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Exactly. The average person is dying to pay to have the privilege of an extra job moderating and administrating their own social feed! This is a bulletproof pla

Exactly. The average person is dying to pay to have the privilege of an extra job moderating and administrating their own social feed! This is a bulletproof plan that really understands consumer behavior.

vorpalhex 4y ago
Who says unpaid? Make your friends buy you dinner or throw some cash your way. One of the benefits of the fediverse is that you can experiment with new payment models.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  I can't tell if this is satire in response to sarcasm, could you clarify?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Not satire! You're providing a real service to your friends - a mastodon server. It takes real time, real skill and real money (buying hardware or renting a vps) to do this. Your friends should compensate you and it's fair to ask them to do so. How you do this is up to you. I host a gameserver for my friends. This is a really nice bit of hardware in a datacenter. It costs me $600 a year directly and maybe 4-6 hours a month. I have about 8 folks who play on it with regularity. For my friend group, we "compensate" via trading food, either cooking for each other or catching dinner out. That works well for my friend group and I perceive this as fair. Your friend group may be different. You may literally ask them to throw in $5 a month or maybe you trade services (your barber friend gives you a free haircut on occasion, whatever). There isn't a magic equation of what is fair or right for your circumstance.. and it's ok to experiment. Part of why the fediverse is good is that these experiments can be run.
    - BoorishBears 4y ago
      Then it's not really a good faith reply to their point is it? The problem presented wasn't how you pay, it's the fact that you pay and take on moderation duties and curation. Getting reimbursed by friends doesn't change that, and if anything it convolutes the latter part of the problem by leaving the door open to some awkward dynamics. A centralized group chat that needs funding to stay alive sounds like a pretty awful product.
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        All things require funding. There are no exceptions. My discord guild also requires time and money. So it goes.
        BoorishBears 4y ago
        I don't think you have any reply to the topic being discussed. The point is that people went from an experience where they didn't take money out of their pocket every month unless they wanted to, and didn't have to curate for others or moderate for others. I pay for a game server and won't accept a dime from my friends for it not so I can feel like king of some fiefdom, but so we can enjoy a game amongst ourselves. If moderation is the part of that experience that you're cherishing, it's no wonder you can't relate to the complaints others have.
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        > The point is that people went from an experience where they didn't take money out of their pocket every month unless they wanted to, and didn't have to curate for others or moderate for others. That was basically a vivid hallucination. You offshored the mod work to underpaid contractors in foreign offices and paid by selling your focus and privacy. You didn't have to feel guilty because some nice folks in fancy clothes with a big PR department told you it was cool. Those folks in the fancy suits are realizing it's too hard to make money that way. You can still chase that bargain. You will see more and more ads. Your privacy will only get more invaded. Eventually you will have to pay.
nerdponx 4y ago
You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right? Big forums had big hosting costs and required donations from members, had issues with spam, had to source volunteer moderators from the community, etc., just like big Mastodon instances today. Small forums had few of those issues because the scale was smaller. The problem was not that nobody wanted to run a small forum: it's actually kind of fun to be a forum admin for your friends, and only one person in the group actually needs to be the admin. The problem was that nobody wanted to be on a small forum because it was small. Now you can have it both ways: a small instance with trivial running cost and moderation demands, but all the benefits of being on a huge forum with thousands of concurrent users. See also: Discord servers. Administering a Mastodon instance that you pay someone to host is not much more difficult than administering a Discord server. If people found it difficult to moderate a Discord server, why would so many friend groups, gamer groups, content creators, sub-Reddits, and software projects have their own small Discord servers? The answer is that the cost of moderating a small group of people is really small because small groups are easy to moderate, and the main downside of a small group isn't really relevant when the small group can follow and interact with anyone in the huge federated network.
- darkwater 4y ago
  > You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right? And yet many of them died or, better put, most of the new forums were never born nowadays because communities moved to centralized, managed solutions (Facebook, Telegram, Discord, Slack etc)
  - kitsune_ 4y ago
    Many of the focused niche discussions around the globe still happen in forums (and subreddits).
    - darkwater 4y ago
      Reddit is as centralized as a platform could ever be.
kitsune_ 4y ago
I was 'web socialized' in the 90's. IRC, web forums, and so on. Before that we had BBS. This is nothing new. And nothing prevents a major player to enter the fediverse btw.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  > nothing prevents a major player to enter the fediverse Apparently Tumblr intends to implement ActivityPub, so it might be happening sooner rather than later.

vorpalhex 4y ago

Who says unpaid? Make your friends buy you dinner or throw some cash your way. One of the benefits of the fediverse is that you can experiment with new payment models.

BoorishBears 4y ago
I can't tell if this is satire in response to sarcasm, could you clarify?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Not satire! You're providing a real service to your friends - a mastodon server. It takes real time, real skill and real money (buying hardware or renting a vps) to do this. Your friends should compensate you and it's fair to ask them to do so. How you do this is up to you. I host a gameserver for my friends. This is a really nice bit of hardware in a datacenter. It costs me $600 a year directly and maybe 4-6 hours a month. I have about 8 folks who play on it with regularity. For my friend group, we "compensate" via trading food, either cooking for each other or catching dinner out. That works well for my friend group and I perceive this as fair. Your friend group may be different. You may literally ask them to throw in $5 a month or maybe you trade services (your barber friend gives you a free haircut on occasion, whatever). There isn't a magic equation of what is fair or right for your circumstance.. and it's ok to experiment. Part of why the fediverse is good is that these experiments can be run.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    Then it's not really a good faith reply to their point is it? The problem presented wasn't how you pay, it's the fact that you pay and take on moderation duties and curation. Getting reimbursed by friends doesn't change that, and if anything it convolutes the latter part of the problem by leaving the door open to some awkward dynamics. A centralized group chat that needs funding to stay alive sounds like a pretty awful product.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      All things require funding. There are no exceptions. My discord guild also requires time and money. So it goes.
      - BoorishBears 4y ago
        I don't think you have any reply to the topic being discussed. The point is that people went from an experience where they didn't take money out of their pocket every month unless they wanted to, and didn't have to curate for others or moderate for others. I pay for a game server and won't accept a dime from my friends for it not so I can feel like king of some fiefdom, but so we can enjoy a game amongst ourselves. If moderation is the part of that experience that you're cherishing, it's no wonder you can't relate to the complaints others have.
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        > The point is that people went from an experience where they didn't take money out of their pocket every month unless they wanted to, and didn't have to curate for others or moderate for others. That was basically a vivid hallucination. You offshored the mod work to underpaid contractors in foreign offices and paid by selling your focus and privacy. You didn't have to feel guilty because some nice folks in fancy clothes with a big PR department told you it was cool. Those folks in the fancy suits are realizing it's too hard to make money that way. You can still chase that bargain. You will see more and more ads. Your privacy will only get more invaded. Eventually you will have to pay.

nerdponx 4y ago

You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right? Big forums had big hosting costs and required donations from members, had issues with spam, had to source volunteer moderators from the community, etc., just like big Mastodon instances today. Small forums had few of those issues because the scale was smaller. The problem was not that nobody wanted to run a small forum: it's actually kind of fun to be a forum admin for your friends, and only one person in the group actually needs to be the admin. The problem was that nobody wanted to be on a small forum because it was small. Now you can have it both ways: a small instance with trivial running cost and moderation demands, but all the benefits of being on a huge forum with thousands of concurrent users. See also: Discord servers. Administering a Mastodon instance that you pay someone to host is not much more difficult than administering a Discord server. If people found it difficult to moderate a Discord server, why would so many friend groups, gamer groups, content creators, sub-Reddits, and software projects have their own small Discord servers? The answer is that the cost of moderating a small group of people is really small because small groups are easy to moderate, and the main downside of a small group isn't really relevant when the small group can follow and interact with anyone in the huge federated network.

darkwater 4y ago
> You are aware that an entire generation of Internet forums operated (and still operate) this way, right? And yet many of them died or, better put, most of the new forums were never born nowadays because communities moved to centralized, managed solutions (Facebook, Telegram, Discord, Slack etc)
- kitsune_ 4y ago
  Many of the focused niche discussions around the globe still happen in forums (and subreddits).
  - darkwater 4y ago
    Reddit is as centralized as a platform could ever be.

kitsune_ 4y ago

I was 'web socialized' in the 90's. IRC, web forums, and so on. Before that we had BBS. This is nothing new. And nothing prevents a major player to enter the fediverse btw.

nerdponx 4y ago
> nothing prevents a major player to enter the fediverse Apparently Tumblr intends to implement ActivityPub, so it might be happening sooner rather than later.