Community is not enough

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).

We need non profits who will monetize ethically just enough to sustain the operations. Particularly cooperatives. Social media doesn't need to be profitable. It just needs to exist and serve it's users.

Community is enough. The Fediverse allows for small servers that do not cost a lot to run.

It's a valid point. We can't expect to be free of corporations and also expect people to maintain servers for free. Running a service costs someone somewhere, and running a massive service can't easily work relying on just donations. I'd be happy to pay a small monthly/yearly fee to a nonprofit to guarantee an independent server, rather than to be a product to be traded.

One of the best things about the internet is that so much of the content and experiences we get are free, but the internet age has also driven down the price of content to almost nothing and forced a lot of providers to rely on ad based content.

The problem that the author is laying out is one that a lot of print media have been having to contend with for the past few decades now as the internet has made news and articles free and replaced newspapers and magazines.

Personally I dont think there is inherently wrong with sponsorship and advertising as long as it's transparent and isnt intrusive. From the early days internet ads were straight trash. Popups that lead to more popups, adware, malware, distracting videos, distracting interactive content, and of course lots of data and processing power and battery wasted on it. Thats not even getting into the more modern trends of hyper tracking and targeted advertising. But I wouldnt be bothered by vetted non obtrusive, not animated banner ads on a site that needs the cash.

For sites and instances that want to be independent a subscriber tier or donator tier could probably do wonders as well. I mean look at how much money random youtubers and twitch stars are able to make with patreon. So while I agree that the current market is a tricky one to weave I think in the case of running a website you can probably go a long way using a free model.

I think Beehaw and many other instances have golden hearts for their goal to start a stable, friendly community. However, like the article says, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, when an instance gets big enough, someone needs to be on watch to ensure things are running smoothly, someone needs to be working on updating, expanding, and improving the service. On top of the cost to run the service, it's unrealistic to expect it to be free. You can't expect the admins who have busted their ass to get this much done for free. Call it human nature or the ills of capitalism, but the fediverse can't run on community and goodwill alone. I saw another post a bit ago saying to expect to pay for internet services from now on. I think, at least in the realm of user-focused and FOSS-based stuff, that may be the paradigm. Donations or subscriptions should be expected, at least for some portion of users, to keep the lights on and compensate the folks keeping things moving.

Like probably most reading this headline in light of why many of us are here in the first place, I cringed at the headline. That being said it's something we must consider. These sites are not magic, they are on physical servers consuming resources to persist. Upkeep of some kind is necessary.

Is the solution a commercial business one? Maybe in some cases. The author themselves acknowledges that this is how the problem we're fleeing began in the first place, but this doesn't necessarily have to be so. Considering the nature of business which I am all too familiar with, involving commercial influence has a much higher potential to corrupt good intentions than we may want to believe however careful we are. There do exist small businesses who place their work above profit (I'd like to think my business included among these) and can be run putting the interests of people first. It can be frustrating to watch less ethical and more exploitative peers zoom past and leverage their resources to get more business even though their service can't compare, but people are not rational actors unless they have been primed to be. Perception is reality in many cases.

I have heard some discussion to make this instance into a non-profit, which could also be a solution. I also recall working for a non-profit who had to depend on laundering the reputation of massive corporations for chump change because that was the only dependable source of revenue. This isn't to say that a non-profit is inherently a bad idea, only that they have their own challenges and are uniquely vulnerable due to having to always re-invest profit and not necessarily being prepared for fluctuations in capital as a consequence. It's a unique set of challenges.

Optimally I would like to see the instances I interact with to be run ideologically by a corps of contrubutors committed to social responsibility and positive freedom as it appears Beehaw is run now. I really like how this instance is run and the values it has demonstrated. I'll most likely be around to discuss when changes need to be made, because the world changes and we have to change with it unavoidably.

I’m genuinely curious how low-spec a server for this could be. If you only allow links to off-site media (only host text), I wonder if that would help with fitting a lot of people on a cheap low-spec server. Hypothetically specific apps instead of using a website could also move a lot of server work onto client devices. Lastly if there could be a way to securely dedicate part of your pc to server hosting the way mining crypto works, the server could provide extra perks that require extra server power (such as animated avatars, higher resolution posts, etc.).

All I’m saying is there are a good few options before we need corporate sponsors.

I wonder if it'd be feasible to get local governments to fund instances of these platforms as a sort of public square 🤔 It's a total fever dream, but would be really interesting to see!