Comment on Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter?
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 1 year agoI effectively pay to use my IRC, XMPP and email, since I rent a VPS. But that payment earns me much more pleasant usage experience (in case of my IRC bouncer) and a lot of cotrol over my servers in case of the latter two. So while paying a subscription feels a bit bad, I think it’s worth it.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
We can’t expect everyone else to self-host. The question is, what would be the most viable solution for a better (ad free, Surveillance Capitalism free) Internet that can work at scale?
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 1 year ago
small communities of self-hosters that offer the services to those who don’t possess the knowledge to do it themselves. These communities would self-host federated protocols (eg XMPP) so people can interact with others no matter which server they use.
Ideally maintained through users donations. If you want to be less idealistic, maybe small co-ops which charge a reasonable monthly/annual fee and provide free services for those who can’t really afford to pay.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
A bit too vague. Please:
The reason that I am asking you to be specific is that there is a good chance that professional providers can be more efficient than any “community-based” solution. We can have hundreds/thousands of independent professional service providers, each serving around 100-500k people, which would make a sustainable and healthy market. On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that we would be able to serve the 2 billion people on e.g Instagram by having millions of “community based” instances of Pixelfed.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Donations. Wikimedia proves that some people will want to donate if they find something useful.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.
Donations only “work” if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don’t see a penny out of it.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
I don’t see that big a difference there tbh. The WMF nowadays also has a paid trust and safety team like a social media platform.
renormalizer@feddit.de 1 year ago
Isn’t that the same for Reddit or Lemmy? The content creators and mods don’t see a penny either. Operationally, a social network probably requires a lot more compute power and somewhat more bandwidth compared to a site that serves mostly static content. But I don’t see why small donations shouldn’t cover that. The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.