I'm not arguing for "commercial revenue as a raison d'être". I'm arguing that it's a numbers game.
Even if 100% of the people here on this small, elitist, open web were "good" (which is not true), a web that is universal and only 10% "good" would be better.
Could you expand on that?
Go take a look at all Mastodon instances that ask for donations to keep running: you will see that all of them get at most 2% of their user base to donate. No donation-based instance is big enough that it can afford to pay FTE salaries for moderation and/or administration. And this is for something that affects people directly when they don't contribute.
Go take a look at some youtubers in the "1M-10M" subscriber range that have a Patreon. You will see that the most of them manage to convert 0.5% to 0.8% of their subscribers into direct contributors.
The open web (ActivityPub sans Facebook) is now at ~1 million active users. Even if we got 2% of these users to contribute $5/month to different creators, we are talking about a "Total Addressable Market" of $100k/month. Even with "best case" numbers, it is just too low to be attractive to a substantial number of creators. Compare with Youtube: it's estimated that they paid out around 7 billion USD to all its creators in 2023.
Do you know that story about the pottery teacher that made an experiment by separating students into two groups, one was going to be graded by how many pieces they made (quantity), the other by their best piece (quality), and that in the end the group that worried about quantity ended up producing better work than the ones focused on quality?
It's the same thing with the internet. You are familiar with Sturgeon's Law, right? Instead of looking at the 90% of crap (quality), we should find always to churn out as much content as possible so that the non-crap 10% can be of a reasonable number.
I honestly do not care about the dimwits on YouTube, but it pains me that I can not convince someone like @geerlingguy@mastodon.social to leave YouTube to post his content on an open alternative, because that would be the same as asking to stop having the resources to keep doing the amazing work that he does.
I'm still doggedly working on Communick and on AP-based projects because I believe in open standards and because it is our best shot at us collectively take back the web. But if we continue on this idea that the Fediverse is somehow "better" because it discriminates against small business owners, or professionals who want an online presence to promote their work, or anything that resembles "profit-motive", then this whole thing will forever remain a wasted opportunity, and we will be (once again) be giving it all away for Zuckerberg.
What we have now is just a Tyranny of the Minority. We need to grow the open web. That includes getting normies here. That includes getting people who are not part of your tribe. This includes getting people that you are able to ignore.
Why does it need monetisation?
Because the number of people who are willing to put in the work and create quality content without any potential reward is too low to be relevant. Without a credible model for monetisation, content creators will always prefer to stay in the closed platforms. If we want the open web to be a real alternative for everyone and not just a fringe thing, we need to be able to attract everyone.
data vacuumed to sell to advertisers?
Maybe I am getting old, but I do remember the time where "ads" did not automatically imply "Surveillance Capitalism". The problem is not the former, but the latter.
I have no issues with sponsorship in videos or creators plugging their stores/Pateron/Kofi in content.
Easy for you to say, but how many creators do you know that can make a living exclusively off their Patreon? And of those that do, how many managed to get known without putting their content on a closed platform?
A few reasons:
I've added support for crowdfunding to Communick earlier this year, and even people who are active on the Fediverse and have a vested interest in having monetization alternatives turned it down. This is why all we see are these completely fringe ideas that can only appeal for the get-rich-quick crowd.
seems to be down at the moment
DNS. It's always DNS... It's back now.
To answer your questions:
Who do you imagine would create the majority of these requests?
Ideally, the answer to this is "the users who sign up to a fediversed instance and see their favorite subreddit missing on the list of recommendations." If this is going to be true, I honestly do not know.
How would the “best participating instance” be determined?
By the categorization matching. If someone wants to make a community to bring a local community (e.g, for a city in Australia) it would try to match the request with aussie.zone. If it's a science focused subreddit, it should try to match it with mander.xyz, etc. Granted, this assumes that those instances are participating and using the fediverser software on their side, and at the moment I'm the only one doing, but the idea of the whole project is to create incentive for instance admins to use it.
How long would it take?
A request should trigger some type of message to the admin. So, "as long as it takes for the admin to act on the message"?
Even if a community is created, it needs people to grow it, making posts and contributing to discussion
100% agree. This is why the other leg of this creature is the "Community Ambassadors" feature, which is meant to help people to grow their communities and find them content.
I agree, but I think we need to be a little more granular than this. We don't need to create a 1:1 mapping for every subreddit, but if at least we can make it in a way that each subreddit has a recommendation in a adjacent sub-category, it will be better than just pointing to the closest/most popular community in the higher-level category.
Imagine if you are into one specific genre of games and subscribed to a bunch of different subreddits through the years for the games you enjoy. When you come to Lemmy, the recommendation is simply that you signup to a generic "Gaming" community, only to find out that no one is really talking much about your niche genre. You'd be more likely to say "this recommendation is non-sense" than "ok, I will start posting content related to the things I am interested about".
I will see if I can some improvements. In the meantime, can you please tell me if it's possible to work by switching to Desktop mode and landscape?
sub.rehab is definitely the first, but it has not been active for quite a while, is not focused on fediverse groups (also list Discord as alternatives) and I reckon that our database is already larger than theirs.
Mario Kart Tour!
What you are proposing is basically half of what I've done with fediverser and https://alien.top. The bots reposting content were regarded by the majority (or by the loud minority) as "not a good idea".