this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
792 points (74.7% liked)
Memes
45746 readers
1541 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well so far everything on lemmy has run on the goodwill of instance owners, lemmy maintainers, and app developers working for free. Sync as far I can tell is the only thing so far to bring an openly capitalist approach to lemmy, and it depends on the free hosting that instance owners are providing. I don't have any problems with people wanting paid for their work. However, I can see how it's a little jarring to see an app charge such a subscription fee while some big instances are struggling with hosting costs and likely pulling in much less in donations.
So much this.
I'd rather give the 20$ to my fav instances, than to an optional app.
Sync's pricing is inherently socialist. LJ owns his own labor and is able to decide what is done with it. If you don't want to pay then cool, there are plenty of other options.
It's also inherently capitalist. Maybe profiteering would've been a better word? As I stated above, I have no problem with people getting paid for their work. He can charge whatever the hell he wants.
Idk, LJ doesn't have a boss that takes a portion of the profits he generates. Extraction of surplus labor is the cornerstone of capitalism. But this isn't really the place to get into a deep discussion about regardless. I don't think it's profiteering either to charge an amount that provides you with a living wage. Sync for reddit had orders of magnitude more users than the Lemmy version so of course he'll need to charge more on Lemmy to keep doing it full time.
I don't know what to think about post-scarcity commodities.