rglullis

How do you decide "what they deserve"? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?

Can you make a list of coops that provide service to its members and is overall cheaper than the equivalent commercial offerings?

If your idea for a good way to spend your hard-earned money is "to own" a service provider that gives you the privilege of participating in absolutely low stakes meetings, then sure, go for it. If you want, I can set up a server for you and you get in charge of finding members to join. Deal?

It need to be people owned.

Sounds good on paper, but the practical implementations make them not any different than any other small service provider. cosocial.ca is a Canadian co-op for Mastodon. To become a member, you must pay CA$50 per year. What kind of "ownership" does that give to you as member? Nothing, really. You can not take control of the domain or the server.

At best, you'll get some bureaucratic oversight and the "right" to make proposals regarding changes in governance: "use the money to upgrade the server or to pay the admin", "Allow some members to get free access because they are facing some hardship, yes or no?" etc.

But at the end of the day, is any of that "ownership" making you (or the other members) better off compared to a service like mastodon.green, which simply charges $1/month and gives you an account?

My own Communick offers managed hosting for things like Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy, PixelFed, GoToSocial, Takahe for those that want to have their own server but do not want to deal with the hassle of managing it or worrying about security updates. I also offer paid accounts: $29/year gives you an account at all of our "flagship" instances: meaning you can get an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale.

There are other providers like omg.lol (Mastodon account at social.lol and some other cool services for $20/year) and mastodon.green (accounts cost $1/month).

All of these servers are of course smaller and less popular than the ones that are open for registration, but unsurprisingly they are stable, well managed, free of drama and (AFAIK) never been linked to spammers or trolls. IOW, "you get what you pay for".

Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.

I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.

To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on...

Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.

A desktop, really? The specs seem to be good, but desktops have well standardized form factors for ages.

They need to go towards upgradable phones, not desktops...

I’m not sure if this has happened yet

I have more than 15 topic-specific instances, and we are in absolute agreement about why this is the best arrangement for group federation.

Also, thank you very much for leading by example. Lets hope the bigger instances also see the value in the initiative.

Replace "hashing" with "encrypted" (perhaps just using a symmetric key that the admin sets up) and then it gets impossible to know for any outsiders who is the real user behind the vote.

I for one just wish people understood once and for all that anything you do on social media is public.

If you are not comfortable backing up your opinion or action, then don't do it.

How long until it gets abused, and trolls start brigading though instances that hide their votes?

Sure, I know it exists. It is somewhat stale in content, though.

there are no bots posting to !emacs@communick.news and the selfhosted.forum/gearhead.town/metacritics.zone communities since at least November of last year. Could that restriction be lifted?

Specific to emacs: maybe it would be better to outright move the community to programming.dev?