this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
555 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
1928 readers
7 users here now
Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it's technological news, it probably belongs here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That part still worries me a smidge, and it's somewhat related to my other concern about funding/scaling. As more of the general public discover and move over, the % of the general population willing and able to host their own instance is going to steadily decrease. Not saying that we're all gonna die or anything, but it's going to be a shift and we'll have to continue to adapt.
Hmm. Theoretically you could commercialise an instance, I guess.
I expect that in time, that's exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it's members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It's not everyone's cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can't hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They'll have success right up until they don't and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.
or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit's traffic and run purely on donation.
That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there's 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.
You'd have to have a hook - guaranteed performance or uptime. Maybe some niche feature set or enhancement.
I think it's similar to some of the other open source vendors out there that sell a service that they host, but do not actually own (even if they are one of the open source project contributors). You can't get too greedy because the thing you sell can be sold by anyone, so you have to compete on price and "extras". Not the easiest way to make money, but it's not unheard of.