rglullis

Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running

You know what also works like that? Any other traditional business operation.

I am saying that since 2022: we only have a shot at this succeeding if we all start putting something at stake.

That community would be perfect for https://gearhead.town/.

I don't know what you mean by "server setup of yours", but I'm glad to help. :)

The main reason is that I strongly believe that we need to move away from server-centric software for social media and to start working on a local-first application that can browse the social web "natively". I wrote a series of blog posts explaining the shortcomings of current AP server software, and how the current architecture will not be enough to achieve mainstream.

I've already developed a generic ActivityPub Server and I recently started exploring the client side as well.

Is there any chance you'd consider implementing this as a "generic" ActivityPub client? Instead of using Lemmy's API, you could query the AP endpoints directly.

I think the model is perfectly valid, so much so that I am also providing a similar service to serve this same niche. I just wanted to point out this in case someone comes to me and say "you are charging $14/month for GoToSocial, this is so much more than $COMPETITOR". Yes, my base price is higher but I do not put any limits on the database and even my lowest capacity plans have a very generous soft-limit 100GB media storage.

Well, sure, that's the usual tactic: hook users into your platform and then after they already invested the time to get things set up, make them pay.

I really hope these strategies don't become the norm. The amount of people who are willing to pay for hosting is still quite small, I don't want to have to take Communick into some race to the bottom to compete for these customers.

Also, they do charge for media storage. So, even if you are not paying for the instance you may find yourself paying a significant bill because you follow a bunch of media-heavy accounts.

They don't have pricing listed for GoToSocial, but judging by their Mastodon packages their entry options are very limited in capability. 2GB for the database and 10GB for media storage will fill up very quickly if you follow more than a few dozen accounts.

We disagree on software development and system administration being work or volunteering.

I'm having trouble parsing this. How exactly do we disagree? You think being an admin is not work? I don't get it.

If you think I am being dishonest, then please let's make it straightforward. Please respond to the following statements with "agree" or "disagree":

• Free Software Developers deserve to be paid for their work, regardless of the "price tag" or license fees.
• People working in free software should treat their craft as a hobby.
• The work of system administrators (setting up the systems, ensuring it is secure, managing backups, keeping it up to date, implementing improvements, etc) is valuable and should be properly compensated.
• If someone is offering to run and manage a server without asking a priori for any form of payment, then this means that all their work is altruistic and they should not be compensated for it.
• One Individual using a platform and actively promoting it is as important as one developer of the platform.
• One individual using a platform and actively promoting it is as important as the admin of one server running the platform.
• If there were no "volunteer run" instances, I would run my own and bear all the costs to operate it.
• People that are still using the traditional social media networks should know better. If they haven't left yet, they deserve everything bad that happens to them there.
• It's perfectly acceptable and ethical for any company that provides an utility (water, heating, electricity, phone, internet) to expect a profit.
• It's perfectly acceptable and ethical for a indie game developer to charge a monthly fee from the users while they are working on it.
• In a world where the big social media companies (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) were provably serving the interests of the users and not its investors (no data exploitation, no promotion of corporate agenda, using and promoting open standards for interoperation, no forced walled garden and artificial scarcity) and changed their business model to a simple monthly subscription fee, I would still not use them.
• In a world where the big social media companies were provably serving the interests of the users and not its investors, I would only use it if I did not have to pay and they relied on other forms of revenue to run their service, e.g, non-invasive advertisements.

Volunteering takes time and energy, doesn’t make it like work.

But running an online service and keeping it functional is work. The fact that some people do it pro bono does not make it any less valuable. When it is not pro bono, people still need/should/want to be compensated for what they do. Same thing with software development.

I’m the only one answering to you

You are not. My question to you is "why do you think that admins and developers do not deserve to be compensated for their work?" and you keep evading the answer. ;)

No. You tried that line of argument already and I am not convinced. When I am posting here I am not investing into the platform. When I make an edit on a Wikipedia page I am not expecting any form of validation or reward. It feels like "work" to you right now because you want to have someone to talk to. Once the network reaches a critical mass, you'd be able to just kick back and become just another participant like any other.

On a corporate social network, content creator would be paid by the platform

Not true. Who was getting paid by Reddit to write content there and ignore Digg? Who is getting paid by Bluesky to get people out of Twitter?

Switching social networks is a big cost and the overwhelming majority of people will not do it unless there is a very strong reason to do so. When it does happen, we see that those people will take on (re)bootstraping their communities and republishing the collective wealth of content they have found.

The Reddit Exodus didn't fail in 2023 because of lack of content. It failed because the overall system was not able to handle the influx of people. It failed because our systems are so precarious that an instance with less than 20k users can bring the whole network to a halt. These things will not fix themselves. They need actual resources, time and money.

This seems different from (...)

Because they are. You are taking two statements from two completely different contexts and mixing them together.

When I say "people need to put their money where their mouths are", I mean that the ecosystem will only mature and reach mainstream if the people that want to make it grow provide material support that goes beyond "paying for the cost of servers". They need to realize that if they want to get rid of Venture Capitalists, they themselves need to start showing to support and invest into the alternatives.

There are not enough admins out there who are willing to maintain the servers more than a few thousand users without being paid. For some of them, it might be a hobby. For everyone else, this is real work and it should be appropriately compensated. Until the people here start to show that they value the work being done by admins and developers to the point where people can make a proper living out of the service provided, we will be stuck in amaterurish, niche state of affairs. No matter how much people here are "against capitalism", this will only grow if people invest in it.

This has nothing to do with Communick, how much it costs me to operate it or how much I charge for the services. When I say "put your money where your mouth is", it can be by running your own instance from your home computer. Or contributing to the developers of a project that you like. Or running a crowdfunding campaign to get some Youtuber out of Youtube and into PeerTube. Or getting a $10/month server from elest.io with half of dozen of your friends and splitting the bill. Anything, as long as it more than "just the cost of the servers". Anything, as long as it shows a significant investment.

I pay for my instances

You cover the costs of the hardware. It's better than most, but far from enough to be considered an investment into the system. You are still relying on free labor from admins and developers.

So here’s the question: how much money should people pay for your 20 instances

Nothing. I am not expecting people to pay nothing there. Whatever it costs me to keep those instances running should be seen as an investment into the ecosystem. The more the ecosystem grows, the bigger the TAM and the more potential revenue my business can make.