Brutalinks does not have separate communities, so it works more like HackerNews/lobste.rs

I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I disagree on the solution. I think that us insisting on the donation model is putting an artificial limit on further growth. It “works” for this 1M-2M MAU, but these numbers are not enough to attract other players and who might be willing to try different approaches.

I think we need to change the general mindset that we “need” the donation model to keep the people around, and flip to a system where every user is expected to pay a little bit. And yeah, you might argue that not everyone is able to afford it, but it would easier to come with systems where not-paying is the exception instead of the rule. We can have a system where every N paying subscribers guarantee one free spot, with N=2, 3, 5, 10, up to the admin. We can have a system (like I have in Communick) where customers can buy “multiple seats” and invite whoever they want. Alternatively, we can set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

If we all donate a little bit to the project, their budget will be larger. If their budget is larger, they can get more steady collaborators.

And even if they can’t get more people, by helping them we show we value all the work they have done already.

Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can’t afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.

I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.

I’m glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us.

What “whale”? Communick costs less than $2.50 per month. It is less than the average donation people send around.

We ‘pay’ by adding content and being members of the community

No one can use your content to pay their bills.

We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit

The network is not expanding. It is stuck in this 1M-2M monthly active users (if you count all of the Fediverse) and Lemmy/kbin/piefed is hovering around 50-55k/MAU for two years already.

Meanwhile, Reddit’s revenue has grown 62% in 2024 (from $800M in 2023 to to $1.3B last year). Do you really think they care about losing a few thousand users who are all talk but no bite?

It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut.

There were other platforms offering free video and free hosting as well. There were even p2p alternatives. Remember Joost? It’s not that people didn’t have a choice then and YouTube was better. It’s that could Google leveraged its capital to run Youtube at a loss for as long as needed until there was no competition left.

This is absurd and shows some ridiculous entitlement.

Software development is not just a drive-thru restaurant where people just make an order with their preferred menu, and 30 seconds later it is handed it out to you. Developers have to balance a bunch of priorities, deal with bugs, make sure that new features being added can be maintained in the future adequately. It’s also not easy for anyone to just drop by and submit a huge piece of functionality without making sure things works as expected. And they are doing this all while getting basically no money in donations (~3000€/month, for 3 developers is less than minimum wage for pretty much all of Northern Europe).

If you think it’s just a matter of “they don’t care”, go ahead and write the code yourself.

It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.

It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.

how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?

Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you’ll be getting.

I didn’t insult anyone. You are putting names out there of admins of existing instances when I was talking about the general story of about how there are constant wheel of new people coming up.

You are gasping as straws, as if ostracizing me would ever validate your arguments. This is getting tiring.

Instead of going for these complicated architectures, it would be better to simplify and make activitypub less dependent on server software.

It’s not about the software. I am just pointing out that Communick’s instances are only available for paying customers, so his argument (everyone should pay a little bit) is at the very least backed by his own actions.

Regarding Peertube: I see the problem of Peertube on the other end of what you are saying. People are not using that much because even those that have a presence on PeerTube still depend on YouTube to make money. If PeerTube had a way to help with monetization, then more creators would be interested in publishing exclusively on PeerTube, even if they had to pay something to upload/distribute videos.

Ok, so you are not taking anything out of pocket at all? That’s better than most, I suppose.

Still, during the interview you touch on the subject of how the donation model is not sustainable and it can only works at the scale that Fedi is right now. Wouldn’t you consider then switching to a different model?

Interesting… the more time passes and your previous arguments fall along with the instances that you supported, the more you are resorting to tone policing.

Do you know that the person you just responded to is one of the first subscribers of Communick?

If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you’ll immediately lose huge amounts of users

That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don’t have to be completely open registration.

Most people don’t want to self host.

You don’t need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.

Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else.

Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.

Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.

The Lemmy devs themselves.

Why not, though.

because cheap VPS will not give you enough bandwidth, or they oversubscribe their datacenters and their advertised speeds are far from real, or they have terrible support and if something goes down you are going to have a hard time to bring things up while having to explain to 10-15k people why things stopped working, or because the reason they manage to get such low prices is because they are selling user data on the side…

I’m not saying that the only correct alternative is to go to the big cloud providers, but there is a reason why “cheap” is not the sole criteria to choose a service provider.

Put those under “self-hosting”.

There will always be “First we need this, then we will start supporting it” excuse. If you think better migration tools are needed, support the developers so that they can make it happen.

34 minute mark. It says in the blog post from OP.