I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it’s a matter of time before it’s enshittified.
I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there’s a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than “big tech” and get more done than just donation based development.
It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?
What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?
Sadly the UX here sucks compared to for profit platforms like Bluesky, I don’t know of a good solution, but money is probably needed.
Non-profits only IMO. Pay folks what they deserve, all the rest goes back in.
Investors can’t go near it. They’re always the problem.
How do you decide “what they deserve”? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?
I mean we’ve determined what a living wage is, right? Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?
There are plenty of jobs similar to the roles that would be needed that we can compare to you. I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly. It’s not rocket science.
I also don’t think mods have to be paid. They can be, but I don’t see it as necessary. I’m talking about the instance maintainers.
Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?
In a centrally-planned system? Yes, it is very hard.
I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly.
I assume you mean that you had to give a quote to a client?
If that is the case, your client has sole decision-making power and has “only” to evaluate whether the price you were asking for your labor is lower than the value you’d be bringing them.
How does this compare with a coop, where (presumably) the member-owners have all to agree on the price of labor? Are they going to accept to pay market rate for the people working there? Are they first find whoever is willing to work for the cheapest and then set the price on that?
Dude you’re acting like this is some Herculean feat when coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations. This is a very strange hill to die on.
coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations
The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.
IOW, I’m not arguing that “coops” can not exist. What I am arguing is we will never get rid of Big Tech if we keep forcing the idea that only community-owned services are acceptable models of governance.
When it comes to hosting instances, yes, I do believe we have to universally keep investors/a for-profit structure out.
keep investors/a for-profit structure out.
Putting these two in the same bag, this is what OP and I are saying.
Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend “on profit”, the methods that and incentives are wildly different.
You could do a for profit without investors. Any profit goes back to employees and paying users. Make it the operating agreement from the get go and no one could come in.
Non profit in many places means you can’t sell a service. So you rely on donations. Which means you’re constantly asking for donations.
Leadership changes. Employees change.
Look at valve: when Gabe dies it could become an absolute shitshow for us. We cannot depend on generosity and benevolence. It has to be a non-profit to limit the potential damage and force transparency.
Yeah I regret commiting to a pc steam library, its just as bad as going console
FIFA is a non-profit. Doesn’t exactly make them a good organisation.
Didn’t say being a mom-profit makes it good
Even non-profits aren’t immune to hostile takeovers. OpenAI is a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit, and that hasn’t stopped them from turning into something indistinguishable from a regular for-profit company. They’ve also been making noise about abandoning the fig leaf of the non-profit.
Mozilla is another one where nominally they’re a for-profit controlled by a non-profit, but they’re now getting into shoving ads in your face just like any other company.
It is harder to turn bad when you’re a non-profit but not impossible, without something of a poison pill that makes it unacceptable to for-profit takeovers.
Didn’t say they were immune.
Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.
I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.
To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on…
Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.
Yeah but Valve is centralized ownership still. One guy has majority and that makes a difference. A coop could be customer led from get go. 51% customers 49% employees or something like that.
The point being if you structure it as for profit you can charge for things and build a good product. You can make rules that says 100% of the profits have to be redistributed and no one can change that. It’s how many farm co-ops work.
I think there’s a difference in definitions, as well as difference between non-profit/not-for-profit and charities. As far as I know what your described is a non-profit and a non-profit can sell services.
Id like to see non for profits hosting servers for their members. fandom conventions, maker spaces, etc. It would also make sense for them to host communities around what they do. scifi literature, games, 3d printing, etc.
Right, long term nothing is more important than retaining agency over their major methods of interaction with members and fostering vibrant online communities that feed into positive momentum.
Non profit coops. It need to be people owned.
It need to be people owned.
Sounds good on paper, but the practical implementations make them not any different than any other small service provider. cosocial.ca is a Canadian co-op for Mastodon. To become a member, you must pay CA$50 per year. What kind of “ownership” does that give to you as member? Nothing, really. You can not take control of the domain or the server.
At best, you’ll get some bureaucratic oversight and the “right” to make proposals regarding changes in governance: “use the money to upgrade the server or to pay the admin”, “Allow some members to get free access because they are facing some hardship, yes or no?” etc.
But at the end of the day, is any of that “ownership” making you (or the other members) better off compared to a service like mastodon.green, which simply charges $1/month and gives you an account?
In my country a coop is a legal entity and it does give you actual ownership. And we do have data coops where people pay, and vote on how services should be developed.
Can you make a list of coops that provide service to its members and is overall cheaper than the equivalent commercial offerings?
Why would it have to be cheaper? I’m not going to make a list. It’s a normal form of organisation in my country. For example my whole apartment complex is owned by the people who live there. We vote on what we want to pay in rent and how we want to spent the money.
And the same can be done with data coops. Here is one: https://data.coop/
There are others, with other values.
Why would it have to be cheaper?
“Being cheaper” is a very good proxy for “being more accessible” and “easier to be universally accepted”.
If the coop model gives you some (real or perceived) benefit to you, great. But if the cost of acquiring/maintaining those benefits are too high, it becomes more of yet-another status symbol than an actual development for society at large.
You’ll never be able to compete with mega corps that can scale and sell your data, in order to provide a service for free. Price will never be the selling point of a more democratic web.
You’ll never be able to compete with mega corps
I gave an example elsewhere on this post: cosocial (a coop) charges $50/year from its members for Mastodon access. mastodon.green (not a coop) charges $12/year. Communick (not a coop) charges $29/year for Mastodon and Lemmy and Matrix and Funkwhale with 250GB of storage. omg.lol charges $20/year for Mastodon, and some other cool web services.
All of these small and independent service providers are offering more than a coop, and they can not scale beyond a certain point. If the service is built on FOSS, then it means that if the business model becomes successful it will face competition.
Painting co-ops as the only alternative against Big Tech is the mistake, here. Smaller ISVs could make things cheaper, serve the market ethically and efficiently without requiring everyone to worry about “owner duties”.
At best, you’ll get some bureaucratic oversight and the “right” to make proposals regarding changes in governance: “use the money to upgrade the server or to pay the admin”, “Allow some members to get free access because they are facing some hardship, yes or no?” etc
That sounds pretty good to me
If your idea for a good way to spend your hard-earned money is “to own” a service provider that gives you the privilege of participating in absolutely low stakes meetings, then sure, go for it. If you want, I can set up a server for you and you get in charge of finding members to join. Deal?
I’d say this is just like a nice e-mail provider that provides you with email and a bit of cloud storage and a place to sync your addressbook and calender for like $5 a month. We could do the same with social media and the Fediverse.
Regardless of the size of the sponsor, commercial sponsorship would be fine, as long as they don’t post ads or try to influence the content in any way.
Unfortunately, that’s a combination that likely will never happen. Imagine if Reddit never had ads or bowed down to corporate pressure. That’s not a viable business model for a capitalist organization.
I don’t even mind ads that much, for me it’s more about the algorithms that push certain agendas and are not open source (for ads and content alike)
That’s hard. I like an algorithm I can control. Maybe could do ads in search only. I don’t know. Kind of hate ads.
Let’s look at email as a history example, google gobbled up everyone for gmail.
If fediverse goes the way of email where it infinitely will grow and compete for the most part eventually businesses offering instances as services will be the norm, we can just jump ahead and try to it right before big tech starts to gobble it up.
Businesses already offer that like elestio
Elastio seems to be a devops platform as opposed to a standalone “buy my service to get a feature rich access to the fediverse or mastodon or peertube specifically, whatever” service like the typical email service providers nowadays
To add to the initial comment, the reason why we would want this is the same reason why we should be donating to instance admins, it only gets more competitive and more work involved the bigger the fediverse gets and the more competitive it gets with offering unique experiences
Non-Profits only. ANY for profit entries will be a poisoned pill at this stage.
I just gave boost $4 to remove the ads. I prefer OSS and Non Profits absolutely, but I also acknowledge that we live in a capitalist hellscape and good things take money.
Bluesky app is open source. I wonder if someone would try and replace the ATProtocol API endpoints with Mastodon ones.
I think supporter badges would be a good monetization model for each instance. ActivityPub could allow for an arbitrary “badge” field (to my knowledge it doesn’t currently have anything like this but I also haven’t read the spec), and each server could fill it in however it likes. Other servers/users could limit displaying them if they get abused, à la pig poop balls on hexbear (or whatever it’s moved on to being called now).
Profits are a bit like internal taxes on wages.
Co-op NPOs should use these taxes to further the company’s goals instead of crude extraction into the goals of the owners.
Those aren’t perfect, because once they reach a certain size any form of corruption can have big bad consequences. The Fediverse approach to this is “decentralisation”, but all decentralisation efforts have an API vulnerability - there needs to be a central body that develops the “language” between the actors.
On the other hand, you might not have an ear for any of this, because you might be dependent on your business’ profits.
Ghost have their code open source and offer paid for hosting which is not unreasonable as you’d to pay to send bulk emails anyway even if you self-hosted (although there are free tiers from some providers if your only send a few hundred a month).
Think beyond VC backed companies. Those get tons of attention because they need it.
Investors = bad. I whole heartedly agree.
For profit doesn’t have to be bad. What if it were a worker/user co-op. Have a free product and have a paid product. If you pay for the product you get a (just one) vote. If you work for the company you get a vote. Users won’t vote for maximizing profit. But the profit means you don’t have to beg for donations.
Craigslist would be another example. For profit but no major investors so doesn’t have to prioritize profits.
A for profit worker co-op is very different than a private for-profit. A for-profit worker co-op would be fine ik my book and in fact preferable than a non worker co-op nonprofit.
My home instance is starting to do some of this, it’s talked about a lot in https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/div0
What are they looking at doing for revenue?
People who support the server have greater voting rights; no revenue steam. But I think it would be cool to sell pirate plushies!
Unrelated: If you code it’s not hard to insert ads in between the comments on your own lemmy instance. It would be a cool experience but probably would create significant vitriol and site wide bannings by most, if not all, major instances for trying.
The problem for most monitization is psychological only ; many ideas would be an unwinnable uphill battle. Yes, can put ads in but also be a leper with zero traffic. You could probably put in perks if have good coding skills or can hire good skills; but if public relations done wrong then you are “poison to the community”.
You could try to do awards ( Reddit gold) but may get laughed off the platform. It’s a tough crowd
My own Communick offers managed hosting for things like Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy, PixelFed, GoToSocial, Takahe for those that want to have their own server but do not want to deal with the hassle of managing it or worrying about security updates. I also offer paid accounts: $29/year gives you an account at all of our “flagship” instances: meaning you can get an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale.
There are other providers like omg.lol (Mastodon account at social.lol and some other cool services for $20/year) and mastodon.green (accounts cost $1/month).
All of these servers are of course smaller and less popular than the ones that are open for registration, but unsurprisingly they are stable, well managed, free of drama and (AFAIK) never been linked to spammers or trolls. IOW, “you get what you pay for”.
