaces where they don't have to pay, and we gate nothing behind paywalls. Most people don't pay for services on the Internet, they pay for special privileges and to stand out. And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they'd milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Most people don’t pay for services on the Internet
    
    Yeah, but we are not “most people”. I thought “we” understood if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product. I thought “we” understood that “Free software” was not a “free lunch”.
    
    And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they’d milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.
    
    This is also why I think we should flip the script and stop cheering admins that run “free” instances. We should stop helping admins who can not make rent and we should start telling them to start valuing their work and demand proper compensation.
    
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