patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se 5 days ago
Oh yea, I actually considered trying to run a replacement for a time, I’m still running the stack I setup for it but I decided to stop pursuing ‘productizing’ it and moved on. That stack just became my over-engineered personal instances - bestiver.se
I setup a stack of Lemmy+Mastodon+Linkstack on subdomains, with the intention of selling accounts to people who would benefit from fully controlling their own social media presence…including adult creators. Afterall, they can’t get kicked off of something catering to them. I even setup a shortlink thing like: bestiver.se/@patrick
If you’re wondering why there aren’t other instances catering to that, it’s because hosting that content is expensive (lots of images/video content), time consuming (tons of mod reports), legally problematic (you better respond to mod reports/police inquiries quickly), and there is no simple way to accept payments since everything kicks you off if they know it’s porn related.
grue@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I think your other big problem would’ve been that attempting to “productize” it (beyond asking for donations to help with costs), would immediately make everybody else on the fediverse hate you.
patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se 5 days ago
My plan was actually to sell accounts to creators for a relatively small fee, and either not sign up free users at all or set up a separate service for free accounts. For the porn one it’d be asking the creators to pay a small fee so they could own their own distribution. Other people could obviously see the content, and creators could interact with lemmynsfw and anywhere else. But by selling accounts it would give them a space where they could interact with the fediverse and know that they are hosted on a thing that is actually paid for without advertising. They can’t get kicked off if they’re the intended users.
It’d also be a way to get funding into paying someone (me) to work on fixing the issues they had in the various fediverse services. That’s how things get built, and bugs get fixed. I care about improving the fediverse and was pursuing a path to get some more funding for it.
Not everything has to be provided for free for it to be a good thing.