I agree with this thread for the most part.
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I would interpret what we're seeing a bit differently. People pay for things all the time. If they're not paying you, it's usually because a) you didn't actually ask them to or b) you're not offering them the actual thing they find valuable. With fedi, it's usually a combination of both.
https://oliphant.social/@oliphant/113137104140519407 -
For the record, I'm not trying to give this person a hard time. I'm quoting this because I know a lot of people think similarly. And I think we need to have more open discussion about this.
We can keep being idealistic and wishing the world worked a certain way. Or you can start learning from watching what people actually do.
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People rarely pay money just to "sustain" something that is not profitable. YOU don't even do that. Ask all of these same idealists why they don't pay more money to open source maintainers. Devs are actually the *least* likely to pay for the same software they build.
Before being upset at other people because they won't pay for mastodon, you could spend more time interrogating yourself. Why don't you pay for things that you actually use and find valuable? Start there.
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@lobingera @polotek same
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@polotek Back to figuring out micropayments? Or is it a social structure thing
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FYI, it seems like this person has some restrictive settings on their post. You may not be able to see it unless you're logged into a mastodon instance. Viewing it from third party clients may not work as expected. I respect their privacy settings, so I'm just gonna leave things as is. Apologies if it makes the thread hard to parse.
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@polotek Links aren't working for me
But yeah, like many issues we're facing, people want the solution to be an easy out of sight, out of mind thing. Unfortunately there's a lot of work that needs to get done to get us to a better place. -
This is what I said a while back. If we want to fund the fediverse, we should start by taking advantage of what's unique about it. We have to offer people real value that they can't already get elsewhere for free, and *at higher quality* to boot. But people will pay for features and experiences that corporate social networks will never give them.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/111869157545251360 -
Here's me earlier this week literally saying "this specific thing is very important to me." And this is a service I already pay money for. What I'm told is "nah we don't wanna do that. But maybe the people working for free will get around to it at some point."
As the kids say. The math just ain't mathing. This is not how you create sustainability. Give me the actual thing I want, then charge me money for it.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113126463775838041 -
Again, I'm not upset at masto.host saying they don't want to give me this feature. It seems like they've achieved a nice, sustainable lifestyle business for themselves. They don't personally have the problem we're talking about. But it's also worth noting that masto.host finding sustainability isn't resulting in more value to the fedi ecosystem. And it's also not providing that much more value to me as a user.
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The stance that the fediverse often takes towards it users ensures that even the people who are paying money are doing so begrudgingly. At the very instant I stop being too lazy, I'm gonna move off masto.host and take my $11/mo back out of the ecosystem. I have to give that money to someone else in order to actually get what I want.
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Both!
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I think there is some of this. But it's not a big issue. There are tons of people here who are not devs. I remember the fervor when the brid.gy thing happened. A bunch of people all angsty about it but not feeling empowered to do anything. I've had lots of people tell me that they feel daunted by running their own instance.
I think it's a problem that the voice of technical people is overrepresented here. It underscores my point that actual users are not being served.
https://social.erambert.me/@eramdam/113137300179091424 -
Damien (friend of eggbug)replied to Marco Rogers last edited by
@polotek Oh 100%. Mastodon/fedi at large is very much a nerd space still, for better and worse.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Damien (friend of eggbug) last edited by
@eramdam that's what I'm saying though. It's not. Those are just the most vocal people. There are tons of people here who are just not participating in these conversations. Because they can see that we're not taking about what they actually care about. The nerds only talk to each other. a) because a lot of nerds don't actually want to talk to normies, and b) because the nerds talk about nerd shit a little too much and the normies have no reason to seek them out.
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@violetmadder @Mutesplash both of those issues and more. It's a complicated problem to be sure. But not unsolvable.
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propapanda :verified:replied to Marco Rogers last edited by
Running services in general isn't an easy thing to do. Otherwise everyone would do and you wouldn't need professionals anymore since everyone would be a professional to some degree.
I think the trade-off Masto.host picked is fine for most people as long as Masto.host isn't shutting down.
Masto.host could also run DNS servers that people can point their domain to. This would probably be the easiest solution around links breaking when moving the instance, ..
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propapanda :verified:replied to propapanda :verified: last edited by
however most people would be overwhelmed modifying DNS records and for the sake of simplicity, they went that road.
They are not asking for a lot of money afaik, so Masto.host looks like some sort of side hustle and developing a full (complicated) onboarding process takes time and no one wants to pay for that.