I asked around so-called influencers why they were not on #Mastodon . Here are the most common replies:
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Trey Roadyreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @nixCraft Can we just admit that social media's appeal comes from the success of creators?
We get caught up in the creator/consumer dichotomy, but when someone makes something I love and it's shared with everyone? When the person creating it is empowered to make more of it? Stardew Valley, Critical Role, and Supergiant Games come to mind.Social media should be a multiplier for creators, and yes, that has a commercial aspect because everyone has bills.
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@mekkaokereke @nixCraft Large, shared experiences are huge.
When someone decides to stand-up to horrible people, when they need to organize to feed their community, hell, when they're amazing at making their breakfast into a cartoon face every morning, the sense of a shared culture is important.
Granted: that's been hijacked and the virality of it has been turned into a cancer. Maybe through a desire for that acknowledgement and visibility, when our own community connections are so thin?
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to April The Pink ⋆☾╶⃝⃤☽⋆ last edited by
I've seen authors get roasted on here for promoting their own books.
I've seen server admins get insulted for suggesting moving to a subscription model rather than a donation model.
I haven't seen many (any?) examples of people being financially successful on Mastodon with a "here's how I did it!" tutorial with real numbers. I just see vague hand-wavings about "It's totally possible!" but when I ask for concrete examples, it gets real quiet. ️
mekka okereke :verified: (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] Minimum wage in NYC is $16/hr. At 52 weeks working 40 hrs a week, that's ~35K a year. Is nixCraft making $35K a year on Mastodon? I hope so! But I doubt it. If they are, how are they doing that? What mechanism are they using to be paid for their labor and craftsmanship? Donations? Subscriptions? (And $35K is not enough to cover the average 1 bedroom rent in NYC. Let alone pay for food, health insurance, clothes, and utilities). People deserve to be paid for their labor.
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
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@mekkaokereke @nixCraft Honestly, our disdain for "influencers" comes from the hacking of our attention economy model: producing content of little value optimized to drag attention and make us feel in ways that are focused on driving use to consume.
There's a difference between buying something because you love it and buying something to repair your sense of self.
If we made a better model, I doubt we'd mind if all the small scale, fun, thoughtful content were also profitable.
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Michael W Lucas¹ :flan_mail:replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @nixCraft @molly0xfff
I dropped Twitter. FB is useless. I have no network on threads or bsky.
My Kickstarter for my last book was promoted only here, and was insanely successful.
You CAN make money on the fedi, through building a network built on sincerity and humor and self-awareness and generally not being a jerk.
Tradesmen like me existed for centuries before capitalism, and we will exist after it (hopefully) dies.
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to Trey Roady last edited by
Honestly, I don't think that's the major part of it. I think there's a lot of confused anti-capitalism, and a lot of misogyny. Many self-described nerds are viciously cruel and exclusionary.️
There's a weird inversion that I observed as both an athlete and a kid that focuses on academics (jock and nerd): Nerds are meaner, more misogynistic, more exclusionary, more disdainful of women and their interests than jocks, and it wasn't remotely close.
mekka okereke :verified: (@[email protected])
@[email protected] Possible? But again, that wasn't my personal observation growing up. My observation was that young boys and girls that cared about fashion, cared about other young boys and girls that cared about fashion, and didn't go out of their way to disparage the kids that didn't as much. They just didn't talk about them. But the way that nerdy kids talked about women and girls in particular that cared about fashion, was disturbingly misogynistic and dehumanizing.
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
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@notmybackdoorbug @nixCraft this isn’t like email. Point to me where you go to one email website and it presents a bunch of emails servers to join
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I would say the exact opposite. The first three are the valid reasons, the last one is the easiest one to solve: just run their own instance, on their own domain, and keep control of your own online presence.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by [email protected]
@mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft I'm fairly financially successful with monetization on Mastodon, and do publish figures (but it's been a while since I've written an updated article)
YTD I've made €7,713.27 in gross revenue from the community, or between €500-1500 a month. That's across 3 channels, excluding GitHub Sponsors.
Last year was €8,497.03 from supporters, averaging €40 per transaction.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
@mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
This year between freelance work, grants, and community support, I'm on track to make €68,000 or there about. (really depends on how far I progress through the FediMod FIRES grant from NLNet.
€68,000 is what I need to cover all my expenses, afaik.
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@mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
Here's the 2023 report: https://medium.com/@thisismissem/2023-final-update-of-the-year-1e5d619dc756
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@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
I hope you do realize that this is less than minimum wage? How much was that per hour of work?
Can you honestly say that this is "financial success" and that it could be emulated by others if one could make more money delivering food and biking around the city?
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@raphael @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
I've only been tracking open-source contributions in terms of hours since the Q2 of this year. This year so far I have done 184 hours of work on open-source, of which 21.50 hours were funded separately and 8 hours of admin work.
I fully agree that the community support I receive is currently well below minimum wage, which is why I'm trying to increase that income.
I've also done a lot of freelance work to make ends meet, which balanced things out.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
@raphael @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
As for is this "financial success", well, it's my full time job, I have no other employment besides the community funding, grants, and freelance work.
I don't work for any for-profit company. I meet my needs.
Note: I'm excluding from those numbers the grants and freelance work, which is the lions share of my income.
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@raphael @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft also, for context, some of the other people in the fediverse development sector that I've spoken to about community funding for projects have reported similar figures, €12,000-ish per year without grants and other income sources.
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@melroy not really. Companies go where the people are. This place is hostile towards capitalism and ads. Even if people came here the money wouldn’t come here.
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
@thisismissem @raphael @april @nixCraft
Hot take:
People think that the Fediverse isn't safe(yet) because of slight differences between how you see the world, and Eugen sees the world, and Ro sees the world, and Oliphant sees the world, and Jaz sees the world, and Sierdy sees the world, and Hrefna sees the world, etc.But the real reason the Fediverse is not safe and secure (yet), is that none of you can earn a stable and secure living working on Fediverse safety full time.️
1/N
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@thisismissem @raphael @april @nixCraft
I am profoundly uninterested in giving my hot take nitpicking ideas on how any of you should be thinking about safety. And I don't think we want or need consensus.
I am deeply interested in how we change state to where you all can earn a living working on this stuff full-time, in a way that avoids the usual "money with downsides and baggage" like VC money, or becoming dependent on wealthy benefactors who may change their minds (eg Big Tech grants).
2/2
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by [email protected]
@mekkaokereke @raphael @april @nixCraft for full disclosure, my total revenue year to date, excluding open/future invoices is €44,960 with €4,210.61 in expenses.
So I have made a decent income for a developer based in Germany, where a less-experienced developer would make €40-45k, and experienced developers would be €60-90k.
That's including freelance contracts, bug bounties, grants, etc.