On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you’ll immediately lose huge amounts of users

    That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don’t have to be completely open registration.

    Most people don’t want to self host.

    You don’t need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.

    Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else.

    Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.

    Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.