I honestly think that social media services should exclusively be nonprofits and run off of a combination of very limited ads and/or donation drives à la Wikipedia. Profit motives destroy things like this, as we've seen time and time again.
I agree. I have been thinking the last few days how Kbin can sustainably keep the servers paid for long term. A non-profit, Wikipedia style arrangement is the only thing I keep coming back to that makes sense.
Wikipedia is a good example. It is annoying when they ask for the $3 every year, but it's true that a small contribution like that across the many users can keep a free/libre project sustained. Things like Usenet used to be part of your ISP bill anyhow, so a small monthly/annual amount to your instance host makes sense to me. Of course, we pay ridiculous amounts to our ISPs without services like this nowadays, so it does hurt a little
I made another comment about this previously and I really don't want to end up as the designated "don't donate to Wikipedia" user on the threadiverse, but here we are anyway. Before I continue, I will say I'm not personally involved and I'm not anti-Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but I do think the Wikimedia Foundation is misleading Wikipedia visitors about its funding, or at least that it has in previous donation drives.
It's worth mentioning that "Wikipedia" is itself never asking for money. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation puts those donation drive banners on Wikipedia, and those banners misleadingly suggest that money will go mostly or entirely to Wikipedia (it won't) and that your donations are necessary for Wikipedia to continue running (they're not). The Wikimedia Foundation receives upwards of $150 million dollars a year, which is much more than the upkeep of Wikipedia, ⅔ of which is not from the individual small donors who respond to those banners.
Wikipedia's internal "newspaper", The Signpost, has a couple of pretty thorough articles on the controversy. The short version is that a) The Wikimedia Foundation receives millions in funding via corporate donations from tech giants like Google (more than enough to sustain Wikipedia on their own), while the income from banner ads represents about a third of their yearly finances, and b) they then spend the vast majority of that funding on things that aren't Wikipedia:
Total expenses were $146 million (an increase of $34 million, or 30.5%, over the year prior). Some key expenditure items:
- Salaries and wages rose to $88 million (an increase of $20 million, or 30%, over the year prior).
- Professional service expenses: $17 million.
- Awards and grants: $15 million.
- Other operating expenses: $12 million.
- Internet hosting: $2.7 million.
(Fingers crossed that Markdown works.)
Before I'm accused of cherrypicking data, I'm literally quoting the Wikimedia Foundation's Consolidated Financial Statements for 2021-2022.
Some of those are a bit nebulous, but even if you're charitable (and we are talking donations!) you can lump in "professional service expenses", "other operating expenses" and "Internet hosting" together as "funding Wikipedia", for a total of $31.7 million, which is about 22% of what they receive in donations. For that matter, it's less than half of what they receive in "large" donations, before we even start factoring in donations from sympathetic Wikipedia visitors. Meanwhile, the Foundation spends $103 million on paying its own staff and giving awards and grants to other people or organizations.
Now, you can certainly make the case that individual donations allow the Wikimedia Foundation to remain independent from corporate or other influence, because they in theory could stop taking those large donations and continue operating Wikipedia, albeit they'd have to slash their staff salaries, grants and other expenses to do so, since, say it with me, the vast bulk of their money is not going toward Wikipedia's upkeep.
I want to be clear that I don't think any of this stuff is evil, just that it's misleading to suggest your donations go any more than a fraction toward the continued operation of Wikipedia. Wikipedia will be fine either way, but the WMF certainly appreciates your donations.
I've seen this article circulating and I think it's a really good cautionary tale. If meta arrives here in full force it's completely going to take over the fediverse, they are already splitting the community as it is.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Note that this is different subject from being anti-corporate. I don't think there's an issue if companies start booting their instances and creating communities for their games or content, whether its EA, Bioware, CDPR or something like pcgamer, LTT, gamersnexus, etc. They want the PR and visibility on a social network but their goal probably wouldn't be take over the AP, and could add some validity and get other bigger names to be active here. That is assuming we want growth at all.
@Kaldo Thank you for the link, that's exactly what prompted this thread!
I think it's just too hard to draw the line of "not rich enough to be a concern." Amazon instance is obviously bad. Pepsi? If they put their minds to it they could do something lol. Hasbro?? They're greedy enough for sure.
Or what if a company starts as a relatively minor player, but suddenly get big. Steam acquires the entire video game industry or something lmao. Then we still have the same problem, they're going to be motivated differently.
So I say we defederate all profit driven instances. They can still make magazines on our instances, if they can follow our rules. If they have trouble following our rules... Well, then I definitely don't want them in a position to affect the whole Fediverse lol.
It's really helpful to see a previous example of something like this happening. I was aware of many instances blocking the potential Meta instance but didn't really get the reason why. Now it makes sense.
I was originally in the let’s just sit back and see what happens camp, but this article completely changed my perspective. A very interesting read. I do, however, agree that companies creating their own instances to advertise their products can only be good for us in the longrun.
On a similar note, I was recently reading about Microsoft’s efforts to dominate the whole browser space in the 90s, and I think it’s a very good example of the worst kind of capitalism.
I wonder if theres any way to pre emptively stop them from taking over activitypubs development and direction
They can't do a hostile take over of ActivityPub. The trap is that they would come in with open arms and an army of developers. ActivityPub maintainers would at first welcome the help and guidance from such an experienced team. Then, once they have the community hooked, they spring the trap and start making changes that are actively hostile to small sites. The community flocks to the big site because everything works better there, and the dream is dead.
Now maybe it'll never happen, but it's hard to tell. Even if Facebook joined with the best intentions, that doesn't mean the project isn't going to be taken over by a power hungry manager later who could still activate the trap card.
this is the closest someone has come to convincing me that this would be a big problem. i still happen to think that the smaller instances will be fine in the long run. big consolidated instances are inevitable because people like being where people are. look at twitter and facebook. i suspect the worst problem we'd have is people switching from "facebook" to "federated facebook".
now maybe meta will be able to fuck with the standards body that is responsible for the standard. that would be very bad. then i'd be on board. until they do that, i won't worry. i'm open to having my mind changed, but i've found most arguments to be unconvincing as they basically boil down to "but they're big!"
because people like being where people are
That's exactly the problem with mega-instances. From the link posted above:
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
I don’t think there should be blind hostility but it should be clear that any hint of embrace, extend, extinguish will result in hostile actions like defederation. I also don’t think targeted ad tech companies share the goals of the Fediverse. I wouldn’t be bothered if instances had sponsors (as in, “/Kbin is made possible by support from Cloudflare”) like all non-profit media. But any sort of targeted ads based on user activity/data should be ruled out as a way to fund the metaverse.
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