Community is not enough
Community is not enough
We will need small and independent commercial providers for the Fediverse.
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Are they going to go to appeal to “your donation is very important to us” and expect that a few generous souls make up for the free-riders?
While the author seems to think this is unrealistic, it seems to work well for Wikipedia and even more so for F2P games that are massively profitable (although ethically questionable as they intentionally exploit gambling addicitons... maybe an argument could be had about social media doing the same though).
The Hacker News discussion that sparked this post also argued that Wikipedia was a reasonable counter-argument. My response then is the same as it is now:
- Wikipedia has a different usage model. Content there is read a lot less than it is written and a lot more permanent. You can store all of wikipedia in a small hard disk.
- When people make a change on Wikipedia, they are doing for their own good as well as others. Moderators on Social media are doing it solely to combat trolls and harassers.
- Wikipedia is not a business. They are a foundation and they've used that position to do questionable things as well. (not sharing their actual revenues, no financial support for their moderators, etc)
Wikimedia is raking in millions from donations. That money could easily also finance a social media site.
Wikipedia is also actively used by practically anyone that has a connection to the internet, too. Something like Lemmy has way higher costs per user (both financial and computational), and a significantly smaller user base.
What are they doing with all the money and why do they keep asking for more of it? Why don't they take some of that money to support the rest of the staff that has asked for help?
Don't ask me... there are a lot of people asking Wikimedia the same thing. See the link below that I posted.
Wikipedia is also actively used by practically anyone that has a connection to the internet, too. Something like Lemmy has way higher costs per user (both financial and computational), and a significantly smaller user base.
Except that the hosting costs of Wikipedia are neligible. Have a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
You're agreeing with me.
I use many services, including this one, from a donation-driven business that has been around since the 80s.