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I think that a lot of the underlying UX and technology is mature enough that we could pretty easily regulate these platforms like utilities. How much would it

• JohnMakin 2y ago
  > How much would it cost to fund an open source alternative ecosystem? Lots of people were throwing this out there when twitter got bought by Musk, like "how hard is it to build a twitter clone anyway?" Incredibly difficult and expensive at scale. Aside from infrastructure costs and maintenance, which would be considerable, you'd also have the content moderation problem which can spiral out of control quickly depending on which locality's laws you are possibly violating (it's different everywhere), etc. Many many millions of dollars at least, and to get to IG/Facebook scale with billions of daily users, I'd wager a lot more.
• lopis 2y ago
  > How much would it cost to fund an open source alternative ecosystem? It already exists in the form of the Fediverse. You have alternatives to twitter (mastodon), reddit (lemmy), youtube (peertube), instagram (pixelfed) and others, all interconnected but distributed, open source, and without ads. Apparently it costs less than 100$ a month to run a fairly large instance, but I imagine that cost would grow as the Fediverse as a whole continues growing. It's not without its downsides, but it's there.