rglullis

The microblogging side of the Fediverse definitely has a cultural problem: people keep thinking that the instance that they join should be an indication of what "tribe" you belong to, and this can be worse that high-school politics. The only way that you can truly avoid issues with power-tripping admins is by running your own instance, but even that doesn't help much when there are some instances around (cough mastodon art cough) that seem to love the drama and play the "everything I don't like is literally hitler" game.

Anyway, if you are still looking for an alternative: I have a small, professionally managed Mastodon instance that has the simple goal of offering a reliable service at an affordable price.

The "rule" of social media is that users split 1%/9%/90% on creators (prolific posters), participants (comments and reshares content that might be interesting to them) and lurkers (don't necessarily signup and only visit to read). That means that we have 200 times more "active" (0.05% vs 10%) users on social media relative to wikipedia. The operational costs and the staff required to moderate these sites should follow this proportion as well.

• The entirety of the English Wikipedia can be stored in a single commodity hard disk. The entire database (with revisions and all) is less than 1TB. All other wikipedias combined amount to something similar. This is probably less data than what Reddit ingests every day.

• Less than 0.05% of the Wikipedia users have done any type of contribution to the content. The absolute majority is just visiting to read it.

• The content of an encyclopedia changes way less often than any social network. Any page written can be a resource used for any high-school student doing research for an assignment. How many people bother to revisit week-old memes on Reddit or imgur, let alone something written decades ago? Yet, both Reddit and Wikipedia need to store all their content forever.

Ok, we will start going in circles already, but isn't that a bit of a "self-defeating prophecy"?

You say you like what it's becoming, but you don't want to support bootstrapping it. At the same time, history is showing us that any attempt to make the fediverse more popular is making the instances to crumble under their own weight because there is not strong backing after a certain size.

It's $10/year that we are talking about here, not a life-changing investment. If everyone keeps expecting high-quality content and an already optimized system that is able to be a home of billions of internet users (because the only realistic way for you get all the niche communities here will be when there are so many people here to the point that makes even the long tail a sizable group), then we will never get it.

Good for you, but I specifically asked if you would join a server that charged from all users.

Also, if you don't mind me asking: how much are you contributing, and what if I told you that it would cost you a lot less to sign up to a professionally managed instance than whatever it is you are giving away each month?

(on reddit) content creators and mods don't see a penny either.

Yeah, but since when is this considered fair? Facebook has one million faults, but at the very least they pay their moderation and safety teams.

The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.

Is there any donation-based instance where the admins can make a living out of their labor? Even mastodon.social with more than 6 million users can only manage to have two developers on payroll, and they pay themselves a ridiculously low salary.

https://www.brex.com/journal/gross-profit-vs-net-profit

• The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.

• Donations only "work" if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don't see a penny out of it.

That is not true. Twitter was not profitable and they were never "honest". They engaged in ad tracking and data mining like all Big Tech.

There are other options for my time

What about the time of the people developing the software and the things that you want to use? Software doesn't grow on trees.

Yeah, plenty of things have become subscriptions because some asshole MBA decided that it is better to try to continue milk consumers instead of offering a quality product once. But on the other hand, there are plenty of services that have an ongoing operational cost and can not be priced fairly if we just charge it once. If it is fair to pay our phone lines or water bill for their monthly cost, why wouldn't it be fair to pay for a digital service that costs every month to host your data, keep it secure and up-to-date?

I hope there’s some way a distributed network like Lemmy can succeed, I really enjoy what it’s becoming.

And to go back to your original response: isn't that at least worth of some appreciation? Do you need to wait for the network to grow to start supporting it now by subscribing to a provider that costs $10/year (less than a dollar per month)?

Yes, and this is why I've been saying for months already that if we really want to have a viable alternative to shit services we get from Big Tech, we need to start putting our money where our collective mouth is.