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.
Do the expenses include the cost of labor from admins and moderators?
When there is a big issue hitting the fediverse (like an bunch of script kiddies attacking servers and pushing CSAM), are we going to just wait for the admins to clock out of the regular-jobs-that-pay-the-bills and then take a look at it?
Lemmy.world is the largest instance and is getting less than 25 cents per user in donations. Meanwhile, Facebook has shown that the true price of what a privacy-respecting social media site is around 10€/month. Do you really think that 25 cents per user is enough to keep this minimally professional?
Facebook doesn’t have a lot of reason to go be telling exactly the truth there …
The precise price doesn’t matter, but the order of magnitude does.
Even if Zuck is lying and he is pushing a high price as extortion tactic. Cut that 10€ by 4 and let’s say that the “real” price is 2.50€. That’s still 10x more than lemmy.world is getting in donations.
Maybe Facebook has bigger problems because they’re so huge; like being a bigger target for attack by hate groups.
Maybe they just really like their fancy offices and cafeterias.
Maybe it’s just better for the world if online speech is diversified over lots of small services instead of one monopoly service; and this is reflected in the way the world actually behaves towards these different services.
Why not? It’s a hobby project.
I thought we didn’t want big companies to control the fediverse? But if we want people to main-job it, then naturally you’re turning it into a business, and sooner or later the larger it gets, the largest will be, well, a big company. Naturally. A Lemmy-company, basically. Lemmy.world Ltd.
Do we want big business to run the place, or not? In the latter case, it cannot be a viable full time job, or it will naturally turn into the former if successful.