this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023

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You Should Know

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YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

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YSK: While you're on Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse, you're not "the product" but you're also not "the customer". (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

257 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you've been invited into.

It has been said that "if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product."

It has also been said that "the customer is always right".

Right here and now, you're neither the customer nor the product.

You're a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.

You're using a service that you aren't being charged for; but that service isn't part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you're participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.

You've probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it's one of the most popular websites in the world, but it's not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don't imperil the service itself.

The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They're not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they're also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.

Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

While I agree and love the idea, it's going to be very difficult to keep things this way. Main two reasons are:

It costs money to run a service like this as it expands.
The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.

I'm honestly fully ready to see ads sprinkled throughout Lemmy instances (but the problem with that is that due to the federated nature, you can place load on one server through the API's without getting ads).

We've also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation (and probably server load as well) https://beehaw.org/post/567170. If that becomes a semi-constant issue I can see people leaving Lemmy, or at least not being as active as they would otherwise have been.

For now I'm enjoying things, finding it a bit "slow" but that's been a bit welcome, no more threads with thousands of comments drowning everyone out.

[–] meldroc 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If things get big enough that hobbyist instance owners are getting overwhelmed, it might be a good idea to organize a nonprofit, under the NPR business model. Not collecting data or breaking your brain with advertisements, though periodically, they're gonna have to go hat in hand, and beg users to feed their Patreon. Hey, I'm more than happy to throw a little in!

Nice thing about this business model is that being a nonprofit, the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive), instead of to make money for owners/shareholders.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive)

I read that as "disturbed" and for some reason the sentence still made sense to me...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The true mission of Lemmy is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

oh-wah-ah-ah-ah

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.

There is no money to be gained from "gathering data" here. All the data is already public, which means that Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. are already free to copy whatever they would like. That's part of being on the open Web.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We've also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation

Troubling but understandable. Beehaw is basically fediverse tumblr, they need to prioritise their own safety.

It really highlights the other main issue though in that people really want a new alternative to work so are obsessed with growth at all costs. But maximising the influx of new users is going to have negative effects on quality, culture, and community.

A bit of friction to onboarding, and a slow steady growth that allows a community to form is what's going to set this up for success