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Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter? (variety.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.

Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.

Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.

We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I effectively pay to use my IRC, XMPP and email, since I rent a VPS. But that payment earns me much more pleasant usage experience (in case of my IRC bouncer) and a lot of cotrol over my servers in case of the latter two. So while paying a subscription feels a bit bad, I think it's worth it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (10 children)

We can't expect everyone else to self-host. The question is, what would be the most viable solution for a better (ad free, Surveillance Capitalism free) Internet that can work at scale?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

small communities of self-hosters that offer the services to those who don't possess the knowledge to do it themselves. These communities would self-host federated protocols (eg XMPP) so people can interact with others no matter which server they use.

Ideally maintained through users donations. If you want to be less idealistic, maybe small co-ops which charge a reasonable monthly/annual fee and provide free services for those who can't really afford to pay.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

A bit too vague. Please:

Define what the number of people in the average "small community".
Define "Reasonable monthly/annual fee".
Define what would be the cut-off point to "can't afford to pay".

The reason that I am asking you to be specific is that there is a good chance that professional providers can be more efficient than any "community-based" solution. We can have hundreds/thousands of independent professional service providers, each serving around 100-500k people, which would make a sustainable and healthy market. On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that we would be able to serve the 2 billion people on e.g Instagram by having millions of "community based" instances of Pixelfed.

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