What Would a Fair and Community-Focused Monetization Model on the Fediverse Look Like?
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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.
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Have a portion of my taxes be set to pay for fediverse general stuff, or for the fediverse instances hosted on my own country. Honestly, with how important remaking the internet is this should be being managed at the level of the big payers, not at the level of individual payers for whom a donation has more fees attached than the donation amount itself...
