Sadly thats fediverse, instance come and go as they like. Because behind them are humans that do this in their freetime ( most of the time out of their own pocket ). Big respect to everyone hosting a federated instance.
It shouldn’t be like this. If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.
@rglullis@Rooki (OT: the last paragraph in the post has a couple of typos. I believe it should be TINSTAAFL (also I recommend making it an abbr for the less informed), and there is an “under” that should probably be “understand”)
“No such thing as a free lunch” (alternatively, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, “There is no such thing as a free lunch” or other variants, sometimes called Crane’s law[1]) is a popular adage communicating the idea that it is impossible to get something for nothing. **The acronyms TANSTAAFL, TINSTAAFL, and TNSTAAFL are also used. **
You are right about the “under”, though. I “accidently half a word”, there. Will fix.
Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It's shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.
Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.
"There's no such thing as free lunch" is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.
It's a dumb metaphor that doesn't even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.
That didn't mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.
Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It’s shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.
Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.
because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.
You know another way to not deal with assholes on your instance? Charge just enough to make sure that people are minimally invested, and point them to the Terms of Service as the reason they are getting kicked out for egregious behavior.
maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed
If better tools was all that was missing, Big Tech would develop them and get rid of all these nasty meat bags. And as much as Google tries to do just that, they still hire tens of thousands of content moderators around the world for YouTube.
You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning,
The fact that things do not have a price do not mean that they are free. Somebody had to pay to get the food done and the volunteer can not take the hours worked in a kitchen soup and exchange for a discount on their electricity bill.
Why would big tech ever want to get rid of nasty meat bags when nasty meat bags drive much of their engagement and thus increase their advertising revenues? We can’t escape the realities of how the human brain operates, how much it likes to be stimulated regardless of the qualities of the stimulus.
I think a much more logical goal would be to take just enough action to avoid most (but not all) legal consequences while otherwise encouraging as many nasty meat bags to encounter other nasty meat bags with opposing viewpoints as possible. That would maximize brain stimulation, increasing engagement and thus revenue. This improves the stock price and makes your boss happier with you.
But you can already see the hurdles of large instance like lemmy.world.
The costs are so immense (probably because of some unoptimized code), the software isnt “ripe” enough that it can be left alone for few months and have it run smoothly. It needs permanent monitoring and maintenance. And that doesnt even go into the moderation issues.
I am saying that the Fediverse will only be sustainable if everyone pays a little bit. Relying on a few generous souls to make up for the thousands of freeloaders will always take every instance to a ceiling which is, frankly speaking, very low. LW has 18k MAU. This number is laughably low for any social network.
Not to single you out, but this attitude is unbelievably frustrating. Everyone here loves to waste hours of their day signaling their virtue and complaining about all the evils done by the corporations, but so few are actually willing to put any skin in the game. they complain about entshittication from Spotify and Netflix, but religiously continue paying their subscriptions while refusing to support smaller, independent businesses.
Well, at this point I would like to point out that I religiously avoid paying anything to hostile services, and that I do support the small independent instance I’m on.
The idea is to get rid of “instances with open registrations”. It doesn’t mean that paywalled instances are the only way to achieve that.
We can have more people running their own small servers to share with their friends
We can have companies providing ActivityPub accounts to customers of their services (e.g, sign-up to the NYT and get access to any of the servers managed by Mastodon GmbH)
We can have companies operating their own AP servers for their employees
We can have phone/internet companies giving access to their AP servers as long as they have a contract or a positive balance on the top-up
We can have “pay it forward” instances: admins put up donations, but they explicitly declare how much they want per active user account. The instance only accepts new registrations when it has secured the resources.
I believe in co-op instance management solution like beehaw uses.
$2.00/year would mean i would require 200 active paying users per year. thats not too bad
the world as it is with its twitter/reddit is survivor bias. so many other social media sites have come and gone, why would the fediverse be any different?
eventually it will be instances who solved for the long-term problems of financial solubility and technical maintenance requirements.