I asked around so-called influencers why they were not on #Mastodon . Here are the most common replies:
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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.
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@mekkaokereke @raphael @april @nixCraft
But yeah, the Fediverse as a whole is extremely underfunded, and that only changes with people wanting to say “I value this and I want to fund it's existence”
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damonreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @nixCraft As always the judgmental crap side of Mastodon has come out. Be it content creators & or influencers also consist of minorities that thanks to smartphones and internet have been able to make money, there’s even some in poor African communities. People like MKBHD and others put a lot of hours and work into their craft. People are in need of money, they have bills and needs. I see people here saying they’ve made money from mastodon which is interesting because admins across Fedi are struggling to even get enough donations to pay their instance expenses, so that’s problematic
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Stureplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @nixCraft I guess, being charitable, it might depend on what we mean by "influencers"?
Down thread, you made a great point about Molly White and MKBHD. Passionate, clever people with interesting content. They know their fields.
I suppose there are others who "influence for the sake of influencing", for want of a better way to articulate it. I don't want to say grifters, but I don't see them necessarily as SMEs, and we've seen in the news some swayed for cash in this election.
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Raphael Lullisreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @thisismissem @april @nixCraft
I've written https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/ almost two years ago, and I still believe it to be true:
- The Fediverse will only have a chance of achieving the mainstream and becoming an universal alternative to Big Tech if we professionalize it.
- It's fairer to charge a little bit for everyone than running instances on donations and relying on a few generous souls