this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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I don't think you understand what a volunteer service is
I understand it pretty well. What I don't understand is why some people only want to participate here if it means they can get to free ride on "volunteers".
In a sibling comment, you say "if providing the service is too much, the solution is to stop doing it". Fine, I fully agree with it. But do you realize that this implies that sooner or later we are going to run out of people with the capacity (or willingness) to do this work?
We are not talking about any small-time instance. It's the third largest instance by active user count. Above it, only mastodon.social and mstdn.jp. If the third largest instance has an admin that might have to stop providing the service in order to find another job so that they can make fucking rent, isn't that a sign that this is not sustainable?
Using the site, interacting with it and participating is providing service. Without those people there would be no content. Showing up is providing service.
Is it really?
Do you think it's quantifiable?
I can go and say "my work as an admin is worth $XX,XXX/month, so this is how much I'd like to get paid to do it". Now, some people will agree with it and pay for it. Some will not, and will look for some cheaper alternative.
If more admins went to on to adopt a similar approach and stipulated first how much their work is worth before even setting up an instance and if users went on to refuse the offer, what would they do?
Can you go around and say "my work as an user of Lemmy (or Reddit, or LinkedIn) is worth $YY per post, or $ZZ,ZZZ per month, and this is how I'd like to get paid to do it?"
Will anyone take you on your proposal?
And if admins refused to accept your offer, what do you think they would do?
As a data point: I may have stopped the alien.top mirroring bots, but I am still running them locally to browse Reddit content. To this day, the niche communities I used to sub there have more interesting content than anything here. So don't think that whatever we are posting here is worth anything.