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A reminder in the age of the Fediverse: if you're not the customer, you're still the product.
(slrpnk.net)
OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
Okay, I might be super ignorant. But how am I Lemmy.world's product if I'm not paying anybody any money and I'm not seeing any ads? Is there something to this that I don't know about? I can't see how my participation in this is getting monetized by anybody.
And in extension, how does paying prevent you from being the product then?
Worst case: You pay and are still the product. Less worse case: You pay to prevent being the product, but never would have been the product anyways.
At the moment it's probably still paid by donations and by the people hosting it, but like any site, it may need to be monetized to keep going, or even just if its owners decide to. It's not like there's any guarantee of privacy just because it's in the fediverse.
Well, if you’re not paying, someone else is. That might work now, but if Lemmy ever grows really large it will likely get tougher. Because a larger percentage will resonate just like you.
It’s also much harder to scale. You can only have very few people working full time (if any). Thus a lot of the work has to be outsourced to people doing it for free. I’m guessing that’s not you either.
So basically, if everyone thought like you there would be no Lemmy.
Lemmy servers aren't meant to be "big". I left lemmy.world for a smaller instance. If the admins of Lemmy.World want to just keep growing and thus increasing their costs, that is their choice. It doesn't mean all the users need to cough up money. THAT is capitalist propaganda. If the person who runs an instance can't afford to run it, then don't run it. You can escape from the system that is stacked against you, the system that demands you pay for every little experience you have, every little resource you use. You do that by giving and sharing with each other and quit acting like a vulture looking for scraps.
If Lemmy would ever have 1/10 of Reddits user there would have to be larger instances. And even the “small” ones, would have to be large just in order to keep up with the amount of federated content. That’s not something you’d host on your 5 year old laptop.
Well they only need the content their users are subscribed to, not all content on the fediverse.
Sure. But most, if not all would need to fetch something like the 100 most popular communities, because they’re given to be subscribed to. Given a size of 1/10th of Reddit, that would be no small feat.
Add to that a couple of thousands of other communities (I mean I’m a single user subscribed to 150 communities). And my point is somewhat clear.
Exactly. This is the reason I run my own instance. Of course that comes with its own issues but I will never have to worry about it disappearing randomly one day. Learned my lesson early with FMHY.