Comment on How to make the Threadiverse a nice place and effectively make it grow
patrick@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
I think if you want Mods/Devs/Admins to have better impact, they actually need to have funding. People focus on funding hosting costs, but everyone seems to be assuming that Mods/Devs should be volunteers.
If you're not donating in some way to the instances/software you use...please start.
As an example, lemmy.world is run by https://fedihosting.foundation, who also run mastodon.world and many other instances. AFAICT the whole group takes in a little over $1000 a month through Patreon/ko-fi. That's barely enough to cover hosting costs for so many huge instances, much less compensate the several dozen volunteers.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 weeks ago
I'm a bit the wrong receiver for that kind of information. I'm not on lemmy.world but run my own instance. I've donated days worth of developer hours already, and I'm planning to do more...
And I dislike money being involved. That leads to obligations, envy, and people stop doing it for the fun and because it's a nice platform. I think that shifts things and I'm not sure if in a good way. We'd get closer to commercial interests and we already have enough commercial platforms. I liked the old way how Free Software worked. Some random people doing it out of their own motivation. Coming up with all kinds of interesting software that'd help them. And they'd generously share it and invite everyone to participate. And it'd stop there. No ulterior motives involved.
But with that said, yeah. Someone has to do the development, pay for the servers and do the community work. That's not optional. And we have a broader issue with money in the Free and Open Source ecosystem.