No, if users paid to their own instances, the network would be fine.
if lemmy.world or some big instances got shortage of donation someday, then what should we do?
Then hopefully enough people will learn the lesson and start donating to the existing commercial instances that exist, or start supporting whatever-next comes.
Bottom line is: trying to charge people who are not your direct users is absolutely moronic.
No, that’s absolute nonsense. You want people “interacting” with your instance to also be paying you?
I’m all for charging subscriptions from users of your instances. I’m all for commercial instances, but charging from people on other servers is next-level bullshit.
Seriously, I got angry just by reading this. Imagine if Verizon wanted to charge from calls made to their customers. Imagine if Google wanted to charge people that send emails to any Gmail address.
What a stupid concept, and I haven’t even touched the crypto part of it.
There you go, straight from the source: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758 mm
To be completely honest, I simply do not want to contribute to anything that is on lemmy.world. Nothing against them, but I do not want to further increase the network dependence on any single instance.
If these communities were created on a smaller instance or (better yet) a topic-specific server, I’d gladly find a way to contribute and bootstrap them.
Unless the lawsuit is a fabrication, you are literally dismissing a story just based on who is telling it.
Political. Steve Teixeira was the one championing the focus on social. Apparently the faction that wanted him out won, and now they are getting rid of his babies, too.
Open source or GTFO. :)
Seriously, Lemmy is AGPL. Any client you do and any functionality you build on top of it must be AGPL as well.
Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork? If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?
As a concept, it could be a valid approach. But you need to put actual numbers to see if things make sense:
I think you’ll see that as soon as you start asking people to put money and to feel like they “own” it, the demands will increase and so will the costs.
For reference, the one coop I am somewhat familiar is from Mastodon: cosocial.ca. Each member pays CA$50/year for an account. I think this is particularly too expensive. There are other cheaper “commercial” alternatives that charge less:
Quantity is quality, if you have good filters in place.
I never understood people that argue something is bad by looking at the median case. The problem of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook is not due to the amount of people they have, and they were absolutely fine until they tried to exploit their userbases.
(Aside for @blaze@feddit.org: see what I mean about Fedi’s anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case)
If you are that famous or worried about trademark, you shouldn’t be using someone else’s server. Tom Hanks can just buy e.g tomhanks.actor domain and set up the @me@tomhanks.actor AP actor.
I keep repeating this: the weird part is that we still have all these companies and institutions being okay with depending on someone else’s namespace. Having the NYT still announcing their Twitter or Instagram for social media presence is the same as using aol.com for their email.
Pretty much any payment processor nowadays work in a way that the merchant has no direct access with payment data. And is there any place where Stripe and/or is not widely known?
And if you are an admin of a paid-only instance (like mine) then obviously you want to use a trustworthy processor to avoid yet-another friction point. In my case, the only people that didn’t want to use Stripe were the ones that wanted to pay me in cryptocurrency.
you’d just get a bunch of chargebacks from stolen credit cards lol.
Criminals use stolen credit cards for high value items that can be sold quickly. If criminals really wanted to do mass manipulation via AP servers, it will be easier/faster/cheaper for them to spin up their own servers than signing up for paid accounts.
The one counter-argument that I would accept though: what if bad actors running psyops become commercial providers to attract legit customers and mix it with their agents?
Another data point in favor of supporters of Dead Internet Theory .
Also, this is one more example of why it would be better if instances charged a little bit from everyone: spammers will rather run things from their own machines (or some illegal botnet) than paying something with a credit card.
I think this is a great thing, but it will be massively criticized and shot down by the “Mah privacy” crowd. There is no way to avoid a competing implementation that will ignore privacy requests, and the moment someone finds out their content is out of their home instance, they will come with the pitchforks the same way they came after the bridgy developer.
AFAIK, the increased users on fedidb are from Threads.
What are you basing these feelings on?
The only problem of excessive optimism is that you might end up alone in a hill which is not worth fighting for.
As a whole, ActivityPub servers have been losing users since its peak in 2022. We were given all the opportunity in the world to build on that momentum with the Reddit fiasco, but were absolutely afraid to grow. Until today, the discourse reeks of elitism with the “I don’t redditors here”.
Meanwhile, Bluesky has focused on building a product that can be used by the masses, without acting pretentious about who they wanted to be there. They were already getting a.sunstantial crowd from Mastodon, now they are taking the Brazilians we well.
The momentum is not in our favor, and our reactionary, anti-growth culture is not helping.
I was being sarcastic. Last week there was a big thread here were most admins people were equating “support the Fediverse” with “pay for the costs of hardware”.
That’s just as extreme, and just as short- sighted.
Enshittification is about companies that offer a bunch of things for “free” (actually, using VC funds) on an attempt to get to dominate the market first. When they get the users and establish a monopoly, the VC starts demanding to see the returns of their investment and that’s when enshittification happens.
Smaller service providers that make a living out of charging directly for their services do not need VC and have no reason to squeeze their users and the nature of the Fediverse ensures that no single provider can create a monopoly.
Small, independent businesses are healthy and should be encouraged. Saying “money = bad” is a recipe to keep things indefinitely small and unable to compete with the alternatives.