2w ago

Big-tech is evil but could Fediverse benefit from more small/medium for-profit companies?

I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it's a matter of time before it's enshittified.

I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there's a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than "big tech" and get more done than just donation based development.

It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?

What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?

86 comments

- 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?
  
  I mean we’ve determined what a living wage is, right? Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?
  There are plenty of jobs similar to the roles that would be needed that we can compare to you. I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly. It’s not rocket science.
  I also don’t think mods have to be paid. They can be, but I don’t see it as necessary. I’m talking about the instance maintainers.
  
  This is a great question and something we shouldn't shy away from considering.
  As far as hosting a mastodon instance? That's something that should be done for free with the only income being donations.
  These people do it because they want to. It's not necessarily "work" for them, which is why they do it for free anyways. It's also sustainable. As more users join their instance, costs for hosting will increase but so should donations. It's not that expensive to host servers, despite what some conpeople and their useful idiots may have told you. (don't assume you know the costs of hosting if you've never done it yourself.)
  Admins get a lot of power that they have no problem abusing, either. This alone would make me a moron for even considering paying them for it.
  "Yeah bro, I'm gonna pay you to host your instance where you have absolute control and can censor anything you don't like."
  This is fun for them. That's why they do it.
- I agree. Commercials get in, you get what happened to the Internet. We need something new.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  Any profit goes back to employees and paying users.
  You just described a normal non-profit, but doomed. Lol.
  Organizational committment to remaining non-profit seems to be critical to the recipe.

Non profit coops. It need to be people owned.
- It need to be people owned.
  Sounds good on paper, but the practical implementations make them not any different than any other small service provider. cosocial.ca is a Canadian co-op for Mastodon. To become a member, you must pay CA$50 per year. What kind of "ownership" does that give to you as member? Nothing, really. You can not take control of the domain or the server.
  At best, you'll get some bureaucratic oversight and the "right" to make proposals regarding changes in governance: "use the money to upgrade the server or to pay the admin", "Allow some members to get free access because they are facing some hardship, yes or no?" etc.
  But at the end of the day, is any of that "ownership" making you (or the other members) better off compared to a service like mastodon.green, which simply charges $1/month and gives you an account?
  
  In my country a coop is a legal entity and it does give you actual ownership. And we do have data coops where people pay, and vote on how services should be developed.
  
  At best, you'll get some bureaucratic oversight and the "right" to make proposals regarding changes in governance: "use the money to upgrade the server or to pay the admin", "Allow some members to get free access because they are facing some hardship, yes or no?" etc
  That sounds pretty good to me

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
  
  Elastio seems to be a devops platform as opposed to a standalone "buy my service to get a feature rich access to the fediverse or mastodon or peertube specifically, whatever" service like the typical email service providers nowadays
  To add to the initial comment, the reason why we would want this is the same reason why we should be donating to instance admins, it only gets more competitive and more work involved the bigger the fediverse gets and the more competitive it gets with offering unique experiences

Non-Profits only. ANY for profit entries will be a poisoned pill at this stage.

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.
  
  You've nailed it. That's the key bit that organizations of all kinds are going to figure out.

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 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.

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?
- 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.

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.

Sadly the UX here sucks compared to for profit platforms like Bluesky, I don't know of a good solution, but money is probably needed.
- Open source projects aren't doomed to lousy UX forever.
  Shoves GNUImp behind a desk with a foot.
  Just look at recent releases of Gnome and KDE. We can have nice things, it just takes time.

Non-profits is what we need here.

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).

Does Flipboard fit this description? They are part of fedi already
- Yes I think so. If they had an ad free versions I’d pay for it.

Fediverse is open source and decentralized, so any for-profit model could leverage it without asking for anyone's permission. There are already for-profit companies that build and maintain apps to access Fediverse platforms. Meta Threads and Tumblr are both integrating into ActivityPub as their own hosts. I imagine in a future where Fediverse grows rampantly, the hosts with the best overall user experience will be for-profit. We live in a world of global capitalism, good things cost money most of the time.
- good things cost money most of the time.
  I've found it's the exact opposite: the best things in life are free.
  It's actually built-in to your argument. None of this would be possible without free protocols that are accessible to everyone.
  
  Protocols can be developed and then shared without cost except for the upfront development costs. Hosting a continuous service requires regular income, meaning for profit models will always out-resource non-profit models of hosting. Especially if a platform is looking at hosting more than just text and compressed images. Why do you think Pixelfed's main host only allows uploads of up to 15MB?

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.

86 comments