Comment by colesantiago
5 days ago
Yes, 9.9/10 times it doesn't work.
For every Wikipedia or Thunderbird that gets millions in donations you get thousands of others that cannot live off sparse donations alone.
And since you are lazy to read the article:
"After three years of running our Fediverse server, we're shutting it down. Not because we've given up on the Fediverse, but because it isn't safe or sustainable enough for a community org like ours to run a server on a shoestring...
...Since 2024, all of our core funding and funding bids have fallen away. The server dwindled to three active users, and the operating costs and effort of keeping it maintained were no longer worth it for our economy of scale. It was a bigger cost, and more effort, than the rest of our hosting put together."
This is one of many examples of hobbyist / community run instances of what you describe, as donations didn't even work for them and they shut down.
Remember, they cannot do ads or subscriptions, so donations are their only way to be sustainable.
> I'm not sure how old you are, but in the early 2000s...
Spare us your fallacious "back in the old days" argument, we aren't there anymore, we are talking about now.
Honestly did not see the article, I apologise.
The issue they are having is moderation, not technical costs. This is the same issue sites like Reddit have. In the article, they even mention that private social media sites use moderation centres from poor countries. That is abhorrent. Not sure why you are advocating for this?
> Spare us your fallacious "back in the old days" argument, we aren't there anymore, we are talking about now.
From my perspective, what is the point of continuing this conversation if you won't address an example in the past where my argument worked?
> The issue they are having is moderation, not technical costs. This is the same issue sites like Reddit have. In the article, they even mention that private social media sites use moderation centres from poor countries. That is abhorrent. Not sure why you are advocating for this?
You go an admit that you haven't read the article and then you knowingly make a strawman argument saying I support "social media sites using moderation centres from poor countries"
Where did I even explicitly say I supported this? You just made that up and you know it.
The argument is about funding without ads, those that run hobbyist federated social media like Mastodon cannot use Ads or subscriptions, so they need to use donations (which is unsustainable)
Even if you throw in moderation, isn't even worth it if you're running a costly Mastodon instance and no donations are coming in.
> From my perspective, what is the point of continuing this conversation if you won't address an example in the past where my argument worked?
Because they simply don't work today and at scale. We have new problems today that didn't exist in the past.
> You go an admit that you haven't read the article and then you knowingly make a strawman argument saying I support "social media sites using moderation centres from poor countries"
To clear it up, I read the article before my most recent reply to you. The very article that you linked mentions that private social networks use moderation centres from poor countries. Did you read the article you linked to me before sending it?
> Because they simply don't work today and at scale. We have new problems today that didn't exist in the past.
So your response is just to throw your hands up and say "won't work". Buddy, let me tell you, we could squeeze out a lot more performance to run social networks if we needed to. The hard part is the moderation, as you correct identified. But private-run social networks use questionable labour to moderate anyway (as per the article you linked).
In the past running a hobbyist social media worked, it can work again.
Mastodon isn't a good example. It's written in Ruby and serves up a heavy React application. A light version of it could be written in something much faster, and served up on something much smaller.
You haven't provided a coherent argument to suggest otherwise. Goodbye and thanks for the discussion.