I absolutely believe the Fediverse needs to remain a space built on transparency, autonomy, and equity for users, instance admins, and developers working on ActivityPub. Look at the current state of social media, power and money concentrated in the hands of a few, stifling innovation and undermining trust. The centralized model isn’t just flawed, I think it’s had a devastating impact on an entire generation.
The Fediverse offers us a chance to rethink how the internet should work. It’s not just about being a space for free expression; it’s also about proving that a values-driven model can support those who keep the lights on. My main question is, can we implement monetization that honors our commitment to fairness, transparency, and equity, while still ensuring that the people supporting the network earn a livable wage?
This isn’t about getting rich, it’s about creating a sustainable ecosystem that empowers us all to build and maintain a trustworthy digital space. The Fediverse is already a success in its own right, but to truly evolve and thrive, I would argue we need a resource model that can drive sustainable innovation and meaningful progress.
TL;DR: I’d quit my day job tomorrow if I could secure a living wage from this work. Many in tech whold do the same. Is a monetization model that fairly compensates those who support and sustain the Fediverse possible?
It’s called Web Monetisation. It’s a standard that’s in development. In short, you, the user, can donate/pay money on any website that follows the standard. No patreon, no PayPal, no VISA, no yada yada.
Setup: You install an extension or use a compatible browser, create a wallet with a web payment provider, login / connect with the extension / browser.
Example operation: while browsing you happen upon a website (Lemmy.world for example) or web page (tilvids.com/u/thelinuxexperiment or one of the video pages), the “tip” button is made available, you hit it and 1£ is queued to be sent to the website or person on the webpage. At your leisure, you accept the transaction.
This can be implemented any number of ways e.g statistics are collected (locally) about which websites you visited with web monetisation active, at the end of the month, you are shown a breakdown of that activity. Say 10% peertube, 30% Lemmy, 40% mastodon, and a smattering of other softwares. You say “I want 10£ to be split across the different softwares with a minimum of 1£ per transaction”. Or anything else you can come up with.
That’s it. The website operator doesn’t need you to have PayPal, or patreon, or some special bank. You have a " wallet", you decide how the money is transfered and to whom, and you’re done.
I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn’t know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.
No monetization, donations only without begging.
Have any of you guys ever hosted… anything? It’s not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.
I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say “server costs are expensive” are discussing in good faith.
Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.
Instances could run stake pools and tie the two together somehow. Perhaps in this case, your username follows whatever pool you’re staking to.
It’s a solution look for a problem admittedly. It works better in the case that instances act as retail “clubs” like Costco for example. In that case, stakers to said pool could be authorized to get certain deals on products sold by that instance.
First sign of crypto and I am out. I would speculate that is true of a lot of people in the Fediverse.
From my perspective, there are only two use cases for crypto 1. Criminal activity 2. Pump and dumps
Yeah! How dare people try to have wealth that is actually borderless and self-sovereign. Those idiots are scammers! I will own nothing and be happy. Get out of my way, I need to step in line to bow before the Federal reserve (an organization that I fully admit is corrupt to the core and the very root of the issues in our society). I’m actually a Marxist living in a capitalist society. So, I am too cool to worry about the fact that I actually need money. I’ll just pretend that I don’t need it even though I REALLY do. I’ll do whatever I can to piss on viable alternatives to the Fed just because people were degenerate gamblers and got owned by obvious scammers. Sure the fed can take away my money for no reason, inflate the dollar so that my savings are worth less every single day, and do whatever they feel like with my money but that is a good thing because scammers exist in the world…
sarcasm
/s
Nice rant. A very provincial take I must I add.
Thanks. 😂 Honestly, I hate scammers. I really do. But they’re SO easy to spot.
I feel that the hivemind threw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to crypto. Thanks to Do Kwan, Sam Bankman Fried, etc, a whole viable set of technologies aimed at wrestling power from the world bank has been vilified by the hivemind.
Nono, it is not all just a scam. It is just {insert list of pretty much all relevant actors} that are scammers, the idea itself is totally legit! /s
Futher reading: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html
You are an easy target if you think the scammers are easy to spot 😅
Scammers:
- don’t tend to share any of their their source code
- usually have an initial token allocation where insiders are given early access to more than 15% of tokens. (this one is a CRUCIAL)…Obviously, the best ITA is one where the tokens are 100% available to everyone at once.
- heavily market their cryptocurrency before it even has a use-case (most projects fall into this category)
- their governance is centralized to some charismatic Elon-bro that talks about price all the time
- don’t let you use any wallet you want (self-sovereignty is CRUCIAL)
- don’t give you access to your keys at all times (again, self-sovereignty)
- are usually just some governance token or ERC-20 or some quickly minted Solana token ($LIBRA $TRUMP $MELANIA were all obvious scams)
- never have a viable peer-reviewed white paper
- their code is NEVER formally verified by neutral parties
- use technologies that are not auditable
- use technologies that are not decentralized
I’ve spotted many scammers a mile away just starting with this list off the top of my head.
For instance, I am the moderator of infosec.pub/c/midnight and actually locked my own communities until I see the source code.
I like the tech from what they tell me. But, I can’t, in good conscience recommend it yet because it ticks some of the above scammer boxes.
Yet you fail to see the forest for the trees…
A system that makes it so trivial to scam people, is a system made for (and likely by) scammers, even if it has other good ideas as well.
I don’t know if you know this, but in many places obsession over central banks is simply not a thing. Maybe you need some real problems in your life? It would help you gain perspective.
And btw, the World Bank isn’t actually a world bank in the literal sense of the word.
I don’t have time to educate you but:
- civil asset forfeiture is a thing
- runaway inflation (and deflation of currencies) due to excessive money printing is a thing
- the work bank may not officially be a bank but what it is is a giant conglomerate of corporations that owns nations, takes part in coups, assasination, price fixing, and controls the dollar.
Did you really think I haven’t heard of this copytext? It’s pretty standard spam, no?
This is not a real thing, it’s more about acting out and tantrums. You don’t care or understand about the issues you describe.
With the right oligarch propaganda, you can be trained to claim that spicy mayonnaise is limiting freedumz and shiiiit!!!
I don’t see why the Fediverse can’t be run as non-profit and by volunteers. We are 8 billion people on this planet. I’m sure we can handle it.
We can and we are.
It’s just that useful idiots have been convinced that nobody does anything because they actually want to do it.
To them, the only reason to do something is to make money from it or distract them from bigger issues. It’s why their lives only consist of working and playing video games.
The problem is if you run as volunteer only you can only recruit from people who are socioeconomically privileged enough to volunteer. Having a revenue model isn’t always about making a single person rich, it can be about being able to properly compensate people for their time, knowledge and experience who otherwise would not be able to because other responsibilities prevent them from it.
I agree. Look at email servers. It just works out. Email server owners don’t look at the content. They just host the servers. Both protocols are federated.
Forums will most likely be driven by the community and volunteers. Just move everyone over to the fediverse. Then it should be easier to find such people.
But do you remember how they monetized email
They…? If you choose to pay for something you can be getting for free, it’s kind of your fault for being a useful idiot.
First question, why would we want monetization? people do amateur theatre, short movies for fun, volunteer do coach kids sport for fun so the whole society doesn’t have to be commercial, and even Wikipedia is mostly ran by volunteers.
I mean sure, federated instance and some authors may get government grant for culture (which would be better spend than for commercial movies, or all the government money spent in AI) but not monetizing won’t prevent people from contributing
Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
No, they really aren’t, and they scale with users.
Have any of you guys ever hosted… anything? It’s not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.
I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say “server costs are expensive” are discussing in good faith.
Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.
deleted by creator
Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
Doesn’t that just mean federation instance maintainers are self-selected among those members of the community who can afford them in the first place? It’s just a less distributed form of a donation system. Instead of relying on 50 people making a 1$ donation each to pay a 50$ hosting bill, you rely on one person (the maintainer of the instance) making a single 50$ donation. That the maintainer wants to donate is already established, how much they can afford to donate can always be reflected by how much they’re willing to let their instance grow.
That doesn’t bode well for the longevity of any single instance, but I’ve always assumed the general idea was to have as many small instances as possible anyway instead of few big ones, otherwise what’s the point of federation. And if you avoid big instances then there will never be a need to funnel funds into big hosting bills.We need to stop discussing server costs without including actual numbers.
We need to stop discussing server costs without including actual numbers.
Why? The premise is that the costs might be too expensive for someone. Whether someone finds paying 12€/a too expensive or 1200€/a too expensive doesn’t really make a difference. Either way it’s too expensive, isn’t it? 🤗
Monetizing is what ruins other places.
I like the way my home instance does financial backing through an open model, and that’s part of why I chose it.
An ideal is enough contributors to keep the lights on and to reimburse the admins for their time spent in keeping it afloat. Moderation should always be a volunteer position for those that want to support their individual communities.
Any excesses in finance I would hope go towards future running costs (to a point), feature development and then charitable donations in that order. Non-profit on paper and in practice.
This is viable for a small instance. Maybe even larger ones if the users are altruistic enough as a whole.
Any excesses in finance I would hope go towards future running costs
We need to normalize posting expenses along with donations.
Let’s stop trusting people when they say something costs “a lot.” Have them share the actual numbers. Don’t take their word for it.
Lot of terrible ideas here, if any of them are implemented lemmy loses a lot if value, donation model works, if a server cant survive itll shutdown and well end up in a better situation since the whole point was to not have centralized servers. Mfs talking about adding ads when this platform barely provides value lol. Like are you serious, at least most platforms with ads developed their own platform and arent just launching someone elses work on a server
I agree. It really shows how conditioned these consumers have become.
They’re eager to be abused.
Truly fair would be to have corporations pay.the users to allow them to show them advertisements.
Couldn’t agree more.
Technology forums are usually just advertising boards.
A corporation will only pay users to watch ads if it is a way to get them to buy junk that they didn’t need or possibly even want. Otherwise the model breaks. Advertising is a scourge, to rely on it in any way does not feel “values-driven” to me.
PS: to be clear, maybe the ad model has merits on pragmatic grounds but, speaking personally, if I ever see an ad here, I am GONE and never coming back.
maybe the ad model has merits on pragmatic grounds but
No, ads aren’t necessary at all. They should be illegal.
