Who is “they”?

Are you at all familiar with the concept of “market segmentation”? Do you think that every user thinks and values the same as you?

Because it’s a professional service and they are willing to pay to not have to deal with:

• instance drama
• overloaded moderation teams
• other entitled users who are not paying and still find themselves in the right to complain
• admins who are doing this as hobby, so may disappear because their day job got more demanding and they can not maintain the instance
• admins who were overly enthusiastic but not experienced enough and lose a whole database
• etc, etc, etc.

There are some other benefits (specific to my business):

• I pledged to give 20% of the profits to all the open source projects I host. So people paying me are indirectly supporting the Fediverse.
• Full integration with Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix/Funkwhale
• Paying members can participate in a zero-commission crowdfunding platform (which is a shame that haven’t caught on)

You know what is funny? For years we have talked about “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”, and yet completely ignore this when it comes to the people hosting Mastodon/Lemmy/Pleroma/Matrix servers. I don’t think people really have learned the lesson.

You are creating a strawman. I’m not saying that this particular model proposed by OP is something interesting. I’m not going to respond to that or the crypto part, but I can respond about the “money movement” required by my service :

Who will keep the money?

It’s a business. People pay for a service. The service provider keeps it.

Who will calculate what users will have to pay?

It’s a business. There is a price for the service. Service provider says “I want $X/month for the service”. Customer pays if the price is acceptable to them, and goes elsewhere if not.

Who will verify that the money is being used for the purpose it was paid for?

It’s a business. As long as the service is provided at a level that the customer is satisfied, customers have no deal in “verifying” anything.

I don’t think your analogy holds. Peering agreements is something that companies do regardless of contractual obligations with their customers.

And they certainly do not require blockchains or cryptocurrency.

But why shouldn’t we have a mechanism that can make fediverse sustainable, not reply on the kindness of humanity?

You charge from your users. The costs of any interactions from other instances will be because of your users.

Open source doesn’t means enjoy everything for free.

Please show me the receipts of every payment you’ve made for every time you’ve used some free software.

What really pisses me off is that you probably never even tried to see for yourself what type of costs and work entails running an instance, yet you are here claiming to have a solution to all of the fediverse. The more you try to argue your position the more clueless you sound.

That’s just as extreme, and just as short- sighted.

Enshittification is about companies that offer a bunch of things for “free” (actually, using VC funds) on an attempt to get to dominate the market first. When they get the users and establish a monopoly, the VC starts demanding to see the returns of their investment and that’s when enshittification happens.

Smaller service providers that make a living out of charging directly for their services do not need VC and have no reason to squeeze their users and the nature of the Fediverse ensures that no single provider can create a monopoly.

Small, independent businesses are healthy and should be encouraged. Saying “money = bad” is a recipe to keep things indefinitely small and unable to compete with the alternatives.

No, if users paid to their own instances, the network would be fine.

if lemmy.world or some big instances got shortage of donation someday, then what should we do?

Then hopefully enough people will learn the lesson and start donating to the existing commercial instances that exist, or start supporting whatever-next comes.

Bottom line is: trying to charge people who are not your direct users is absolutely moronic.

No, that’s absolute nonsense. You want people “interacting” with your instance to also be paying you?

I’m all for charging subscriptions from users of your instances. I’m all for commercial instances, but charging from people on other servers is next-level bullshit.

Seriously, I got angry just by reading this. Imagine if Verizon wanted to charge from calls made to their customers. Imagine if Google wanted to charge people that send emails to any Gmail address.

What a stupid concept, and I haven’t even touched the crypto part of it.

There you go, straight from the source: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758 mm

Unless the lawsuit is a fabrication, you are literally dismissing a story just based on who is telling it.

If they were shutting down their mastodon instance but continuing their efforts to work on Social Media that is open and not just an instrument of Surveillance Capitalism, you’d have a point.

But they didn’t. They shut down the instance because of some internal political struggle and their interest in becoming an ad company themselves.

Political. Steve Teixeira was the one championing the focus on social. Apparently the faction that wanted him out won, and now they are getting rid of his babies, too.

Details of the lawsuit.

They shouldn’t be “running a social media”, they should be working on making their browser the best client for the Social Graph that is ActivityPub.

Have the apps API access been officially restored?

No, they won’t be and the majority of people didn’t care. Which is kind of my point?

private API keys stop working

That will not happen. If they kill the API for good and do the same thing that happened at Twitter, all the bots from Reddit are going to disappear and it’s going to cause a hit on Reddit traffic.

The number of people who cared enough about third-party apps is not enough to affect their bottom line, so as long as they managed to get (say, 80% of the Apollo/Sync/Infinity users into the official client is enough)

Nah, there is no more concerted effort from the mods to get people out of Reddit. The mods that still wanted to take action were kicked out, the others that remained are too afraid to lose their “power mod” status or were appointed by Reddit itself to take charge.

it will take some other new event to take place for people to get mobilized again. Reddit won that battle.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a post of Taylor Swift or someone from /r/wallstreetbets convincing the mob to short RDDT and to move to Lemmy, we are talking about any random scenario that manages to get 300k people interested in Lemmy.

how are instances supposed to handle 300k new users overnight?

They won’t. Not at first. First we will get maybe 50k, LW will do their thing and try to gobble up the majority of users, alien.top can also help absorb part of this crowd and I could even finally convince some other admins to set up fediverser on their instances to help with the migration.

But the important thing is that this type of backing from the mainstream would mean free marketing.

do you expect those hundreds of thousands of new users to get a Communick subscription?

All of those people, of course not. But I expect the increased user base and media attention to bring the following:

• more instance admins realizing that this is not sustainable to be run as a hobby
• power users who want to run their own instance
• companies looking to establish their presence online (therefore looking for a quick/simple way to set up an instance)
• increased usage in the topic-based instances, which can open potential revenue streams.
• more people realizing the limitations of the server-centric approach and becoming interested in a single “Social Browser app”

All of those things translate indirectly into more business opportunities, none of which need to sacrifice the ideals of the open social web.

deleted by creator

“oh, I want it to grow, I just don’t it want to grow with people that I don’t like”

You can dress it however you want, it’s still elitist, reactionary and exclusive.

Quantity is quality, if you have good filters in place.

I never understood people that argue something is bad by looking at the median case. The problem of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook is not due to the amount of people they have, and they were absolutely fine until they tried to exploit their userbases.

(Aside for @[email protected]: see what I mean about Fedi’s anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case)