To some extent, Reddit does get a slice - in the form of user engagement. User engagement is how they generate ad impressions, even if it's not from the users on the third party apps.
They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn't.
Their entire goal is to maximize "value" before their IPO. Control and number inflation. They don't care about the long term. Spez wants to cash out, and he doesn't care what it costs the company.
If, as Starbucks claims, this is, at most, happening at the store/district levels, they need to own that narrative.
Even worse, their official app uses the same API -- and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.
They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.
Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can't just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren't resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).
If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.
Unfortunately, the way federation works means that a 100 user instance that never grows past that can still see cost increases from the ecosystem growing. The number of network effects involved in all of this makes planning for meaningful sustainability a lot more difficult.
Federation frustrates that, as well -- for cross-instance posts, what's the split? 50/50? What if one instance is charging $1 per coin, but another is $0.50 per coin, what price becomes paid? How will you even ensure that the split can occur reliably? Heck, how will you handle trying to do that transfer internationally?
I know I'm probably coming across as a downer, but without answering these questions, we don't have a solution, we just have a patchwork of ideas that people worked on and implemented without every providing anything useful. I want this to succeed, desperately. I'm tired of corporate interests ruining everything -- but we can't succeed at this without figuring out these long-term issues.
Donations are not consistent, that's the big trouble. Especially after a big exodus, people may move, and they may donate for a while, but those donations will typically drop off eventually, even if they keep using it.
You're right that people are usually more willing to spend on community projects, and that's largely true - but watching open-source software as long as I have, I know that donations rarely cover things in the long-term, and most of the projects that are funded well enough to have a team behind them are actually funded by corporations. Heck, even getting one person able to run an instance as a full time gig is going to be difficult without it turning corporate.
That starts running into a few issues. It's high friction ("You mean I have to enter card details every time I want to do this on someone from a new instance?") and it has some serious risk of disproportionate impacts.
So... it could work. But that's not going to be consistent, and the federated nature of things like Lemmy makes for some weird structures. Can you give rewards across instances? What if one instance has "gold" at $1, but another has it at $0.50?
Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs -- and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we're moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn't have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.
I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn't sustainable.
Because that dip isn't due to the blackout. Reddit was pretty hard down for about an hour.
"Taking over" is the wrong tense and the wrong interpretation. With very few exceptions, charter schools have been a Christian nationalist ploy nearly from the beginning.