Server hardware isn’t free. At the end of the day, SOMEONE has to pay the bills. Either you are the customer, or the product. If you insist on being the product, you don’t get to be surprised when platforms focus on the actual customers that actually pay the bills, by enshittifying the platform.

Among every server that “do just fine,” there are more instances that are just gone for not having proper funding, especially for non-Western instance where paying for social media in not a common thing. I’m from Indonesian, and almost every Indonesian instance are cease to exist except for Misskey.id.

While Mastodon does not support ads, other fediverse software like Misskey support it. Misskey.io, the second biggest fedi instance after Mastodon.social, runs ads and subscription simutaniously.

Their ads is merely community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc. I think that might be replicatable for Western instance like Mastodon.art or Pixelfed.art.

Because most mastodon instances are running off donations, and have a relatively small user base.

The kind of people who use Mastodon are substantially more likely to be heavily invested in the technology and the vision, and thus more likely to donate.

Expand that out to the billions of people who use social media, and you have a funding problem.

Not to mention the much lesser need for moderation due to more homogeneous and well-intentioned micro communities and substantially lower rate of bots, which all means less “staff” you have to pay too.

It’s not a matter of minimum viability, it’s a matter of scale.

There’s distinction between targeted ads and community ads.

Mainstream internet is bad for targeted ads and for-profit site that plaster ads as maximum as possible.

Fediverse instance like Misskey.io runs ads, but all of them community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc.

The early internet also couldn’t provide most of the larger sites and platforms we now use. As it grew, it had to monetize in order to actually operate. If you want something outside the scope of a passion project, you need funding outside the scope of a passion project. The early internet did so well with people who actually cared because they didn’t have to operate platforms that couldn’t just care. They were operating things like personal sites and chatrooms, not social networks, document editors, or newsrooms.

Federated servers with donation-based models can function as of now, but you’d have a hard time covering hosting costs if every normal social media user began using federated platforms. There’s simply too many of them.

I’m not saying ads improve content, I’m not saying they’re the best model, and if you refuse to accept ads anywhere, that’s fine, but sites simply can’t all provide services for free, and if we want sites with the same functionality we have today, they need to monetize somehow.

Donations are definitely an option (I mean, hey, look at Wikipedia) but it isn’t necessarily viable for every online venture. For a lot of platforms, monetization must be compelled in some way, whether it’s by pushing ads, or paywalling with a subscription. The best option a platform can offer if it’s not capable of just running off donations alone is to let users choose the monetization they prefer to deal with.

True, but that’s a matter of technical implementation that I believe should be changed along with any proposed change to monetization models like I’d previously mentioned.

For instance, the site should delay ad loading until you pick “yes, I want to see ads,” or if you pick “I have a subscription” and sign in, it shouldn’t load them at all.

This isn’t impossible to do, it’s just something they haven’t made as an easy implementation yet, since things like Google’s ad services auto-load when a page is loaded, since no site really has a mechanism to manually enable or disable the core requests to Google based on user input.

This isn’t really much of an issue, practically speaking. The likelihood of someone buying a subscription is different than buying a product from an ad.

For instance, while I’m highly likely to pay for a subscription to a streaming service that lets me watch videos from creators (in my case, Nebula) I’m not likely to buy any products from a sponsorship or YouTube ad. (and haven’t, thus far)

My likelihood of paying for a product in an ad is entirely separate from paying for the service those ads are on, and this is commonly true for many people.

If there’s an independent news outlet I want to support, I’m going to feel more inclined to pay them than I am to buy a product in an ad, just because each carries different incentives for me. I want to support the news outlet, I don’t want to buy a product somewhere else.

This is anecdotal, and I understand that, but as someone else had also mentioned before, even companies like Netflix are promoting their revenue from the ad tier, and having both is a good mechanism to keep the business afloat and allow it to acquire customers who don’t want to spend too much.

Where have you heard about that?

I can think of a counter example in how Netflix is boasting about the revenue of its cheaper ad tier.

You’re thinking about it too literally. It really comes down to emotes, stickers and the like. That’s the Discord currency and before you say you can just post pictures, that’s not the same and not treated alike. It’s not about being ridiculed. It’s about being excluded from the conversation. You simply won’t be acknowledged the same way if you can’t communicate in the same style. It’s not even about one party being better. It’s more of a small rift between the two. The divide is subtle. Perhaps too subtle for most to care but it’s there.

As it appears to me Mastodon is public like Twitter. I didn’t know about private instances. Why use this format when there’s chat rooms?

What subscriptions do you have?

Thanks, I’ll take a look at misskey.

ARPU is a sadistic metric.

Is making a profit = profiteering? I agree with endless growth. I hate the big data model that assumes large numbers of users, huge churn, low success rate.

The ads I had in mind would be topic-based. If you’re on a supplement sub, you see suggestions for a vendor. If you’re on a web dev sub, you see VPS vendors. Nothing crass like Betterhelp or Masterworks.

Just FYI, you accidentally typed “l” instead of “)”.

she’s a crypto queen

Gunpowder, gelatin

Dynamite with a laser beam

Guaranteed to blow your mind

Anytiiiime!

the hype around crypto clearly makes it a stable job to get started with

And the hype around crypto also is driven by people who have certain ideologies which are, let’s just say, bad for regular folks.

You’re gonna have a hard time convincing me anyone who sees crypto as a “stable job” and not “a fucking con” isn’t sucked into this psycho TESCREAL bullshit and that they won’t start being a fucking pox on our nation like Musk,who is also a TESCREAL freak.

Jay Graber was personally chosen by Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey is all in on TESCREAL, too.

You’re telling me she’s completely uninfluenced by the psycho freaks surrounding her and their unhinged ideologies? I just don’t god damned buy it. Those views are almost endemic in Silicon Valley at this point.

If by “enshitification” you mean things like invasive ads, invasions of privacy, etc, then the idea is absolutely that making money through a paid tier can stave off the company having to resort to those means.

Because of capitalism’s never-ending desire for more, I expect to see both subscriptions and ads.

Well done everyone, you jumped ship from one pile of shit over to something that isn’t quite a pile of shit yet

The timelines are vastly different here. Twitter had like 15 years to figure it out.

Ya know people have to pay money for the fediverse to even operate right?

maybe, but I came from kbin. which I now consider dead and gone.

RIP

this is not the bluesky you’re looking for

https://blueskyproject.io/

Bluesky enables experimental science at the lab-bench or facility scale.

Bluesky is a collection of Python libraries that are co-developed but independently useful and may be adopted a la carte.

Donation model works for Wikipedia and they’ve got a fuckin warchest of god damned money.

As of 2023, it has employed over 700 staff and contractors, with net assets of $255 million and an endowment which has surpassed $100 million.

If fuckin Bomis Gooner Jimmy Wales can figure it out, so can we.

Isn’t a subscription on a free platform just donating with extra steps? Either way it’s optional but with one of the options you get perks. I’m not discounting the obviously shady things they are doing, I’m just pointing out that they’re basically the same thing from the perspective of the consumer but you get bonus shit.

Read the article, it shows the plans in detail.