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Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed [Opinion]
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Such a valid point; success should not be measured only in dollars. I began explaining the basics of the Fediverse with some of my friends and the first question they asked was, “How do people even make money on there then?” It’s a bit disheartening to see how money-driven things are for some people.
Them: “How do people even make money on there then?”
You: "The same way I'm making money off of you now." (pause) "I don't. We're just friends."
Them: "What do you mean? Like friends... with benefits?" [unfriended]
Yeah, the best social networks are designed to prioritize…socializing. It’s like building a public park and people start asking where the money comes from. The point is that it’s made for people to use.
Parks require maintenance that’s paid with tax dollars. They go to shit really fast without it.
I don’t think this needs to be profitable but there are real costs that need to be covered somehow, and it’s not going to be taxes.
Or volunteers. Don’t know about where you are, but near me, town gardens, flowers, woods and rivers are maintained for all by community-minded volunteer groups.
Sure, but there’s a distinction between maintenance and profit.
If that requires a maximum ratio of active users to average donation, then it’s feasible, and has the potential to survive with a more invested userbase than a site that’s severely bloated with lurkers.
I personally think the model of the old style ISP actually made a lot of sense here, but I'm guessing it might never come back. Back in thr 90s, you paid your ISP for Internet service. But that was more inclusive than just a data pipe. You also got space for a small personal website, text usenet, and email.
This made a lot of sense and back then the services didn't need to have ads or tracking, you paid monthly for the bundle of services.
I don't know if federation will actually take off, but I can imagine needing some sort of paid hosting for large groups of people on large style services. Maybe that will be some ISPs, but more likely it'll be either "federated services" companies that for a monthly fee run a bunch of the popular fediverse tools like Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix, Pixelfed, and maybe Peertube. Possibly through in email too idk. Or you'll end up needing a per tool subscription to a company. Maybe donations will work, that'll really depend on how this scales.
Exactly! Not everything one does needs a dollar figure attached to it.
Well I can kinda see where they are coming from. How do you know it’s gonna stick around if it can’t make money? It isn’t even about making a profit either, but covering costs.
There are costs associated with hosting all this stuff. Right now donations are how instances keep the lights on (most of the time).
What happens when there is more and more users joining?
It works for Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, to cite two popular examples.
OpenStreetMap is pretty shitty because of their need to make money; specifically it has basically no good apps, no free, limit-less tile servers, and it has actively hindered development on these fronts precisely because they want to make money.
OpenStreetMap ist a database for open GIS data, not a map service. The map service is just an accidental by-product.
Right, but trying to overly monetize the map service(s) actively hurts the GIS database as well - it means there's less adoption, less eyes on it, less contributors, and worse dataset.
And that's not to say that nobody should make money by providing map services - it can be healthy, too - but being docks about it doesn't help anyone.
when I used mastodon for a while, people would talk about how great not having ads was, but there were a lot of people asking how they were supposed to sell commissions without an algorithm making people see their posts as if they didn't consider that advertising.
Those are people that came to the fediverse thinking that it was the exact same thing as corporate social media and that is where they were wrong. I heard the same quips and gripes from social media influencers. The whole point of the fediverse is to get away from ads, influence, toxicity and all that other crap.
Mastodon does have an algorithm that makes people see their posts: it's called following someone. How does one make others follow them? Well, maybe post something they'd like to see more of.
Mastodon absolutely does have a weakness of making it more difficult to find people that you want to follow based on what you have already engaged with.
And from a purely user perspective, that is a weakness.
But it's also a very distinct choice. Because having enough data to be able to meaningfully make such recommendations means having a central database of every user interaction by every user.
And it also means making choices and value judgements which, almost by definition, can not be value neutral.
If the creators of the algorithm are good, they will actually be aware of the choices and value judgements being made, if not, well... They will still be making them, just not in nearly as educated of a way.
On the whole, I really hope that we eventually come up with answers to these problems that make it possible for a user to make those choices, and to have the amount of recommendations that they want, while somehow not having anyone have the huge database of user interactions. I'm not sure if that's even possible, most especially if you assume that there will be entities on the fediverse that are fudging their data to get recommended in ways that other users don't want.
But it sure would be interesting to try.
Ah, recommendations... hm.
Just thinking out loud: what if, anyone who wanted to, could take a hash of their username, and make public all their interactions by listing the hashes of the usernames they interacted with. Maybe store it in a distributed database. So everyone could make a graph of anonymous hashes to run a recommendation algorithm in any way they wanted, but each one would only know their own username's hash, so they could find out which hashes they could find personally interesting according to their chosen algorithm. Then, have people who wanted to be discovered that way, publish their user along their hash, so someone who found their hash through the graph of anonymous hashes, could find out which user it belongs to, and see them as a recommendation.
I do also wonder how a website makes money before I make an account. It is because I want to know how secure my data would be, now and in the future. If they don't have a viable income source, the could get sold to someone else and the new owners would own my data. If such a possibility exists, I need to be careful on what I post or share with the site.
Even worse, just making money isn't enough: you also have to become a fucking global monopoly.
To be fair, often times that question is code for “how can someone contribute to that platform while also paying rent, feeding their kids, etc.”
I think that’s a fair question and IMHO, for a fedi project to succeed, we need some people who can get paid a reasonable wage to focus their full attention on the work.
We’re likely going to continue to see folks who ask for Patreon donations and set up fedi hosting businesses, like Ruud at Lemmy World. We’ll also probably see more folks like the Tapbots gang selling fancy clients for a price.
Individual people will make money so they can live life, but cash cow corporations likely won’t be a thing.