I’m curious.
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I’m curious. This place has a very vocal anti-capitalist community, anytime moneys come up people shout about donations. When it comes to consent and Trust & Safety I’ve seen many people attack devs. Yet, when #Mastodon was asking for donations to fund a position it was largely crickets. #IFTAS has done great work and set out to be a great benefit to the #fediverse and #OpenSocialWeb yet they’re struggling to keep the lights on. How can that be? So many of you are always talking about donations so why are projects underfunded and servers shutting down due to lack of funding?
Where are you passionate and vocal lot? https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas-funding-crisis/
https://about.iftas.org/ -
B beaware@social.beaware.live shared this topic
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I’m curious. This place has a very vocal anti-capitalist community, anytime moneys come up people shout about donations. When it comes to consent and Trust & Safety I’ve seen many people attack devs. Yet, when #Mastodon was asking for donations to fund a position it was largely crickets. #IFTAS has done great work and set out to be a great benefit to the #fediverse and #OpenSocialWeb yet they’re struggling to keep the lights on. How can that be? So many of you are always talking about donations so why are projects underfunded and servers shutting down due to lack of funding?
Where are you passionate and vocal lot? https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas-funding-crisis/
https://about.iftas.org/@damon
Donationware will just never cut it. It will never be possible to fund the fediverse at a level where it can actually matter just on small donations. Large foundations could help. but probably won't. It could be tax funded, but that's unlikely to ever be adequate either.As far as I can see, the only viable paths to financial security for the fediverse are paid features, affiliate sales, or ads. I intend to try to make paid features work.
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@damon
Donationware will just never cut it. It will never be possible to fund the fediverse at a level where it can actually matter just on small donations. Large foundations could help. but probably won't. It could be tax funded, but that's unlikely to ever be adequate either.As far as I can see, the only viable paths to financial security for the fediverse are paid features, affiliate sales, or ads. I intend to try to make paid features work.
@jenniferplusplus @damon an idea i've floated before: hosting text is relatively cheap, but so many "free image host" services have shut down over the years or purged old content etc. video is even more expensive. therefore: why not charge people for media hosting? or for communication services which want to be more sustainable: why not allow for a BYOP approach when it comes to attaching media?
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@jenniferplusplus @damon an idea i've floated before: hosting text is relatively cheap, but so many "free image host" services have shut down over the years or purged old content etc. video is even more expensive. therefore: why not charge people for media hosting? or for communication services which want to be more sustainable: why not allow for a BYOP approach when it comes to attaching media?
@trwnh @jenniferplusplus @damon
hosting text is cheap on the condition that things are pull based and you can have low requirements for uptime, like RSS.
A typical AP microblogging network will not be cheap to keep online the moment you get 10000 accounts following 100 different remote accounts.
Also, serving the media is the least of the problems. Keeping a synced timeline for each user is far more complex.
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@trwnh @jenniferplusplus @damon
hosting text is cheap on the condition that things are pull based and you can have low requirements for uptime, like RSS.
A typical AP microblogging network will not be cheap to keep online the moment you get 10000 accounts following 100 different remote accounts.
Also, serving the media is the least of the problems. Keeping a synced timeline for each user is far more complex.
@jenniferplusplus @damon we will only make AP applications cheaper if we remove the process logic from the server and make them simple message routers, but @trwnh already convinced me that in doing so we are no longer talking AP strictu sensu. This means we will have to admit to ourselves that AP instances will never be properly decentralized and always fall into a power-law curve - few huge instances, many micro instances.
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@jenniferplusplus @damon we will only make AP applications cheaper if we remove the process logic from the server and make them simple message routers, but @trwnh already convinced me that in doing so we are no longer talking AP strictu sensu. This means we will have to admit to ourselves that AP instances will never be properly decentralized and always fall into a power-law curve - few huge instances, many micro instances.
@raphael @jenniferplusplus @damon well, we could move toward such a "event source/sink" system with message brokers and pubsub, but that leaves side effects having to be handled... where, exactly?
for better or worse a lot of fedi right now is just monoliths doing lossy replication. people think in terms of "platforms" rather than "infrastructure". in some ways it's easier to monetize the former rather than the latter -- venues charging entry fees is an easier sell than road tolls.
