Comment on We have to solve the money problem!

• rumimevlevi@lemmings.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You can’t ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.

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    • rumimevlevi@lemmings.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I don’t know how this dismise my point. Small instances dies all the time.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Small instances dies all the time

        Small hobbyist instances die all the time. Just like the medium ones and the large ones.

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    • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Isn’t elest.io/open-source/lemmy still a thing? Different model from you, though.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Put those under “self-hosting”.

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• gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  • Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)

  This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.

  It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say… Just like an email address or URL.

  Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.

  We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.

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    • gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I think it’s the best starting point. University and government resources can handle the volume and will motivate widespread adoption. In one sense, it is only kicking the can down the road, but it is kicking it into a future that will be better prepared for these questions.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.

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• nulluser@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Let’s get rid of open registration instances

  How?

  Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is stopping them. Some already have

  But isn’t the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?

  You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can’t “get rid of open registration instances.” That’s just stupid.

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.

    What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.

    If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.

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    • nulluser@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      That I can agree with. But I think it’s just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.

      As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they’ll find that free instances just aren’t an available.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.

        How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say “Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own”? I’m not going to say zero, but I really doubt it’s going to be “more than 3”.

        The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new ~~sucker ~~ enthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.

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