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Non-profits only IMO. Pay folks what they deserve, all the rest goes back in.
Investors can’t go near it. They’re always the problem.
You could do a for profit without investors. Any profit goes back to employees and paying users. Make it the operating agreement from the get go and no one could come in.
Non profit in many places means you can’t sell a service. So you rely on donations. Which means you’re constantly asking for donations.
Leadership changes. Employees change.
Look at valve: when Gabe dies it could become an absolute shitshow for us. We cannot depend on generosity and benevolence. It has to be a non-profit to limit the potential damage and force transparency.
FIFA is a non-profit. Doesn’t exactly make them a good organisation.
Didn’t say being a mom-profit makes it good
Even non-profits aren't immune to hostile takeovers. OpenAI is a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit, and that hasn't stopped them from turning into something indistinguishable from a regular for-profit company. They've also been making noise about abandoning the fig leaf of the non-profit.
Mozilla is another one where nominally they're a for-profit controlled by a non-profit, but they're now getting into shoving ads in your face just like any other company.
It is harder to turn bad when you're a non-profit but not impossible, without something of a poison pill that makes it unacceptable to for-profit takeovers.
Didn’t say they were immune.
Yeah but Valve is centralized ownership still. One guy has majority and that makes a difference. A coop could be customer led from get go. 51% customers 49% employees or something like that.
The point being if you structure it as for profit you can charge for things and build a good product. You can make rules that says 100% of the profits have to be redistributed and no one can change that. It’s how many farm co-ops work.
Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.
I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.
To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on...
Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.
Yeah I regret commiting to a pc steam library, its just as bad as going console
I think there's a difference in definitions, as well as difference between non-profit/not-for-profit and charities. As far as I know what your described is a non-profit and a non-profit can sell services.
How do you decide "what they deserve"? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?
Regardless of the size of the sponsor, commercial sponsorship would be fine, as long as they don't post ads or try to influence the content in any way.
Unfortunately, that's a combination that likely will never happen. Imagine if Reddit never had ads or bowed down to corporate pressure. That's not a viable business model for a capitalist organization.
I don't even mind ads that much, for me it's more about the algorithms that push certain agendas and are not open source (for ads and content alike)
That’s hard. I like an algorithm I can control. Maybe could do ads in search only. I don’t know. Kind of hate ads.
Let's look at email as a history example, google gobbled up everyone for gmail.
If fediverse goes the way of email where it infinitely will grow and compete for the most part eventually businesses offering instances as services will be the norm, we can just jump ahead and try to it right before big tech starts to gobble it up.
Businesses already offer that like elestio
Non-Profits only. ANY for profit entries will be a poisoned pill at this stage.
Bluesky app is open source. I wonder if someone would try and replace the ATProtocol API endpoints with Mastodon ones.
Think beyond VC backed companies. Those get tons of attention because they need it.
Investors = bad. I whole heartedly agree.
For profit doesn’t have to be bad. What if it were a worker/user co-op. Have a free product and have a paid product. If you pay for the product you get a (just one) vote. If you work for the company you get a vote. Users won’t vote for maximizing profit. But the profit means you don’t have to beg for donations.
Craigslist would be another example. For profit but no major investors so doesn’t have to prioritize profits.
My home instance is starting to do some of this, it’s talked about a lot in https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/div0
What are they looking at doing for revenue?
People who support the server have greater voting rights; no revenue steam. But I think it would be cool to sell pirate plushies!
Unrelated: If you code it’s not hard to insert ads in between the comments on your own lemmy instance. It would be a cool experience but probably would create significant vitriol and site wide bannings by most, if not all, major instances for trying.
The problem for most monitization is psychological only ; many ideas would be an unwinnable uphill battle. Yes, can put ads in but also be a leper with zero traffic. You could probably put in perks if have good coding skills or can hire good skills; but if public relations done wrong then you are “poison to the community”.
You could try to do awards ( Reddit gold) but may get laughed off the platform. It’s a tough crowd
A for profit worker co-op is very different than a private for-profit. A for-profit worker co-op would be fine ik my book and in fact preferable than a non worker co-op nonprofit.
Id like to see non for profits hosting servers for their members. fandom conventions, maker spaces, etc. It would also make sense for them to host communities around what they do. scifi literature, games, 3d printing, etc.
Right, long term nothing is more important than retaining agency over their major methods of interaction with members and fostering vibrant online communities that feed into positive momentum.
Ghost have their code open source and offer paid for hosting which is not unreasonable as you'd to pay to send bulk emails anyway even if you self-hosted (although there are free tiers from some providers if your only send a few hundred a month).
I think supporter badges would be a good monetization model for each instance. ActivityPub could allow for an arbitrary "badge" field (to my knowledge it doesn't currently have anything like this but I also haven't read the spec), and each server could fill it in however it likes. Other servers/users could limit displaying them if they get abused, à la pig poop balls on hexbear (or whatever it's moved on to being called now).
I just gave boost $4 to remove the ads. I prefer OSS and Non Profits absolutely, but I also acknowledge that we live in a capitalist hellscape and good things take money.
I'd say this is just like a nice e-mail provider that provides you with email and a bit of cloud storage and a place to sync your addressbook and calender for like $5 a month. We could do the same with social media and the Fediverse.
Non-profits is what we need here.
My own Communick offers managed hosting for things like Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy, PixelFed, GoToSocial, Takahe for those that want to have their own server but do not want to deal with the hassle of managing it or worrying about security updates. I also offer paid accounts: $29/year gives you an account at all of our "flagship" instances: meaning you can get an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale.
There are other providers like omg.lol (Mastodon account at social.lol and some other cool services for $20/year) and mastodon.green (accounts cost $1/month).
All of these servers are of course smaller and less popular than the ones that are open for registration, but unsurprisingly they are stable, well managed, free of drama and (AFAIK) never been linked to spammers or trolls. IOW, "you get what you pay for".
Profits are a bit like internal taxes on wages.
Co-op NPOs should use these taxes to further the company's goals instead of crude extraction into the goals of the owners.
Those aren't perfect, because once they reach a certain size any form of corruption can have big bad consequences. The Fediverse approach to this is "decentralisation", but all decentralisation efforts have an API vulnerability - there needs to be a central body that develops the "language" between the actors.
On the other hand, you might not have an ear for any of this, because you might be dependent on your business' profits.
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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