this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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there's a big difference between running a service on volunteers, and having full-time folks to keep things running / answer the regulation discussions / keep maintaining / keep adding the features that folks are looking for. This is not primarily an infrastructure spend. There's also an amount of legal work involved, unfortunately. So, those are some of the elements we're looking at.
Sure. But at the end of the day, economics is just a big game of resource allocation. 5M€ can get you quite a long way, and I'm wondering if we could have better use of those resources than by putting it on Mastodon.
Can it? Because I wouldn't try to run a social media company with less than that. It's kind of shocking they make do with a tenth of it. Which I guess is helped by being staffed by the equivalent of a mid-sized McDonalds franchise.
If I was going to spend that much on anything beyond servers and full time employees I would spend it on marketing, though.
Then don't make a "social media company". Change the game.
The goal is not to "compete" with social media companies. The goal is to build tools and digital infrastructure that can let people communicate with each other (a) cheaply, (b) without intermediaries and (c) with robust protections against malicious actors of varying scale.
Give me 5 million euros and one single year, and I can definitely build it. Fuck, give me half a million and I'll do it.
I did not, in fact, make a social media company. Rochko did.
And hey, I mostly agree with the diagnosis in your link. As always with business pitches, I'm more skeptical of the leap in logic from the diagnosis to the proposal for an alternative.
Also, if a software developer tells me they will have a project done in a year I immediately walk away. Show me a production plan or don't give me a deadline. But hey, that's just me and you're not actually pitching.
For now, if Flipboard gets there with Surf we can revisit and talk about whether they needed 5 million and a year or not. I don't think it's a terrible idea, but also don't think it's going to explode. I'm ready to be proven wrong, though.