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> and very few people actually want to pay for it. I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe in. Works for the public deserve public (dist

> and very few people actually want to pay for it. I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe in. Works for the public deserve public (distinct from government) funding. There are many things that say "if you don't give us money, we can't continue to exist." "We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments." Reddit's enshitification[1] is a function of needing to please investors. Many people are very happy with old.reddit.com, yet reddit paid for ux devs to implement dark patterns because that's what investors demanded. I don't want to pay for signal, but I pay for it. I don't want to pay for Wikipedia, but I pay for it. I don't want to pay for my local radio stations, but I pay for them. I don't want to pay for my politicians to represent me, but I pay for that. I don't want to pay my taxes, but I've traveled enough to see what happens without government institutions. I think people are willing to sacrifice money for purpose. Reddit and twitter were great free speech platforms before billionaire malfeasance. These platforms threatened authoritarians world wide. That is purpose I think people would financially sacrifice for in both external funding, and loss of income. I think it is pretty clear that the next great social media platform will be a 501c3 and they will ask for money in the same way that radio stations do. [1]https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

waboremo 3y ago
And now we get to actual solutions: public funding. But it's something a lot of people don't want to admit. We skirt around the issue, this relies on donations, that relies on the goodwill of the owner, all of it to ignore the fact that what we really want is public funding for crucial software such as forums/social networks (and hosting them).
- hooverd 3y ago
  Mr Biden please send me money to host a Lemmy instance.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > what we really want is public funding for crucial software such as forums/social networks (and hosting them). Maybe some people want that. Your "we" is putting in a lot of work.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Pedantry doesn't get you anywhere, you should know this by now you're a grown man.
robinsonb5 3y ago
> "We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments." It's almost as though the large-scale abandonment of old-skool small-scale, independent domain-specific web forums in favour of huge centralised platforms was a mistake... (Just out of interest, can anyone give me an idea of the typical running costs of, say, a phpBB or vBulletin web forum with a couple of hundred users?)
- elwebmaster 3y ago
  Mostly it was just the cost of the domain since there was free hosting all over the place. You could also just run it in an old PC in your bedroom, not sure how much electricity that used as I was not paying electricity at the time :) but mostly the problem is simultaneous users, 100 users is ok as long as they are not all making requests at the same time. Anyways, with modern frameworks it would be practically free. But the SEO and marketing costs to get any kind of traction these days are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the real reason we can’t have decentralized communities anymore, the big guys have formed oligopoly. They control the market and prevent any competition by owning user attention.
- justinlloyd 3y ago
  I don't know what the lower bound is, but a specific answer is "$97.67 per month" which is what I pay for a server in a rack in a data center that has been chugging along, with an occasional drive failure, for the past 15 years that hosts a forum, a bunch of low traffic websites, and an email server. I also run a BBS on a Raspberry Pi that plays host to a few hundred DAU, that engage in chat, forums, a MUCK, and the occasional file transfer which runs on my home internet connection. I am sure someone will jump right in and tell me that I am doing it wrong and I can host everything on an AWS micro VPS for $4/month, but the amount that I pay is for my server. I also suspect someone will jump right in and tell me I am not allowed to host a server on my home internet connection.
viksit 3y ago
not sure if it’s clear yet tbh. capitalism is alive and well, and public goods funding will not scale internationally if it’s controlled by the us.
- hayst4ck 3y ago
  I am not sure why a non profit in the style of Wikipedia could not work. Wikipedia seems to be scaling fine, even to other languages (correct me if I'm wrong).

waboremo 3y ago

And now we get to actual solutions: public funding. But it's something a lot of people don't want to admit. We skirt around the issue, this relies on donations, that relies on the goodwill of the owner, all of it to ignore the fact that what we really want is public funding for crucial software such as forums/social networks (and hosting them).

hooverd 3y ago
Mr Biden please send me money to host a Lemmy instance.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nordsieck 3y ago
> what we really want is public funding for crucial software such as forums/social networks (and hosting them). Maybe some people want that. Your "we" is putting in a lot of work.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- waboremo 3y ago
  Pedantry doesn't get you anywhere, you should know this by now you're a grown man.

robinsonb5 3y ago

> "We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments." It's almost as though the large-scale abandonment of old-skool small-scale, independent domain-specific web forums in favour of huge centralised platforms was a mistake... (Just out of interest, can anyone give me an idea of the typical running costs of, say, a phpBB or vBulletin web forum with a couple of hundred users?)

elwebmaster 3y ago
Mostly it was just the cost of the domain since there was free hosting all over the place. You could also just run it in an old PC in your bedroom, not sure how much electricity that used as I was not paying electricity at the time :) but mostly the problem is simultaneous users, 100 users is ok as long as they are not all making requests at the same time. Anyways, with modern frameworks it would be practically free. But the SEO and marketing costs to get any kind of traction these days are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the real reason we can’t have decentralized communities anymore, the big guys have formed oligopoly. They control the market and prevent any competition by owning user attention.
justinlloyd 3y ago
I don't know what the lower bound is, but a specific answer is "$97.67 per month" which is what I pay for a server in a rack in a data center that has been chugging along, with an occasional drive failure, for the past 15 years that hosts a forum, a bunch of low traffic websites, and an email server. I also run a BBS on a Raspberry Pi that plays host to a few hundred DAU, that engage in chat, forums, a MUCK, and the occasional file transfer which runs on my home internet connection. I am sure someone will jump right in and tell me that I am doing it wrong and I can host everything on an AWS micro VPS for $4/month, but the amount that I pay is for my server. I also suspect someone will jump right in and tell me I am not allowed to host a server on my home internet connection.

viksit 3y ago

not sure if it’s clear yet tbh. capitalism is alive and well, and public goods funding will not scale internationally if it’s controlled by the us.

hayst4ck 3y ago
I am not sure why a non profit in the style of Wikipedia could not work. Wikipedia seems to be scaling fine, even to other languages (correct me if I'm wrong).