rglullis

But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.

Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.

How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say "Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own"? I'm not going to say zero, but I really doubt it's going to be "more than 3".

The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new ~~sucker~~ enthusiast coming up thinking "my server will be different".

Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.

I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.

What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I'd hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don't see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.

If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.

Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let's say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.

• This is not how the fediverse works. Each server keeps a whole copy to themselves of all that they've accessed in the federation.
• Cost of hardware is only a fraction of the total cost. Even if we solved the issue of running the Fediverse at scale with negligible costs, we still are not accounting for all the labor of volunteers, instance admins and developers.

The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.

If it was an exceptional case, I'd be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.

Let's get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:

• Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
• Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
• Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
• Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
• Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)

We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.

@jerry@infosec.exchange , I'm sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?

If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don't you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?

My point is that if I am to be in al “alternative” economy is not to make rich a cool San Francisco dude instead of Jeff Bezos,

That is the perfect display of crab mentality that is so prevalent in the Fediverse.

We're talking about one guy that is building a service that is 100% FOSS, and who currently has (according to the article) 300 musicians on the platform. Even if them all become paying subscribers, we are talking about something on the order of $3000/month. No one is going to become a "rich dude in San Francisco" because of that.

Even if he gets 10 times as many people paying, we are still talking about income that is less than what a senior developer would be making by slinging code at Big Tech. And if he got to the point where there that many people using his service, you can bet that would also mean more competition in the space. With the difference that no one would be able to build a monopoly around it because the service is FOSS and built on top of open protocols.

Voluntary donations are more than enough to keep it on float.

"Keeping it afloat" is not the same as "thriving". The Lemmy developers have made this their full-time job, but they could be making more money by doing deliveries by bike than what they get by donations. This is pathetically little for all the value that they have produced. There is so much potential in the Fediverse, yet we don't get to realize 1% of it because people like you keep this silly idea that an "alternative" economy is only fair if everyone is piss-poor broken.

paying music hosting services a p2p network

Hosting the files is the least of the problems. Accepting payments online is. Dealing with fraud is. Managing exclusive access and features for paying customer is. Getting one place where you can point your fans to go and buy your music or merch is.

self hosted searxng instance.

How is that free? Even if you are self-hosting, you still need to pay for your server, the electricity to run it and your time that you spend troubleshooting, making sure things are up-to-date, etc. Not to mention that you are also not accounting the labor of the developers of libre projects: FOSS does not grow in trees, they require people working for it as well.

I don’t think there would be a lot of people really willing to spend that for a service others provide for free with a bigger platform

TANSTAAFL. If people refuse to understand this very basic principle and if we don't collectively start putting our own resources on the line to invest in ethical alternatives, we will never be able to have a sustainable alternative that is not dependent on Venture Capitalists. Everything wrong with Surveillance Capitalism can be traced back to the point where people started expecting to get things for free when they should be asking themselves "What is the catch?".