OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
I agree donating to instances and to things you believe in is a good idea.
But declaring that paying for things means they aren't going to be controlled by shitty corporations is just ignoring every other aspect of the global economy.
I don't know that I agree. Paying to support a site that supports your community isn't sufficient, by itself, to protect you from enshittification. But it's a necessary first step. Because sure as hell a website run by a for profit corp, that doesn't charge you to use it, is making its money off you. And if you want to lessen the percentage of your life directly controlled by corporations you need to get away from corporate social media.
I'm excited by looking at Lemmy instances over the past few months and seeing how many of them are openly and transparently discussing finances with their communities - this is how much running the instance costs, this is how much the community has given us, this is who makes decisions about our site and this is how we make decisions, these are our future goals and plans for the future, etc, etc. Sure they have to work with Amazon Web Hosting etc in order to function at all but making decisions that actually put users first and being transparent in both finances and decision making is a huge improvement from the FaceTwitTokGram monolith.
The problem is if you pay for it you still end up without privacy.
Bingo.
Devil's advocate here - as soon as you introduce monetization to the use of a service you have locked in it's potential as an income stream which will inevitably lead to the downside you are afraid of.
Fediverse services being distributed means no central host has to bear the entire weight. I could probably take on all of the server load that I use if I repurposed my PleX server:
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1592223884107218944
This is not about money, it is about control.
Monetization of users will never be enough. They will also want to sell ads and paid promotional content.
Source: Back in the day, Imgur was a paid service. You paid $2/mo and you could upload more than 200 images, you could link directly to them, and they did not expire. End of transaction. I paid for imgur and used it as described. But they wanted more. Instead, they cancelled paid accounts, and made it free*. No more direct linking, instead you had to go to their ad-riddled site and also be exposed to the community comments on any image. Eventually they changed the UI to 'trap' people into doomscrolling through images while showering them with ads.
Yep. It's simply not how greed works.
They'll never say "Oh since we're making millions of dollars a month, we don't need to sell user data". They'll just do both, because there's always greedy people at the top pushing for every penny of profit.
It would be nice to run some nodes attached to your favorite instance to distribute the bandwidth cost.
Well, first of all, this is capitalism - if people suddenly were okay with paying for the big online services that are currently completely free but harvest a lot of user data, they're just going to put the paywall up AND harvest your data at the same time. Why choose between one option or the other for monetization when you can combine them and make more money from both?
Besides, speaking of the fediverse - due to its decentralized nature, it can't really be paywalled or monetized. If some instance decides to put up a paywall or ads for some reason, you can just hop to another instance and have access to pretty much the same content.
Your first paragraph is what the website formally known as Twitter is doing. There's an option to pay $8 a month for various perks, yet the site continues to harvest their data. Yet, a lot of people are paying that $8 for whatever reason.
No. I would be fine with the Internet returning to a bunch of little passion project sites. I hate the internet as it is today.
Passion projects still cost bandwidth, if not hosting fees.
Also, major news and media sites are not going anywhere. Little passion project sites will not replace a platform like YouTube. Serving video is expensive.
@stabby_cicada I think digital public space is as important as physical public space. A lot of this communication space is well provided by private people and companies, but to ensure freedom nation states must also invest in it. Just like physical public space, it is a common good, a res-publica.
Okay, I might be super ignorant. But how am I Lemmy.world's product if I'm not paying anybody any money and I'm not seeing any ads? Is there something to this that I don't know about? I can't see how my participation in this is getting monetized by anybody.
And in extension, how does paying prevent you from being the product then?
Worst case: You pay and are still the product. Less worse case: You pay to prevent being the product, but never would have been the product anyways.
At the moment it's probably still paid by donations and by the people hosting it, but like any site, it may need to be monetized to keep going, or even just if its owners decide to. It's not like there's any guarantee of privacy just because it's in the fediverse.
Paying for website access will only make things worse, not better, because the major players are so extremely malevolent.
Spot on!
As soon as the disgusting tendrils of capitalist greed get a taste, the whole game is cooked. It's better as a hobby project. Just donate to your instance to help cover costs!
Yup, they'll take membership money and then still put ads on.
I'm broke, and have no capacity to make money in a capitalist society. This isn't to say what I do doesn't have value, it's just not valuable to rich people.
Am I just FUBAR in this purely-transactional NWO?
Not necessarily in the fediverse world. If server costs are being covered by donations from 4% of users, a volunteer admin will probably be quite happy whereas a commercial operator will undoubtedly think "damn I have 96% freeloaders, that's leaving money on the table".
Unfortunately I’d say yes.
U ain't got holes?
Edit o man what a comment lol
Those who have money can afford better than what I got.
It's not a matter of having nothing to offer, it's that what I do isn't bought by people with money. Value ≠ What people pay for. Case in point: Funko-Pop figurines.
That is what taxes are for. The Constitution enables the government to establish "post offices and postal roads". Those purposes are served these days by the equipment that comprises the backbone of the internet. There is no reason it shouldn't be federally funded.
Ok can we also regulate the infrastructure like a utility, please?
Absolutely makes sense to me. On top of that it should be treated as necessary as water or electricity with it universally provided to all citizens for a nominal fee supported by tax revenue.
Counterpoint: In this day and age hosting and sharing text can be done on donated resources, we have basically reached post-scarcity there .
I absolutely do not care enough about any site I use to be willing to pay. If it disappeared, I'd find something else to do with my time, just like I did reddit. I accept that I am the product, and simply do not care.
This is nothing but eBegging. The internet was forcefully taken from the people who created projects out of passion, and now those people who forced their way in are like "yOu MuSt PAy Us!". How about no?
yeah but I care enough to maybe self host a social media and plex server for my friends / family which is the same thing. If everyone did that and or chipped in for their friend/family to do it, we could rebuild some community structure
itd be nice if the usa had a public free hosting service that was paid for by a 25 or 50 dollar flat tax.
I sometimes pay for things and still end up being the product. Smart TVs sell tons of data, and you may still pay buckets for one. YouTube Premium is no guarantee that Google won't use your data in other ways. A modern luxury car has tons of ways to spy on you.
This is why I refuse to bow down and accept monetization, because it's never enough money for them. they want all of your money. All of it. Any money that you have that they don't is evil to them.
If Lemmy stops being ad free or charges money I'm gonna leave here just as fast as I did reddit.
For as long as selling user data is still profitable, it will continue regardless of whether users pay to access the site or not.
i'm being the best product that i can be!!!
There's two parts to this problem often overlooked, that on one side, is down to whomever runs an instance and two, the larger hosting industry (and by extension, the developers of kbin/lemmy/mastodon/etc).
The admins often have a tendency for vying for their instance to be the biggest and bestest. Stop that, grow the communities you have an interest in supporting instead of just wanting to be the biggest instance. Don't use this as a penis extender. You're not helping. And this idea of being the biggest just gives us another Reddit or Twitter instead of a federated network of systems.
The hosting industry is milking the ever living daylights out of servers and resources. Cheaper hosting will make hosting new instances much less reliant on sponsors and the like. Add to that that domain registrars are also milking the ever living daylights out of domain registrations.
Ofcourse, the developers of the fediverse apps optimizing their code as much as can be done without falling behind on general development, which reduces the resources needed to host an instance, helps in that regard too.
Just saying people need to foot the bills, without first looking if those bills are actually necessary and just, just shifts the blame on the users.
blahaj.zone provided an example of this recently. They reported that their finances are no longer sustainable but reassured their users that things will be fine because the fix was straightforward ... move everything off of AWS to a cheaper hosting provider.
Adding to the problem is ISPs.
I personally was part of putting fiber in the ground in my country from 2007-2011, there has been fiber in the ground up to peoples doorsteps and fiber connections between all street level hubs, since then.
It's only now, since 2022, that for an obscene premium compared to cable and copper, you can get fiber as a domestic subscriber, STILL limited to 1/1G and with fair use limits (going over 100GB in a day gets you throttled to a snails pace).
And even though the technology is present and available to go well beyond 1/1G, no ISP will provide.
There's plenty people with hardware at home capable of hosting substantial sized instances for federated systems. They just can't get the bandwidth to do so.
And with can't, make sure to understand this is in no way a technical limitation.
It's 100% down on restrictions by ISPs and "the industry", they don't want people to have that capability to host content themselves.
My opinion is that if the fediverse would set up an online shopping page where people can sell things and the site owners would get a cut of the proceeds that that would kill two birds with one stone.
One, the fediverse could be profitable for the site owners, and two, we could break our reliance on sites like eBay and OfferUp and let go and Facebook and Amazon for selling goods to one another.
You wouldn't even have to worry about payment processors because the United States government now has an instant money transfer service that you can utilize instead of MasterCard and Visa, and if that failed zelle would be another good option.
I have the idea and it's essentially worthless without implementation so if anyone wants to take it on it would be much appreciated because that is a change I would love to see in the world.
Hard pass.
Yay for supporting sites you want to stick around!
Gentle reminder to watch out for places that take your money for a product and still treat you as a data factory. Such as the three largest US based tech companies.
Internet Giant: "You need to pick one:"
a) pay for the service,
b) accept we'll sell your data,
c) accept we'll show you ads.
Consumer: "Er, okay... I pick (a)"
Internet Giant: "So (d) then. All of the above."
Who pays for the data stored on the Blockchain?
Who pays for those server costs?
Regardless of what you think of crypto, there is some self-sustaining 'business model' there where storage and compute is paid for by the user (transaction fees).
Technology for a Solar-Punk future.
Airships and hydroponic farms...