this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
176 points (72.7% liked)
Technology
59091 readers
4107 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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...