- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.
Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.
Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.
We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.
For those that are saying “no” because it’s Musk: would you be willing to pay to your account on Lemmy, Mastodon, or any other social network that you happen to use?
Let me be specific: I am not asking if you donate or contribute to any server. I am asking if you’d sign up to a social network that required payment from every user as a measure to avoid spammers and to keep the service running.
No. With the current model of social media selling advertising space, user data, and now subscription fees. No, I don’t think I should have to contribute directly from my pocket to these mega media giants.
I am not talking about the media giants, existing or yet to exist. I am talking about someone providing access to a subscriber-only Lemmy or Mastodon instance, that could be well federated, and professionally managed and moderated.
No, I don’t think a subscriber-only based model would work. Seems so simple that somebody would have tried it already, but what I imagine is the exorbitant cost of running a popular site.
Today you are one of the lucky 10 thousand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
I know for a fact that I can run an instance with 15k users and if each one paid $10/year I could make enough to make a living, hire someone to help with moderation and would let me have time to contribute back to the codebase and work on more fediverse projects.
The beauty of this is that I don’t need to have a “huge” site or a monopoly in the market. Other developers could do something similar, due to federation there could be space even for collaboration and/or expansion into other segments.
All we need is to get more people to understand that paying $10/year for something they used to have “for free” is a lot better than having your data exploited.
No because it would exclude all the interesting people, I’d much rather donate to keep a door open for all.
Are all “interesting people” so cash strapped that they wouldn’t be able to afford a $10/year membership?
Anyway, what if I told you that my instance provides “group-based” billing? You could, e.g, get a 10-account package for $5/month and give access to 9 other people there.
I would still try to come up with some form of vouch or sponsorship-based system, where the paying members get to approve non-paying members if they have a backing sponsor.
Donation-based instances are not sustainable. You can see that already with Mastodon. They used to be able to get enough funds to even support upstream projects, now they are invite-only. Turns out that “keeping the door open for all” makes the operating costs rise faster than the revenue from donations.
Interesting people barely have time to pop onto Twitter every now and then, they’re not going to bother if it costs money
And I guess we’ll see which system ends up bearing fruit, I think we’re already seeing the capitalist walled garden model falter, I suspect your more collectivist model won’t have the momentum to replace it but while the commons might trip and start with a dozen different stumbles the sheer force of its ever growing ubiquity will carry it through.
Especially as hardware continues to get cheaper and software more efficient, hosting a few thousand users on a federated server is already fairly trivial, its only going to get easier the more hurdles are removed through innovation and tech creep.
In terms of costs, the predominant factor is storage, which does not go away and is ever increasing. But anyway the problem of instances with thousands of users is not the cost of hardware, but the labor involved with moderation, security, support…
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This way, you end up paying a lot more than the cost of an yearly subscription, and I am not just saying that because of the cost to rent the server or the electricity to run one at home. It’s the cost of your time as well doing admin duties that can be seen as a hobby for you but for most people is just another unpaid job that they’d rather outsource.
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Please explain? I’m not saying that what you are doing is a bad idea, I’m just saying that you might enjoy the process of self-hosting but the majority of people simply just want a worry-free solution.
I already donate to Mastodon development, and to the Mastodon server I’m on. It’s a good reminder to donate to the Lemmy server I’m on too.
A one time fee? Perhaps. But not an ongoing subscription.
Why? This is not a one-off cost. You wouldn’t be paying for a product that you bought once and can be used indefinitely. Software needs to be maintained, data needs to be stored, bits need to transported, mods need to be paid for their ongoing work, etc.
Mind you, I am not talking about price levels of a Netflix or Twitter Blue subscription. I am talking about a much lower price point. $10/year would be more than enough for me to make hosting a large instance a sustainable venture, which would even let me keep my pledge of giving 20% of the profits to the development teams of the upstream projects.
I didn’t interpret the question as pertaining to ongoing costs.
Well, the discussion was about Twitter charging a subscription so I thought that was implied.
You are right though that having a system where simply paying to signup would already help alleviate some of the problems with spammers and bots.
I effectively pay to use my IRC, XMPP and email, since I rent a VPS. But that payment earns me much more pleasant usage experience (in case of my IRC bouncer) and a lot of cotrol over my servers in case of the latter two. So while paying a subscription feels a bit bad, I think it’s worth it.
We can’t expect everyone else to self-host. The question is, what would be the most viable solution for a better (ad free, Surveillance Capitalism free) Internet that can work at scale?
Donations. Wikimedia proves that some people will want to donate if they find something useful.