So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?
I'm fairly new and don't 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
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Well that's the nice thing about a decentralized platform. If someone tries to "take over" Lemmy, they would have to take over all 1,100 Instances on separate servers in different countries to ruin it.
Email became mostly centralized without any company buying thousands of independent email servers.
The same could (and probably will) happen with other federated services.
Email is a shitshow, but its far from centralized. There are 100s to 1000sof email providers out there.
Self hosting is hard, but not out of the question.
If one or two instances ends up larger than the rest, can they not exert influence? They would have all the content and all the users and can threaten to break off. The infrastructure would still exist, but not the content.
fewer users is only a problem when you're profiting off of it
Yeah good luck meaningfully using a Lemmy instance with barely any users.
There’s a reason both Lemmy and Mastodon only really started taking off when the equivalent proprietary platforms drove users away - a service like this needs users to create content.
Also the guy you’re replying to is right, stuff like this already happened in the past; look at the centralization of email (which is also federated) for example.
A big instance threaten to defederate, but that's something that will cost them.
If you're running an instance you're basically getting free content from the other instances through federation. By defedearting you're saying "no thanks, I don't want that free content on my server!" So it's a little self-destructive.
Combine that with the fact that users can more easily switch to another instance than they could moving from Digg to Reddit, or Reddit to Lemmy, there's more downsides to defederating than upsides.
So it's like a hostage situation where you have the gun pointed at your own head. Nobody wants to see an instance kill itself, but that's not enough to give them significant leverage.
There will be more disagreements over moderation than anything else. We've seen this happen already. "The users from your instance are shitposting in the communities on our instance, so we're cutting you off." But that results in a case where site that's blocking gets less content than the site that's not. But it solves the shitposting problem for the users of that instance, but it's a blunt tool that has negative repercussions for the site that's blocking.
I think there probably just needs to be more ability for users to block content themselves to avoid tensions over defederation over moderation disagreements. But I'm not sure how that would work.