rglullis
@rglullis@communick.news
- Comment on Dansup promises Loops federation beta 'later this week' 15 hours ago:
One more reason to be asking for help from the community and to be doing everything in the open.
He doesn’t need to know everything. No one is expecting him to deliver flawless software. But I’d have place more trust on someone that works in the open than someone who keeps saying “next week!” out of fear of being judged by the initial quality of their software.
- Comment on Dansup promises Loops federation beta 'later this week' 15 hours ago:
I want to support the guy, but damn does he like to overpromise and underdeliver…
We’ve been hearing about Loops being open sourced (which would imply the ability to be federated) for months already. Just publish the thing and let the community help, @dansup@mastodon.social !
- Comment on Resources for discovery across the open social web/fediverse 2 days ago:
Listen to Berlie:
- Comment on Solopreneurs - making businesses solo 2 days ago:
You were faster than my edit.
What we can do is try go get popular communities to other instances.
I am particularly more interested in getting people aware of Fediverser because of the long tail of niche interests than the “popular” communities, and I am not that interested in arguing over whether a community should be in the largest instance or second or the 8th.
- Comment on Solopreneurs - making businesses solo 2 days ago:
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Have you tried running any of the alternatives for more than a few hundred users?
Mastodon is bad for small and single-user instances because it wasn’t designed to serve so few people. Once it starts growing beyond a certain level of activity, most of your overhead is on sidekiq/redis side of things.
I’ve seen the Pleroma devs openly saying that their service can not handle more than 20k users, because they rely on the database to build the timeline and they don’t have a strong caching system.
So yeah, there are a bunch of tradeoffs and Mastodon is not trying to optimize for anything in particular. But once it reaches a certain size the operational cost (per user) does go down.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Mimic what paid online news does
I could easily write an essay connecting the rise of populism and the fall of civic society to our loss of real journalism, and another 1000-word post arguing that paywalls are just a bad band-aid trying to cover the deep wound caused by eyeball chasing “infotainment”.
These “fake” paywalls are just an attempt from the news publishers to have both ways and make revenue both from the paying customers and the ones that may be okay with ads.
Also, if the admin deserves compensation for their time, why don’t I get a pretty penny for this?
People love to hate the Brave browser, but their system pays 70% of the revenues to the end user. If you manage to convince more people to use it, it would be perfect. End users would get some $ from accepting the ads and they could kick some of that back to the sites they wish to support. The whole economy could grow and everyone would have their incentives aligned.
You know what the problem is? People were looking at the 2-5 bucks of crypto tokens that they would get and instead of using them to stimulate the economy they would just hang on them for the speculation of profit. Individual greed and penny-pinching turned one of the most viable alternatives into another tool for crypto grifters.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
My mention of drugs/booze/cigarettes is completely non-judgemental. I am not saying that is bad if people spend money on that. I am just pointing out that, yes,.some people do spend money on it and they are not expecting to keep partaking in their pleasures for free.
Reddit is having trouble monetizing
They do not. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with their advertising.
We have no tools against capitalism.
Trade and commerce that prioritizes small business is already a big weapon against globalism and Corporatist Capitalism.
Focusing on closed-loop, sustainable economies is a tool against Capitalism.
Community-led investing that prioritizes long-term wealth building is a tool against rent-seeking enterprises that stimulate zero-sum games.
You are definitely underestimating the number of broke people here.
If I am, then the discussion should be “how can we have a sustainable system that gives a fair wage to those working on it , while not stressing those who can not afford even 2 bucks per month?” instead of this “you can not charge from everyone because you are not empathizing.”
Once we reframe the discussion, we should be able to propose things like:
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“pay it forward” systems, where those who can afford more pay for those who can not. Let them become responsible for who to invite. (I have implemented this at Communick, by the way, and so far I had only two people paying for others.)
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Selling ad space for ethical businesses. Back in 2007 there used to be a network of bloggers who did not want to pollute their pages with adSense, so they got together and created a system where companies would pay $5k to $10k to have one slot and all bloggers committed to display this banner during the whole month. Something like that could be done here as well, if “making money” wasn’t such a capital sin.
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focus on making this normie-friendly. Stop with the political bickering and organize the topic-specific instances (which I already offered for other admins), use them to attract a larger audience so that we have more “actually I can pay a few bucks per month” crowd to dilute the “I am establishment but I can not afford to fight against it” crowd that seems to dominate so far.
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- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
The latter.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
You of all people here should know that the cost of running the service is not the real issue. Even if Mastodon takes 3x as much hardware to run as Lemmy, the cost of hardware is still pennies per user.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Mastodon because it is the largest number of instances and users, but the principle is the same. It hasn’t happened with Lemmy yet because this subset of the Fediverse is ridiculously small compared to Mastodon/Pixelfed
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs
Not quite that. The argument is that admins shouldn’t be treated as a disposable entity who don’t need any money just because they are not directly asking for it.
It’s a “I want you to want to do the dishes” kind of thing.
Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
Easier said than done. We already have a long list of instances that disappear suddenly because the admins burned out, and I have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month instead of just saying “you know what? You don’t want to help me, so I don’t owe your lot anything”.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Or their games. Or their booze/drugs/cigarettes. Or their whatever they spend their money on without questioning the one providing the goods why they want to charge for it.
Btw, just gave 10$ to my instance today
Good on you! Now, let’s get that to become the norm for everyone else.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
I think that the crux of the matter is about whether or not we see this as “just a hobby” or if we really see an investment in the Fediverse as the best alternative that we have for an open (I am not going to say “free” to avoid confusion) web that can take power away from Big Tech and back to the people.
We need the instances run by volunteers.
Why? Are you going to tell me that the 98% of non-paying users are struggling so much with their finances that they can not afford to pay a couple of bucks per month to an admin?
If the numbers were reversed and we had 2% of the people saying “sorry, I really can not afford this. Can I have access still?” I would be a lot more understanding. Hell, the number could go up to even 20% and I wouldn’t mind opening a few free accounts…
But 98%? I can bet that the most if not all find a way to pay for Netflix, or Spotify, or their games but $2.50 a month is suddenly too much for ninety-and-eight percent of the people?
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Is it really?
Do you think it’s quantifiable?
I can go and say “my work as an admin is worth $XX,XXX/month, so this is how much I’d like to get paid to do it”. Now, some people will agree with it and pay for it. Some will not, and will look for some cheaper alternative.
If more admins went to on to adopt a similar approach and stipulated first how much their work is worth before even setting up an instance and if users went on to refuse the offer, what would they do?
- Putting themselves through the trouble to set up an instance for themselves?
- Pay a professional to do it for them?
- Go to Reddit?
Can you go around and say “my work as an user of Lemmy (or Reddit, or LinkedIn) is worth $YY per post, or $ZZ,ZZZ per month, and this is how I’d like to get paid to do it?”
Will anyone take you on your proposal?
And if admins refused to accept your offer, what do you think they would do?
- Find other sources of “content”?
- Pay other professionals to generate content for them?
- Go To Reddit?
As a data point: I may have stopped the alien.top mirroring bots, but I am still running them locally to browse Reddit content. To this day, the niche communities I used to sub there have more interesting content than anything here. So don’t think that whatever we are posting here is worth anything.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
I understand it pretty well. What I don’t understand is why some people only want to participate here if it means they can get to free ride on “volunteers”.
In a sibling comment, you say “if providing the service is too much, the solution is to stop doing it”. Fine, I fully agree with it. But do you realize that this implies that sooner or later we are going to run out of people with the capacity (or willingness) to do this work?
We are not talking about any small-time instance. It’s the third largest instance by active user count. Above it, only mastodon.social and mstdn.jp. If the third largest instance has an admin that might have to stop providing the service in order to find another job so that they can make fucking rent, isn’t that a sign that this is not sustainable?
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
- the fact that you think that “creating a business” is bad says more about you than me. And I don’t want a business “just for me”. I am looking for a sustainable way where many people can work in tech and create technology that does not exploit the users, but this will never happen if the people working are expected to do it from free and still figure out how to make rent.
- not quite, see above. I don’t particularly care about the individuals and I certainly wish to change the prevailing culture. I am not here to have any significant impact on people individually and I am not concerned about “being nice”. I do care about finding one platform that can be sustainable and universally accessible, though.
- no, but I think that the LW users do have the resources to allow Ruud to work full-time on Fediverse stuff, but for some reason there are 18k users there who think it is okay to exploit his free labor.
- pick a lane: do you think that “community building” is a job, or not? Are you participating here as a service to others or do you out of personal enjoyment? If you want to be paid for it, then state your value and tell me how much you think your work is worth.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
And each one of them should be commended for having a better understanding of ethics than you and all others who are only to participate if they can exploit free labor.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Yeah, you made it clear that you:
- do not value the work of the admins
- can only see meaning in a “free” social media platform if it means "free of charge"
- think that a small business provider providing hosting for open source systems is as bad as Big Tech/Corporate/VC funded ones
- see volunteered work as as opportunity to excuse yourself from giving a meaningful contribution
- think you should be paid for participating
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating
It is quite realistic to get 100% of your users to pay. Just make registration conditional on the payment.
$10, $20 or even the $29 per year that I charge at Communick is not a significant amount of money for the average user. It is mind boggling that we got so used to “free stuff” offered by Big Tech that now anyone saying “Everyone using the service needs to pay for it” is seen as an heretic.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
What is stopping an admin unwilling to “give away their labor for free” from doing so?
Again, you are going at this backwards.
Instead of asking yourself why the network can reach a few million users even when admins are unpaid, you should be wondering how much bigger the network would be if the current users appropriately invested in the ecosystem.
Yes, of course. Sysadmins, developers, moderators, Fediverse advocates, active posters, even commenters deserve something, as every of those roles make the platform alive.
Amazing. By equating the value of the work provided by admins and developers (which you can not do) to the work of “Fediverse advocates and active posters” (which you want to do) you create a false equivalence that you think excuses you from giving full credit to others.
You said you did not respond to the original statements because “it would take too much time”. Now, you spent more time trying to find a reasonable justification for your unwillingness to acknowledge the higher value of someone else’s contribution and you still didn’t give a straight out answer and resort to rhetorical tricks.
Where is this money we supposedly all deserve going to come from?
First: who is “we”, here? Are you really implying that you should be getting money by participating?
Second: the money exists. You and many others can pay $10-20 / year for the service being provided to you. The problem is that you (and many others) do not want to acknowledge the value of the work and refuse to contribute beyond “covering the cost of hardware”.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Again: hosting costs is the least of the concerns. The problem is that users are not willing to pay for the labor of admins.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
I do support admins
Again, paying out to cover hardware costs is not the same as supporting the admins.
Now do I think Lemmy admins should be able to make a living out of managing an instance? Based on what we see (…) it seems unrealistic.
Holy $%&! what a contortionist way to avoid the response! You are sounding like a Monty Python comedy sketch.
I’m not asking what you think is “realistic”. I’m asking whether you think admins should be compensated for their work.
Should I try again, or can I just assume that your answer is “no, I do not think that admins need to be compensated for their work.” ?
Sorry to tell you, but you’re here with the crabs.
Speak for yourself, then. But at least you are starting to show some honesty and admitting that you rather pull people down to your level instead of acknowledge the value of the work done by admins and developers.
If you can’t see the difference between employees of companies providing millions to stakeholders and 50k monthly active users
You are getting at this exactly backwards.
It’s not the employees of tech companies who complain about poor pay. Quite the opposite.
And the reason that Lemmy can not grow past 50k users is because the Fediverse is stuck on a horrible culture where they refuse to even acknowledge that the work of admins and developers is valuable, so those with the skills that could take the Fediverse to the next level are not going to be sacrificing themselves to serve a bunch of people who think they are entitled to free work from others just because they themselves are not able to do it.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
You are right. These types of discussions are beyond silly. But you might not be aware that this back-and-forth between me and Blaze is going for months already and whenever he is asked about how he values the work of admins and FOSS developers, he goes full gas-lighting mode and refuses to answer.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Whether something is funded by donations or fees is separate from whether the cost of people’s time should be included in the revenue target.
Yeah, but where are the admins who dare to say “I think my work is worth $15k/month, so I will only keep the instance open if we collect that much money”?
There aren’t, because the majority of users will see that “profiteering” and flat out refuse to contribute. Or they will come up with the worst excuses to diminish the work of the admins, which in the end translate to “I don’t make that much money, how could I justify accepting that your work is more valuable than mine?” crab mentality.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
I’m trying to just end this conversation
Yeah, you keep trying to end the conversation because you painted yourself to a corner and you refuse to publicly admit that you do not want to support admins and FOSS developers.
Is the previous comment not true anymore?
The whole comment is true. Including the part where I say
I’m honestly tired of this crab mentality. People think it’s a sin to be upfront about their work and how much they value their time. It’s also quite ironic that I can see the huge overlap: those who are always virtue signaling and complaining about bosses who don’t pay enough to their employees are the same ones who refuse to patronize a small independent business
Why couldn’t you highlight this part instead?
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Are we stuck in a loop? Because it seems that yet again you are bringing things out of context and using it as a shield to avoid giving out your opinion.
You have the time to chase things around and select clips of whatever supports your worldview, but you do not have the time to say “I don’t think admins should be compensated for their work”.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
You want to make a living out of the platform, to make a business out of it. I prefer it to be run by volunteers.
This right here is a good example of you taking things out of context and not caring about “nuance” when it is convenient to you
the difference is quite obvious
Is it? Then why is it so problematic for you to say:
- “No, I do not agree that admins should be compensated for their work”
- “No, I do not agree that developers of free software should be compensated for their work”
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
You called me dishonest when I said that you were evading to answer your opinion on the value of the work from admins. I ask you then to make it as clear as possible, to remove any chance of doubt.
You put a bunch of links to past conversations, but you highlight things that are not the main point of the argument and take things out of context, and you have the audacity to claim you are doing it “for context”.
Now that I got wise about your games and decided to ask you to provide receipts, you continue to evade the answer and are showing you’d rather play the victim than owning up to your opinions.
- Comment on The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent 1 week ago:
Start with the top 3. A simple “yes” or “no”.
