I would say *it's time to federate", but the path to monetization is nonexistent. Production value costs money and there should at least be a way to make that back. But as with open source software regarding monetization, federated platforms are overtly anti-monetization, demanding there be no ads, paid subscription or any integrated payment that is linked to the actual content (for analytics and tax purposes, which is key if you want to run it as a business).
The general consensus I seem to get from tankies and anarchists on Matrix and here on the fediverse is that they don't want anyone who makes any money to take part, thereby creating a "boys club" specifically catering to their whims.
A bit of an aside, I know, but I thought it should be said.
Framing anti-monetization as a "tankie and anarchist" stanice is a bit disengenuos. I know that hosting costs money, but this can be handled through donations.
Not everything on the internet needs to be a for-profit venture, archive.org and Wikimedia work just fine as donations supported NGOs.
No, not everything. Just the things people want to sell and hopefully through smaller platforms in a decentralised manner rather than being corralled into a massive, centralised platform. You know, people who do it for a living, who'd like to eat food and be independent rather than being stuck in some dreary ass company or under the thumb of Google. Ever consider that?
Like if I put $200,000 into a piece of work I need to have some guarantees. I can't put years of my life into a project that I need to make money off of, give it out for free and hope for donations. That's insane.
Like if I put $200,000 into a piece of work I need to have some guarantees.
That's called investing, and guess what, sometimes you lose on investments. If you want guaranteed income, you can be a salaried employee.
I can't put years of my life into a project that I need to make money off of, give it out for free and hope for donations. That's insane.
If the end goal is monetization, then say so upfront, don't worm your way into communities and start hawking your wares. Again, not everything needs to be a profit making machine, volunteering, donations and non-profits exist.
You know, people who do it for a living, who'd like to eat food and be independent rather than being stuck in some dreary ass company or under the thumb of Google. Ever consider that?
Your personal ambitions are not a concern of me, or anyone else. You sound like the Lemmy community is putting a damper on your dreams of making it big (it's never just about putting food on the table,right?). Maybe we want a place where we can talk to each other and not have ads shoved into our faces, like on every other platform?
If you want to set up a commercial based instance, go ahead, just don't be surprised if you don't recieve a warm welcome.
Yeah pretty much, quality of community spirals downwards very fast as money becomes a bigger factor. I'm one of the anarchists you mentioned though. I have no interest in monetization of the fediverse and would be willing to change instances or platforms if they allowed that.
Its also funny that you mention it as a "boys club", because in this situation the only people we're explicitly excluding is capitalists. So like, a "workers club" which yeah I dont want to be part of communities that cater to capitalists and capitalism. Content creators can use patron or other more direct methods of earning from content they post here. Capitalist middlemen profiting off of ad placement be damned.
I was referring to tankies and anarchists on Matrix - not as a major qualifier. Libre is important, but saying that integrating payment systems and such into software or services as either immoral, unethical or predatory is disingenuous at best.
But you've proven one thing: you are definitely apart of that boys club, no matter your political leanings.
Btw, I'm a social democrat and I'm very pro-integrity and anti-predatory. But we're cutting off our left hand to spite out right, meaning we've created a sterile environment where there is no possibility for content creators or commercial developers to monetize without jumping through hoops.
There is something to be said about dark design patterns within UX, but the belligerent and stubborn disposition that all monetization is bad monetization is the folly of a one-track mind.
The "boys club" that excluded capitalists, yeah. Youre acting like I should be sympathetic to capitalists who are missing out on business ventures.
You're certainly not showing any socialist leanings if you're literally calling on me to "think of the commercial developers". Capitalists are class enemies. Excluding them makes this a space for the working class. Thats a great thing, there is no other major social media free from capitalist profiteering.
Youre never going to convince a leftist to start feeling sorry for capitalists who aren't able to come in here and set up shop. So that this space continues to be worker oriented and free from corporatism we absolutely should continue to actively prevent commercialization of this community.
One simple difference between a federated "video service" and stuff like mastodon/lemmy/etc. would be the vast quantity of bandwidth and storage required if the service got successful could push this well beyond goodwill and crowdfunding efforts.
The amount of active user a single dollar (or whatever currency really) can support for a text based service, even with image hosting, is way higher than a video streaming service like youtube.
PeerTube is a federated video service, and one that's been around longer than Lemmy.
It gets around this problem by using Peer-to-Peer tech. Essentially, when you go on the site it uses your machine to send data to multiple other users, like how torrents work. The server still needs to exist, but load is lessened by offloading it to clients who seed data to others.
Unlike file sharing systems, there is no need for the uploader to remain on the network after uploading a file or group of files. Instead, during the upload process, the files are broken into chunks and stored on a variety of other computers on the network. When downloading, those chunks are found and reassembled. Every node on the Freenet network contributes storage space to hold files and bandwidth that it uses to route requests from its peers.
Linux Experiment has been doing a mixed model for a while, and asks reasonably well for Patreon patrons to front the majority of the bill. And frankly, that might be the way forward. Creators putting their introductory content on Peertube and then their best content on curiosity streams. Introduce themselves on the free platform, get the money on the paid platform. But they're always going to at least want to put some content on the easily monetizable platform that's ad funded, and I think that's fine, to be honest. Maybe they even want a three tier model. Intro stuff on Peertube, some of their premium content on YouTube as a preview for what you get if you pay extra, and then the best stuff on the paid platform. You'll see some people who jump from Peertube straight to paying the creator directly, but people always have varying degrees of caring about this stuff and different motivations, and for content creators who really have to put a lot into videos to stand out even just a little, they need to find the model that makes them the most money
Ads are horrible and always ruins the experience severely, since there are never enough ads on a page for the producer to be happy.
I'm not against being a subscriber but I only do that for services that are extreamly useful, like search and email.
The point of Lemmy as a federated platform is that the cost is shared between many people. If hundreds of instance admins pay 10 dollars per month, it's easily manageable. But if one instance becomes huge and needs to pay 10000 dollars per month, there is an issue for that instance, not the Lemmy network.
Uhm... software and content creation? Exclude ads, fine. But I'd like to get paid for my work and that you won't get your hands on my work until you pay me. If read the words "donate" or "honour system" in your reply I'm going to lose my shit.
And again, I'm not talking about paying for the platform, but for some content. Some content costs money to make, and people work for the money they put in and may naturally want returns. Why is that a bad thing? Why is people getting paid for their work a bad thing?
I'll tell you what's bad: people being dependant upon major platforms because it's the only place to make money. It's a self fulfilling prophecy giving way to much power and influence to the big corporations. Why wouldn't you want to decentralise that?0
You will get paid for your work on windows or mac if you make good software. Go ahead and create.
Content doesn't cost to create. Users are doing to for free as you can see. People have other reasons to contribute to a platform than making money. It's not the meaning of life you know.
This is what you don't understand I think... That a technical platform can have other goals than how to produce profit for it's owners.
I need you to understand that markets and selling products or services is not what defines capitalism. Capitalism is modern usury, i.e virtual liquidity, like central banks printing money they don't have, loans upon loans on the glimmer in the milkman's eye.
Do not let capitalists co-opt the concept of markets and money. Okay?
Additionally, we will never see adoption in the fediverse or in open source without monetization. People want commercial products and media. By preventing any access of it on a purely ideological and zealous level because you don't like it screws all of us.
Do I want a libre system? Yes! Do I mind a UUID for my hardware provided by the kernel? No! Do I want Ableton Live on Linux? Fríggin' yes! Do people who develop software and media need to pay rent, buy food, pay employees? Heck yes! Will most users gravitate towards platforms that provide all this? You bet your sweet bippy!
Again, I feel zealous demagogues so lost in mainstream disinformation and yankie psy-ops have really become a wet blanket over all liberating technologies.
Some guy on Matrix said that "letting people pay for exclusive content on a platform is akin to DRM"... like removed, you mean paying for someone's work? "Oh, you can just donate and then give the content out for free"... like how is a content creator supposed to operate on that? Even Patreon is it self a video platform with exclusive videos and people make a living off that!
But NOOOOOO! We gotta let the fríggin' liberals (right-wing) and capitalist screw us in one ear so our brain falls out the other, to completely dominate these markets ON THEIR FUCKING TERMS just because a mind bogglingly childish disposition like "money bad" makes regular people disinterested and even concerned upon the point of cringe.
What do you expect? We start trading goats for wicker baskets again, or is that also "capitalism"? Or do you hope that society will automatically jump to a Trekkien utopia over the weekend if we just hope hard enough? Goddamn it pisses me off that people are this uneducated.
Thank the heavens that Flatpak will support payment systems in the future. Maybe then we can FINALLY get some commercial software that cost a lot of money to develop in the first place on to libre platforms so anyone, literally anyone other than the closed minded demagogues and zealots might be interested in making the switch from PREDATORY CAPITALIST BASED SYSTEMS LIKE WINDOWS AND MACOS over to libre ones.
Maybe then this fucking boys club will reseed into the egocentric, chest thumping, brain rotting, narcecistic matrix chats, where the circle jerk can continue in a zoo like controlled environment.
God, I'm getting an anurism over here. So many have fallen for the Okey doke, and I gotta sit and explain why paying for a product is okay and not what capitalism is about. Shoot me.
I don't get this argument. You already have windows and Mac ecosystems where people pay for everything and you have the professional sales guys and big tech being fully invested in sucking all value they can from it all.
Ads in operating systems, spying on users, ads in search engines, telemetry in products, everything you want yourself because you want companies to make money from users.
You have Facebook, Instagram, Google, Microsoft, Meta etc etc. They are all there for you.
So maybe use one of the existing platforms which is fully monetized? Use programs developed for those platforms? Don't bring that shit into the Linux world.
You mean those tracking platforms and walled gardens? Is that what you have to do, opt into predatory platforms in order tobuy some software? How does that make sense? "Oh well, you just need to sacrifice your privacy and autonomy to buy a product"... seems like you want people to be manipulated and subverted so you can sit on the other end and be a smug git.
Mass tracking is a danger to democracy and liberty. Look at China. Stop enabling the status quo. Stop being a selfish zealot.
That tracking and those walled gardens will come to Linux if you make it a highly profitable platform to develop apps for, or allow ads into our software.
I don't know why that's so hard to understand when you have examples right in front of your eyes.
No matter how good an AI is, it cannot restore details that were lost. It can approximate them, but if you have a 4k photo of a piece of paper with a small stick figure drawn on it and compress it to 144p, you will have a gray blob in its place at best or just nothing.
The most advanced AI from 50 years into the future would still not be able to restore the original stick figure.
I think you could do this if the compression algo is made with ai upscaling in mind. You'd just neet to store the word "stick figure" and its position, and bam your ai can draw a stick figure on the sheet.
You store what objects are seen in text or tokens and the pixels serve as more of a coordinate system to mark size/shape etc