Donations. Wikimedia proves that some people will want to donate if they find something useful.
Comment on Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter?
rglullis@communick.news 1 year agoWe 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?
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
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The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.
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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.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
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The entirety of the English Wikipedia can be stored in a single commodity hard disk. The entire database (with revisions and all) is less than 1TB. All other wikipedias combined amount to something similar. This is probably less data than what Reddit ingests every day.
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Less than 0.05% of the Wikipedia users have done any type of contribution to the content. The absolute majority is just visiting to read it.
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The content of an encyclopedia changes way less often than any social network. Any page written can be a resource used for any high-school student doing research for an assignment. How many people bother to revisit week-old memes on Reddit or imgur, let alone something written decades ago? Yet, both Reddit and Wikipedia need to store all their content forever.
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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.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
(on reddit) content creators and mods don’t see a penny either.
Yeah, but since when is this considered fair? Facebook has one million faults, but at the very least they pay their moderation and safety teams.
The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.
Is there any donation-based instance where the admins can make a living out of their labor? Even mastodon.social with more than 6 million users can only manage to have two developers on payroll, and they pay themselves a ridiculously low salary.
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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.