I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
I’ve wondered a lot about this.
Ultimately, I think we’re going to need to compensate the devs, mods and contributors if we want this to succeed long term.
How to do that with a group that is (understandably) allergic to ads is another question.
Oh, it is absolutely understandable when it comes to the ads part. But there are other ways. Plus, there are ethical ads and Open Source ad companies, maybe that’s something to look into. I just know we need to explore ethical options and not just rely on donations.
Yup. I wonder how much transparency and a self sustaining model (vs maximize profits) could bring down costs to even make it a subscribe free but with ethical ads or something.
It’s tough. We want to walk the line between accessible for everyone vs thing that crashes and relies pretty heavily on a handful of posters and an even smaller number of mods.