What Would a Fair and Community-Focused Monetization Model on the Fediverse Look Like?
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I would love this, great idea
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I don't use Gmail. There are plenty of email providers out there that is completely free without ads and privacy focused. Mailfence, Tutanota, ProtonMail etc.
Personally I use my ISP provider that is actually pro privacy - Bahnhof . That due it is a niche and if you don't save logs you don't have the log storage cost.If feddit.nu (only 50 users) did not exist I would have chosen to self-host it on the free Oracle VPS teir.
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The claim was "Email server owners don't look at the content". This is untrue since possibly the largest owner of email servers looks at the content to monetize the service. That's all.
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They are not suppose to do that. It is disrespect to the user privacy. Hence good opportunity to change owner.
Just a design flaw of the protocol that makes it possible to abuse that. Gmail is just one single provider, but yes, many more does it and Gmail is big. -
No monetization, donations only without begging.
Have any of you guys ever hosted... anything? It's not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.
I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say "server costs are expensive" are discussing in good faith.
Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.
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We can and we are.
It's just that useful idiots have been convinced that nobody does anything because they actually want to do it.
To them, the only reason to do something is to make money from it or distract them from bigger issues. It's why their lives only consist of working and playing video games.
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They...? If you choose to pay for something you can be getting for free, it's kind of your fault for being a useful idiot.
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Any excesses in finance I would hope go towards future running costs
We need to normalize posting expenses along with donations.
Let's stop trusting people when they say something costs "a lot." Have them share the actual numbers. Don't take their word for it.
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No, they really aren't, and they scale with users.
Have any of you guys ever hosted… anything? It’s not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.
I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say “server costs are expensive” are discussing in good faith.
Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.
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We need to stop discussing server costs without including actual numbers.
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Couldn't agree more.
Technology forums are usually just advertising boards.
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maybe the ad model has merits on pragmatic grounds but
No, ads aren't necessary at all. They should be illegal.
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I agree. It really shows how conditioned these consumers have become.
They're eager to be abused.
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We need to stop discussing server costs without including actual numbers.
Why? The premise is that the costs might be too expensive for someone. Whether someone finds paying 12€/a too expensive or 1200€/a too expensive doesn't really make a difference. Either way it's too expensive, isn't it?
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The problem is if you run as volunteer only you can only recruit from people who are socioeconomically privileged enough to volunteer. Having a revenue model isn't always about making a single person rich, it can be about being able to properly compensate people for their time, knowledge and experience who otherwise would not be able to because other responsibilities prevent them from it.
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I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn't know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.
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Yes, I work in cloud hosting professionally. The problem tends to be when you out scale single just solutions. Sure it's cheap if you have a small number of users.
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It's called Web Monetisation. It's a standard that's in development. In short, you, the user, can donate/pay money on any website that follows the standard. No patreon, no PayPal, no VISA, no yada yada.
Setup: You install an extension or use a compatible browser, create a wallet with a web payment provider, login / connect with the extension / browser.
Example operation: while browsing you happen upon a website (Lemmy.world for example) or web page (tilvids.com/u/thelinuxexperiment or one of the video pages), the "tip" button is made available, you hit it and 1£ is queued to be sent to the website or person on the webpage. At your leisure, you accept the transaction.
This can be implemented any number of ways e.g statistics are collected (locally) about which websites you visited with web monetisation active, at the end of the month, you are shown a breakdown of that activity. Say 10% peertube, 30% Lemmy, 40% mastodon, and a smattering of other softwares. You say "I want 10£ to be split across the different softwares with a minimum of 1£ per transaction". Or anything else you can come up with.
That's it. The website operator doesn't need you to have PayPal, or patreon, or some special bank. You have a " wallet", you decide how the money is transfered and to whom, and you're done.
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Unsubstantiated claim:
I'd say reality pretty cleanly substantiates this.
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That would increase so much the costs of keeping my phone operating that I'd have to set up an obligatory payment system.
