rglullis

Sorry, I don't see how what you are talking about relates to my comment. At all.

I am not saying that people should be forced to pay, at least no that they need to pay to any specific admin. What I am saying is that we should stop to hand wave the total operational cost of an instance. Keeping the servers running, developing fixes and improvements to the software, dealing with moderation issues... these are all costs that need to be covered by someone.

Some people are willing to do all this work just to avoid "paying" someone else, but they end up paying with their own labor, their own server, their own time. If they are willing to do all of this, good for them. But for the majority of people who are simply looking for a social media alternative that is more ethical, it will be better for them (and everyone else) if they just go on to contribute with direct financial support and give a a few bucks every month.

Brutalinks does not have separate communities, so it works more like HackerNews/lobste.rs

I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I disagree on the solution. I think that us insisting on the donation model is putting an artificial limit on further growth. It "works" for this 1M-2M MAU, but these numbers are not enough to attract other players and who might be willing to try different approaches.

I think we need to change the general mindset that we "need" the donation model to keep the people around, and flip to a system where every user is expected to pay a little bit. And yeah, you might argue that not everyone is able to afford it, but it would easier to come with systems where not-paying is the exception instead of the rule. We can have a system where every N paying subscribers guarantee one free spot, with N=2, 3, 5, 10, up to the admin. We can have a system (like I have in Communick) where customers can buy "multiple seats" and invite whoever they want. Alternatively, we can set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

If we all donate a little bit to the project, their budget will be larger. If their budget is larger, they can get more steady collaborators.

And even if they can't get more people, by helping them we show we value all the work they have done already.

Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can't afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.

I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.

I’m glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us.

What "whale"? Communick costs less than $2.50 per month. It is less than the average donation people send around.

We ‘pay’ by adding content and being members of the community

No one can use your content to pay their bills.

We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit

The network is not expanding. It is stuck in this 1M-2M monthly active users (if you count all of the Fediverse) and Lemmy/kbin/piefed is hovering around 50-55k/MAU for two years already.

Meanwhile, Reddit's revenue has grown 62% in 2024 (from $800M in 2023 to to $1.3B last year). Do you really think they care about losing a few thousand users who are all talk but no bite?

It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut.

There were other platforms offering free video and free hosting as well. There were even p2p alternatives. Remember Joost? It's not that people didn't have a choice then and YouTube was better. It's that could Google leveraged its capital to run Youtube at a loss for as long as needed until there was no competition left.

This is absurd and shows some ridiculous entitlement.

Software development is not just a drive-thru restaurant where people just make an order with their preferred menu, and 30 seconds later it is handed it out to you. Developers have to balance a bunch of priorities, deal with bugs, make sure that new features being added can be maintained in the future adequately. It's also not easy for anyone to just drop by and submit a huge piece of functionality without making sure things works as expected. And they are doing this all while getting basically no money in donations (~3000€/month, for 3 developers is less than minimum wage for pretty much all of Northern Europe).

If you think it's just a matter of "they don't care", go ahead and write the code yourself.

It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.

It shut down because the admin team didn't want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.

how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?

Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you'll be getting.

I didn't insult anyone. You are putting names out there of admins of existing instances when I was talking about the general story of about how there are constant wheel of new people coming up.

You are gasping as straws, as if ostracizing me would ever validate your arguments. This is getting tiring.

Instead of going for these complicated architectures, it would be better to simplify and make activitypub less dependent on server software.

It's not about the software. I am just pointing out that Communick's instances are only available for paying customers, so his argument (everyone should pay a little bit) is at the very least backed by his own actions.

Regarding Peertube: I see the problem of Peertube on the other end of what you are saying. People are not using that much because even those that have a presence on PeerTube still depend on YouTube to make money. If PeerTube had a way to help with monetization, then more creators would be interested in publishing exclusively on PeerTube, even if they had to pay something to upload/distribute videos.