The problem is that for the number of users, a centralized platform is terrible at scaling. This is why they seek advertising revenue so much.
The only efficient way to solve this problem is by decentralizing, which is what Lemmy’s doing.
Or, how about a simple nonprofit that charges a nominal fee for access to high quality maps? That way there’s no risk of them abusing their position to please advertisers.
yuki2501@lemmy.world 5 months ago
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Eh, kinda, but I see Lemmy as multiple centralized services, not actually decentralized. All of the content I view is stored on my instance, even if it was created elsewhere. This means it’s going to have issues scaling because there will be a ton of copies of everything throughout the fediverse.
A properly decentralized service won’t have so much duplication, it’ll have just enough redundancy so it’s not at risk of failure if too many nodes fail.
yuki2501@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Ah, I see your point.
If we want to be precise, we could say Lemmy is federated.
There’s centralized, federated,and distributed (e.g. DHTs).
On federated networks like Mastodon, I can send messages to my followers that I’m moving instances; after I finish moving, my followers can refollow me on the new instance.
I can export and import the people I finish and my block lists. I’m not sure if Lemmy has this functionality, but the point is that it’s still better than Reddit. A node daying doesn’t mean the end of the network.
The ideal would be to have a fully distributed version of Lemmy, where people could join virtual instances over a distributed architecture. Perhaps that will be possible one day, but for now Lemmy’s better than nothing.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Yup, I’m actually working on one distributed alternative, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually finish it.
And yeah, Lemmy is good in that it’s resilient to nodes dropping off, but it doesn’t solve the problem of costly hosting. I would assume the total cost of running Lemmy is way more expensive (perhaps an order of magnitude) than running Reddit, for the same number of users, because of how much duplication and communication there needs to be across instances.
So yeah, I’m here while lemmy is sustainable, but I’m worried about how it’ll scale.
tinkeringidiot@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The idea that non-profits aren’t profiting-seeking is the biggest misunderstanding in the world. I work for a large one, and it’s absolutely the same rampant penny-squeezing 30%-unsustainable-growth-seeking monstrosity as anything in the Valley. The pittance that gets thrown to “charitable causes” is just another tax dodge in an otherwise profit-demanding venture. Swap “shareholders” with “the endowment” and there’s no difference at all.
Much better to be a for-profit company with a charter demanding where profits in excess of modest growth targets are spent internally.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
That’s too bad. I’d be interested to see some statistics about how customer experience is, on average, with non-profits vs private companies vs public companies. Maybe it’s still a net win even if there are awful non-profits
tinkeringidiot@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Most nonprofits don’t do a lot with the general public. They have the community they serve (which is getting something for nothing and therefore “customer service” is not a thing) and the community that funds them (where, of course, service is king). How the company treats you on the outside very much depends on which side of that equation you’re on.
This is necessary behavior for nonprofits, at least in the US, because of the demand for charitable giving. It’s ultimately a decent structure for a charity, but a pretty awful way to run a product or service business, since the incentives are all on the opposite side of “good product/service”. Private for-profits with strong, conscientious leadership do much better - I encourage you to read up on Patagonia and Gore-Tex as examples.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Yeah, I’ve read about Patagonia and love their model. I’m just skeptical in general because leadership can change. The Non-Profit stamp provides certain legal rules, whereas a private charter is enforced by the people who have power to change it.
I’m absolutely a fan of responsible for-profit companies like Valve (esp. wrt company structure), and I wish that was the norm instead of the exception.