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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Oh, I completely agree. What I mean is that a not for profit can still live in the commercial world of it wants.
Not for profits still need stuff. Like offices or servers or staff. How the funding comes about without compromising the mission is the question.
Look at cancer charities fund raising. Look at Wikipedia. Look at Firefox.
The funding model doesn't have to be the same for every instance. Some could be just volunteer funded or donated by the admins as a cost of their hobby.
However, the broader community will not tolerate a social media space that is not professionally run with uptime and lack of errors and downtime. The only way the commercial ones die is if the free ones are better. Look at piracy. It's not a cost problem in music versus movies versus games, it's a service problem.
I'll agree with you that a server needs moderation or administration staff in proportion to its size. Wether those staff are all volunteers or paid depends on the overall budget of the server.
But I don't think office space really makes any sense For a decentralized platform like this one - the only place that makes sense is for the actual lead developers of the software that the platform runs. And even then with the WFH culture of today I think even that is not likely to exist.
As for server administration, the most I could really see is a regular online meeting to keep interests aligned as well as a staff audit log for the server owner to review. And Lemmy already keeps a public audit log anyway.
As for your last point I wholly agree with you. The whole point of federated systems like mastodon and Lemmy is to move away from the for profit system so we can avoid enshittification. It's meant to be a method of spreading the cost across multiple smaller nonprofit organisations. And hopefully we can avoid it and therefore make the platform better.
That being said, the only thing that prevents a corporate entity from joining in is the instances and their federation policies themselves.
The only other way I see parts of the fediverse become for profit is if an existing non profit turns for profit, which is really only a big deal if it's one of the larger instances. And as for how the rest of the fediverse deals with that. Well it's again up to individual server owners, and the collective decision they may or may not make.
I've always said a social system that isn't socialised is not a social system - I mean it's in the name! And the fediverse is really one of the first major attempts at doing that. Wether it lasts or not we're sure to learn a lot and if it fails, we can take those lessons and try again.