I have nothing against having the option to donate, which has worked for many projects.
The idea you are sketching, it is a possible reality but that is the bad future to me.
There’s a threshold where the number of users makes it impossible for your service to still have any real sense of identity or intend and it ought to be broken up in smaller parts.
Some of the larger instances have already passed that threshold in my opinion.
You did mention the solution, “The alternative is possible small scale”
The good future is where every family has their own private instance and every business and service has their own public one, interconnected.
Keep things small, manageable, focused and responsible.
I do agree this (fediverse) likely won’t last, not with so many predators waiting to grab a piece. Web3 is not here yet, as much as meta threads want to believe we are it.
That doesn’t sound reasonable for a lot of reasons. The idea that each family can host their own instance (which still has costs, and as you reasonably pointed out can’t generally be done with a server in the basement because of broadband laws preventing that kind of usage, is kind of ludicrous. That would lead to an internet where only people with money would be able to host a website of any kind. And even then, public services (video hosting, cloud storage, news, any kind of public service or so on) wouldn’t get anything out of the deal so why would they let you connect to them and mirror their content?
Also, if we keep things small scale, social networks die because new people aren’t coming in to replace dead accounts as people leave. So what happens then? Those social networks die. Social network sites like Lemmy and mastodon and so on need people. Without people to post content and people to consume it the site is basically just an empty husk of random 1’s and 0’s.
Keep things responsible? How do we do that? You’ve given me an outline of an idea you have but it’s all broad strokes and no details.
I have nothing against having the option to donate, which has worked for many projects.
The idea you are sketching, it is a possible reality but that is the bad future to me.
There’s a threshold where the number of users makes it impossible for your service to still have any real sense of identity or intend and it ought to be broken up in smaller parts. Some of the larger instances have already passed that threshold in my opinion.
You did mention the solution, “The alternative is possible small scale” The good future is where every family has their own private instance and every business and service has their own public one, interconnected.
Keep things small, manageable, focused and responsible.
I do agree this (fediverse) likely won’t last, not with so many predators waiting to grab a piece. Web3 is not here yet, as much as meta threads want to believe we are it.
That doesn’t sound reasonable for a lot of reasons. The idea that each family can host their own instance (which still has costs, and as you reasonably pointed out can’t generally be done with a server in the basement because of broadband laws preventing that kind of usage, is kind of ludicrous. That would lead to an internet where only people with money would be able to host a website of any kind. And even then, public services (video hosting, cloud storage, news, any kind of public service or so on) wouldn’t get anything out of the deal so why would they let you connect to them and mirror their content?
Also, if we keep things small scale, social networks die because new people aren’t coming in to replace dead accounts as people leave. So what happens then? Those social networks die. Social network sites like Lemmy and mastodon and so on need people. Without people to post content and people to consume it the site is basically just an empty husk of random 1’s and 0’s.
Keep things responsible? How do we do that? You’ve given me an outline of an idea you have but it’s all broad strokes and no details.