YSK: While you're on Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse, you're not "the product" but you're also not "the customer".
YSK: While you're on Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse, you're not "the product" but you're also not "the customer".
Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you've been invited into.
It has been said that "if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product."
It has also been said that "the customer is always right".
Right here and now, you're neither the customer nor the product.
You're a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You're using a service that you aren't being charged for; but that service isn't part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you're participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You've probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it's one of the most popular websites in the world, but it's not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don't imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They're not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they're also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.
Couldn’t agree more, we need to continue to attract the kind of people who would really be able to help grow this kind of community, so if you have friends you think would like this, try talking to them.
Drop a couple bucks into support the admins and servers - think about streaming services you pay for and use less. $5-10/month to donate to a service you are using daily is pretty cheap considering.
I see a lot of people willing to support the servers, but little conversation on how to support the admins. I support a living (and competitive) wage for folks, and don't think instance admins should be doing this work for free. If you set up your own tiny instance for your family, sure, I bet you won't be charging your family for it, but a huge instance with constant needs and a bunch of strangers is a totally different thing. Just donating toward server costs does not allow admins to pay their personal bills, while they put in hours of work to keep this place going. So, I appreciate you for including "admins" in the support needs!
I’m dirt poor but I’ve donated to Wikipedia at least three times now. I use that website so often, it’s changed my life.
You've inspired me to be honest. I really didn't use much of Wikipedia in high school or university but I've definitely fallen down the wiki-hole very many times and leanred things that there's no way I'd have learned if not for the convenience. Gonna donate them a fiver now; it ain't much, but it's honest work.
Beehaw has a periodic financial update. It would be great if each instance had a similar kind of update so that we can understand what is needed and where to help.
That gives me an idea!
contributing to open source projects
You need to be careful with this point, because it becomes addictive.
It's 4AM and I just submitted a PR to the Liftoff app repo.
Eh, I like free software the same way I like free beer - I don't ever have to pay for it, and no one can compel me to. The beauty of community projects and free software. I enjoy being a freeloader, thanks very much. I will contribute by making this an active project with my posts.
Eh, I like free software the same way I like free beer - I don’t ever have to pay for it, and no one can compel me to.
Right, and no one is even attempting to compel you to. In my opinion, this is one of those "within your means" kind of thing. If you went to your friends house, hung out, and drank his beer every weekend, month after month, his reaction might depend on your ability to contribute. If he knew you struggled to make ends meet, he might be just fine with it, especially if you tried to help out in other ways. He you make more money than he does, and he was the one scraping by, he might get resentful. Either way, he can't compel you, but one is kind of shitty.
Some of us have more ability to financially support than others, and that's fine. Last night I made a donation to the developers and another to my instance admins. I'm thinking about making that automatic monthly, but we'll see. The point is, I think it's fine if this is a bit socialistic, with some paying a lot, some paying a little, and others not paying at all, as long as the community is able to thrive. By the same token, some instance owners will likely consider it a hobby and not need/want any donations, while some others won't be able to support growth without them.
This might not compel you to, but the only way to keep Lemmy from turning into Reddit 2 is by donating so they don't have to seek out investors. We all have to do what we can to help out - that said, by posting you are creating content for the website. That's not nothing.
Thanks OP. We have an opportunity to do things differently, and better.
When I signed up on a mastodon instance winter of 22, I moved a couple times, when I settled down, I setup $5/mo to the site.
When I signed up to lemmy.world, I did the same after a week.
No ads! No spying, no coercion, no CEOs whims to extract profit from accumulated past collective work. Sure admins mods etc can become assholes -- and we can move.
Wikipedia's innards can be icky at times, man politics around some pages is infuriating. GUESS WHAT. WE DONT EVEN GET TO DO THAT MUCH on a corporate site. Most Wikipedia.org pages operate just fine. There's always someone "wrong on the internet" somewhere, we can choose where we put our energies.
Reddit seemed incrementally better than most -- up to the Troubles. But I just got lulled by the mostly great people there and the great conversations, but jarred awake, again, by the reminder than in reality, it was just another pump and dump deal. It was just taking longer than my attention span.
I'm starting to work out a concept for funding servers a little differently. Since the Fediverse / Lemmyverse is not just one server admin, but a bunch of them, I want to run an experiment to see if it's feasible to make a subscriber based, or even activity-based calculation of how to dice up each user's donation.
It'll all be just a proof-of-concept at first, maybe it works and it's legally possible too (biiig if), then it could work something like a FOSS funding system.
It's just in documentation phase now, figuring out what would be a proper algorithm and such, but if you're wiling to think along (or talk me out of it), please send a dm.
Edit: woah there, my app was going haywire. I removed the duplicates
I purchased Apollo and also subscribed to Reddit premium as I was a heavy user and wanted to contribute my fair share. Happy to until…of course. Looks like a much better value here - an actual community. Worth my money (like Wiki too!)
This post missed the most important part people should know: someone is footing the bill for you to use this service. If you're not paying, they will make their money in whatever what they choose. Potential resulting in you becoming the product. Yes, even on lemmy. So if your instance mod needs funding, kick em a few bucks, be their customer.
This is important to note, we're not the customers nor the product for now.
Instances need to be sustainable as to not look for other potential types of funding.
It's time for social media where you are the customer. That's what I would like, and I am willing to pay for it if the costs are reasonable. I thing that starts with public accounting. Like a condo association. I think some instances have started doing this.
Or they can decide to shut down the instance. If you have the means to do so, consider donating to your friendly neighborhood host. Hosting an instance isn't free.
Yes, and this will foster large instances, similarly to the Mastodon project, which means a concentration of power, which means easy targets for billionaires.
This is similar to presidential regimes: they can be useful temporarily in a “move fast, break things” motto (see France trying to be perceived as a “winner” of the Second World war after having constitutionally given the full powers to the Pétain Marshall, who then decided to collaborate with Nazis) but they're much easier to corrupt and they make it much easier to say, privatize every public service than a parliamentary one.
You don't want power concentration or the billionaires will come for you.
One of my favourite things about early days Reddit was it’s growing community of positivity. There was actual encouragement to be nice to each other and subreddits were built around celebrating stuff.
Negativity was downvoted into oblivion so you never saw that stuff on the All page and popular pages.
I’m seeing the same thing with Lemmy right now and hope it continues long into the future. The lack of profiteering should really help with this.
It's the kind of thing that's easy to start and hard to continue. Time will tell, but I hope we can develop the kind of community values here that will grow with scale, rather than shrink
On the Fediverse you are a user, not a customer, not a product.
and that's ok for a change
Nope. You're the USER. A concept that is as old as computing and yet has gone completely by the wayside recently with the corporate monopolization of the internet.
Good to see it making a comeback.
USER
WARNING: INCOMING GAME
The only way to win is not to play
I sincerely hope you’re right about that comeback!
To quote the first words of the old Dune movie:
"A beginning is a very delicate time."
What we should all take responsibility for is the health and quality of the community. We should be more active citizens, instead of the passive "consumers" we've all been corporately groomed to be.
I think more instances are the answer because this activity can't be cheap. maybe Lemmy.world splits off into 2 or 4 instances. Lemmy1.world etc
This dynamic will have to stabilize in costs. I don't know what that looks like.
I'm not a developer of any sort, but I'm super interested if a "folding at home" style option is doable. I can't front the costs for a whole server for an instance, but I'm totally willing to contribute some resources from my pc to avoid falling into the same reddit trap. If we all did it as users I think that would avoid the centralization problem as well as distribute costs effectively.
Unfortunately, there is no way to distribute the work in that way. the @Home projects worked because it could give your computer a hard problem to work on with little traffic to and from the server.
no, unfortunately, the best way for all of us to contribute in those smallest of ways is to run an instance at home. That way, whatever amount of "thinking" (CPU) thats done by Lemmy server would normally have to do, you can do. Its not a lot of processing (CPU) though (compared to @Home), but its a lot of traffic
Hmm, distributed computing Lemmy instance, that's an interesting idea.
Storage of the database might be complicated, especially as user submissions increase. You might be able to break up the data and spread it across multiple hosts, but keeping it all synchronized as users add information would be complicated and probably have more lag time than the current issues sharing posts and comments across instances.
Can a Lemmy instance be effectively abstracted from the host server? Probably worth exploring.
Adding to your point on responsibility: Call out people who insult others in their comments. There should be no place where insults are ok.
Lets see what the future brings. As long as the user count is low there isn't much of a problem, but if instances suddenly have millions of users, it will get expensive for admins to run the service. If too few people donate (what is usually the case), admins are forced to search for other ways to finance the infrastructure. The other point is AI, wheter you like it or not, if Lemmy is big enough, the content (conversations etc.) will be used to train LLMs. Also, the content will certainly be interesting for advertisers to learn user preferences. The difficulty comes with scale.
So, in theory, of we keep the individual instances manageably small and spread everyone across multiple instances we should be sustainable. As it generally doesn't matter which instance you're on so long as its federated with the community at-large we could keep the instance servers affordable for the admins and users that are able to financially contribute.
This idea that the poster isn't the "customer" isn't really helping matters. The whole point of these communities is to facilitate communication, and if there are bugs and feature requests interfering with that process, that's something to be taken seriously. Instead, we have a UI that badly needs improvements and not enough interest to fix them.
"Doing awesome things" comes at the cost of time and effort. It doesn't just happen.
Mostly what I feel is gratitude. Personally, I don’t have the skills, technical knowledge, or free time required to run even a small instance. I know I’m relying on the generosity of others, which makes me much more tolerant of delays, glitches, etc.
“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.
I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)
What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”
I've donated to wikipedia before because I feel its valuable to me for all the information it gives.
I might donate to lemmy if i feel its valuable to me for information or discussions
I think the part that’s missing is that this advice is related to companies, not in general. If the company is making a profit, and not asking you to pay, where is the money coming from?
The second quote often leaves out the rest of it.
The full original quote was.
The customer is always right in matters of taste. Notice how that means something completely different than the quote everyone uses?
That is all I have to add.
So many boomers think "the customer is always right" means the service provider is required to give you white glove treatment when the real meaning is that the service provider is not allowed to tell the customer theyre wrong to like plaid and paisley together
Not even not allowed really, it’s just a dumb thing to do if you want to make a sale in most instances
This has been commonly spread around Reddit for a while, and is completely made up.
The full original quote was "The customer is always right." This was pushed by some retailers as a way of setting the standard of how to treat customers.
Like most oversimplified phrases, it can't be used as a blanket policy, because customers take advantage of it. "in matters of taste" is a nice way to try to correct the phrase in response, but it was never the "original" and it does no favors to revise history to cover up the blunder.
I think I remember reading that, and the author provided clarification a year later, correcting that it doesn't hold true with dishonest customers!
I've never heard the full quote before, I guess. Where does it come from?
It truly does remind me of the wide-spread forum days, but with the bells and whistles that comes from connectivity across the board.
And that’s where I’m just loving it. All dope apps and services without a single person being greedy. I still haven’t seen a dev ask for money for any apps and the crazy part is I would pay for Memmy in a heart beat.
People always forget the last part of the quote: "The customer is always right in matters of taste."
</pedantic> ;-)
I like this but I cannot find a reputable source to back this quote. Do you have one by any chance?
I've heard: "the customer is always right, until you get their money."
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
If i'm not mistaken, the original saying was more along the lines of "The customer should always feel he's right". Anyway, the gist is that any side is "always right" should never be the mindset of any sane business or service.
Not entirely related to the topic, but something that I think everyone shold be aware of
I heard it was shortened from "the customer is always right in knowing what they want"
The version I like is "the customer is always right in matters of taste". You can't tell them what they should want, but they can't get it for a penny.
"The customer is always right" is a very popular saying, usually uses by managers to tell their front-facing employees that they must prostrate themselves before the customer on behalf of the corporation.
This is to create a false feeling of entitlement and service in the customer while the corporation seeks to squeeze all value from both employee and customer.
None of those relationships fit into the fediverse scheme.
I don't really think there's a risk of a business having an abundance of deference to the customer. Would be a nice problem to have, these days.
Karen demands to speak to your manager
I’m actually paying monthly to help with server costs. What am I?
A person who chipped in $5 for a pizza party.
You're one of the awesome people hosting the site, of course.
A subscriber!
Minsandten om ikke det er en vild dansker
A follower.
Kind, generous, etc.
A whale!
Not really but also kinda?
Do you mean that in the sense of “a rare and highly profitable customer?” We used to talk about whales when I worked in gaming. 99% of people never put money into free to play games. .9% put some money in, and those are the fish. The .1% put maybe 90% of the money in and are the “whales.”
Or did you mean something else?
"Do awesome things"
BEANS
"Do things awesome"
BEANS
4.34K updoots is no joke after all
While I agree and love the idea, it's going to be very difficult to keep things this way. Main two reasons are:
- It costs money to run a service like this as it expands.
- The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.
I'm honestly fully ready to see ads sprinkled throughout Lemmy instances (but the problem with that is that due to the federated nature, you can place load on one server through the API's without getting ads).
We've also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation (and probably server load as well) https://beehaw.org/post/567170. If that becomes a semi-constant issue I can see people leaving Lemmy, or at least not being as active as they would otherwise have been.
For now I'm enjoying things, finding it a bit "slow" but that's been a bit welcome, no more threads with thousands of comments drowning everyone out.
If things get big enough that hobbyist instance owners are getting overwhelmed, it might be a good idea to organize a nonprofit, under the NPR business model. Not collecting data or breaking your brain with advertisements, though periodically, they're gonna have to go hat in hand, and beg users to feed their Patreon. Hey, I'm more than happy to throw a little in!
Nice thing about this business model is that being a nonprofit, the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive), instead of to make money for owners/shareholders.
The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.
There is no money to be gained from "gathering data" here. All the data is already public, which means that Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. are already free to copy whatever they would like. That's part of being on the open Web.
We've also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation
Troubling but understandable. Beehaw is basically fediverse tumblr, they need to prioritise their own safety.
It really highlights the other main issue though in that people really want a new alternative to work so are obsessed with growth at all costs. But maximising the influx of new users is going to have negative effects on quality, culture, and community.
A bit of friction to onboarding, and a slow steady growth that allows a community to form is what's going to set this up for success
Particularly in these early stages, really clear and transparent communication and plans are key I think.
Nice to see some info on the sidebar links, hopefully will be combined with posts and further info as things progress.
Help people buy into supporting the service they use, but knowing who they are supporting, why, and what their support via Patreon enables.
I think a lot of people would be happy to pay small amounts, but what are the running costs, and what is the roadmap and requirements and cost to scale and improve performance etc. What happens to additional funds over and above the running costs? (Fair compensation for time should be a thing!)
Another consideration is aside from the financial side, what other support will be required to scale and what are plans for that - additional admins, any other mods for "official" communities etc.
It's a very exciting time, delicate but full of potential!
Let’s make lemmy the best community in the world without corporate greed!
While we're at it, big thanks to the instance owners :) I'm donating an Euro a month, it's not a lot but at least something
While I understand what you're getting at, users can be viewed as "the product" if they are contributing content (posts, comments, votes, and other forms of engagement) and "the customer" if they are consuming this content in any way.
Without content or readers there would be no Lemmy, just like for Wikipedia with no editors or readers there would be no purpose for that site either. The terms "product" and "customer" aren't intrinsically related to monetary value.
To me that's trying to fit something that doesn't belong into a capitalist box.
It just seems unnecessary to me.
It's a place to interact with other human beings, and hopefully we can make that as positive an experience for people as possible.
I like that perspective! But at the same time, if the user's are both the producers and the consumers, where does that leave the platform hosters. We gotta pay our tax at somepoint if we wish to have the space to produce and consume.
I've always been a wikipedia donator, but with the fediverse its a little bit harder. I don't ascribe to one community/instance more than any others, but I don't want to have to figure out how to spread my donation accross all the instances that I interact with. If everyone just donates to where their home account is, does that balance itself out?
The comparison to Wikipedia is a really good one.
yeah i still think we are the product, we are providing all the content, the moderation, just our words can be used for future LLMs, our usernames can still be profiled by analyzing the content we post, search engines can index and link to content on instances
our particular instance is not doing these things for profit but someone else still can
It's always better to assume that any public content you upload or download from the internet is being used for profit by someone
Thanks a lot for the post! Super nice to hear. Would also like to point out that "the customer is always right" was originally meant for sales. I.e. if they want a meat themed car, sell it to them, dont tell them its in bad taste. So for more ways than one treat those that serve you with respect. Theyre serving the community, not your servants.
Thank you for the reminder, it's a breeze of fresh air with all transparency on this platform that's we're not used to - coming from Reddit. I can only hope that this "movement" persists and that lemmy or any similar fediverse app will eventually become the norm. It certainly feels inevitable to me, having seen that the grass is greener on this side
I'm just here for the spicy memes.
orcas have entered the chat
I honestly think more instances should support some sort of donation or explicit customer model. Running such things is expensive, and sourcing money when things are ran for free is hard, so these kinds of platforms tend to be ran out of pocket, which makes them somewhat volatile. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of big platforms and instead should build something sustainable from the get go.
I think lemmy should do what Lichess.org does, which is: Give an icon to donators/patrons. That is all, just an icon. It is surprisingly effective. For example, see this: https://lichess.org/@/thibault. The wing, before his username is the icon to which I am referring. it is visible site-wide.
I bet if we stole the idea of reddit gold and allowed people to award comments and posts, but 1. no premium membership and 2. make it clear that the money is going to help keep the service running, that would bring in a lot of revenue without harming the community.
Quick question: I have an account on Lemmy.world and kbin.social.. When trying to post on Lemmy.world it just spins and posts.. so I bopped over to my kbin account and one thing I noticed is that Kbin says it has 39 comments, but Lemmy.world this same post has 139... how do I square this circle?
There is sometimes a delay between the time when you make a post or comment and the time it gets synchronized by all of the federated instances. Depends on the instances in question, and their bandwidth and server load and etc.
Furthermore, comments made by a user whose instance is federated won't show up. A little in depth on this one:
Lemmygrad.ml is full of obnoxious tankies and is not federated with most instances. But they are federated to lemmy.ml. So users of lemmygrad.ml can comment on posts to lemmy.ml. But as a user of lemmy.ca which is federated with lemmy.ml and not lemmygrad.ml, if I go read that post on lemmy.ca, I won't see the comments made by users of lemmygrad.ml. basically it's a Venn diagram.
Beehaw.org is defederated from a few of the larger instances, so you won't see comments from lemmy.world users on posts hosted on beehaw.org.
It's weird, but it is a feature not a bug.
Instances running 0.18.0 can't communicate with any Kbin instance right now. Anything already synced is readable, but new subscriptions, posts, and comments fail. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3354 .
Can't say anything about the kbin side, but Lemmy has a known bug that syncs are only attempted once and if the target instance isn't available (e.g. due to maintainance downtime or due to being overrun by thousands of users), the sync is lost.
There is currently no workaround, except of maybe editing an unsynced comment, but the devs know about it and it's in the pipeline.
Theething problems. Overload hasn't ever been an issue until two weeks ago. I'm honestly impressed that Lemmy still works at all.
We are guests.
Extremely well put. Not the customer or product but the citizen. And try paying taxes if you're able. This is a FUBU type of thing.
We’re all guests in an apartment building with an open door policy in a village of apartment buildings.
Help out your building owners with the utility costs if ya can, design some cool apartments for others to experience and visit, but most importantly: take care of your neighbors and commune with each other to grow a stronger community
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
That's not really the saying, it's what everyone thinks the saying is, especially Karen's, but it isn't.
The saying is "the customer is always right, about the price". I.e. that value of a product is equal to what people are prepared to pay for the product, not what you'd like them to pay, as a business owner.
It has nothing to do with businesses have to appease customers, regardless of whether they're being ridiculous or sensible.
I remember seeing "the customer is always right in matters of taste" on Reddit many times, but I can't find any real sources now. Maybe that was just an artifact of the echo chamber.
The positivity is appreciated a lot. Have a nice day.
Actually, this is not necessarily true. Because it is open source doesn't mean it cannot be commercial. I can happily imagine that with the future rise of spam, porn, and other nasties, I would happily pay small amount of money for well moderated, clean experience.
I couldn't happily imagine such a future personally. Thankfully its possible to block instances without having to pay for the privilege.
Of course, your choice. And that’s the point … if you don’t want it, you don’t have to read it.
I actually see a lot of ways to monetise Fediverse without affecting regular users in any way, shape or form.
This is honestly so refreshing. I forgot what it felt like to not be the product or customer online.
Great post, thanks for taking the time to write up this sentiment
If you're not paying for it, directly or through donations, you are the product. If you're not paying for it via donations, someone else is paying for you. Nothing really changes.
Put another way, this is a commons. You share the job of maintaining the commons, or you recognize that someone else is supporting you and you pay it forward when you can. Nothing is free, and we can lose these spaces if we don't take care of them.
There's a reason I've decided to contribute to whatever "primary" Lemmy server I end on.
Infrastructure costs money, and so does the admins time.
Ideally, we are participants. This can have many forms like donating, voting, commenting, reporting, posting, helping and explaining.
The whole thing also lives off substantial support, mostly to the codebase, but also the wiki, the various tools people use to search and monitor, apps and pages like https://join-lemmy.org/. Consider contributing what you can, and what feels right for you.
so a real question if a one instance decided to setup for advertising and used that money to pay mods would that be acceptable?
I would be fine with that, but everyone has his own opinion.
People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.
Speak for yourself. I am but a simple upvote salesmen. I sell one upvote for the low price of one uplemmy. Get yours today, limited time only!
Absolutely. I'm glad that we're cultivating such a great community so far, hopefully it will only continue to grow and improve as time goes on.
The sentence “if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product” might be accurate, but it would make more sense to me to say that if you're not the customer, you're the worker.
Facebook and Twitter run on unpaid labor, mostly made by abuse survivors and especially teenagers. Twitter has been enshittified pretty fast so this has been the case since at least 2012. These aren't just scam, the long-running relationship between the scammer and his victims imply most components that you would find in a standard definition of abuse, including limiting their ability to conceptualize what's happening to them, for example with hard or hidden characters limits.
Edit : I've forgot to mention that, but Mastodon also optimizes for engagement, I believe that we needed that to get attention from the media and thus to gradually build migration waves. There are good reasons to use Mastodon, but there are also forms of abuse there, total institutions as would say Goffman – defined by their inmates' isolation within a differentiated society. So there's a lot of bullshit. If we want to get rid of that, we need people to use software that won't abuse them, such as https://bonfirenetworks.org.
Thanks for the reminder! I signed up at sdf.org because I saw that r/bbs had moved over. As soon as I saw SDF's website, which hasn't had its look updated since the mid 90's by my eye, I knew it was the one for me. I can tell they've been struggling a bit under the load but I appreciate so much that they're hosting an instance and I have confidence they'll get it all running smoothly. They're a non-profit and I'll be donating as soon as I'm able.
I do worry, though, that as the fediverse grows many of the instances won't be able to scale up and will drop out. I'm not an admin or sysop and know nothing of how this works on the back end, so hopefully those fears are groundless.
A great post that I wholeheartedly agree with.
Just as with Mastodon / Twitter, the services may look very similar but what many fail to grasp immediately is the culture is different (in a very good way!).
Thank you for clearfy. Good thing to know.
“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.
I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)
What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”
Gary King : We want to be free! We want to be able to do what we want to do! We want to get loaded, and we want to have a good time. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have a good time.
Thanks to everyone who contributes in big or small ways.
This is so sweet and wholesome that I might faint from a sugar OD!
That is magnificent 👏👏👏
- The Product: the fediverse
- The Consumer: the people who created and maintain the servers
- The Media: you.
Well said.
I kinda like looking at Lemmy as a sort of Internet Pub on steroids (Activity Pub). Kind of like a busy street with all kinds of pubs, libraries, bookstores etc. But where those places have something to sell like liquor, coffee or books, Lemmy does not really have anything to sell but just offers a place of conversation. It alsof isn't for everyone, anybody can join but each pub had their own rules.
I see a Lemmy admin like a barkeeper of one of the many pubs around. We sit in this one pub with one owner but we meet a lot of people from other pubs around. And if we like, we can walk across the street and visit somewhere else or even move there permanently. We have options, we as users have more power and especially actual alternatives to go to.
Donating is a thing to help the pubs keep existing. Like tipping the waiter. I'm a big fan of OpenCollective and Patreon for how they allow these small groups of people to take back parts of the internet for themselves!
There is no need to commercialize this space, it's largely for conversation. Here there is no need for the waiter tot eastdrop on conversations, to make the pub all smart or to guilt you into a VIP pass tot enter.
I really hope we can find a way to tip the waiters and barkeepers incidentally like we would in a pub. Like a donation, and maybe also a more prominent place like a tip jar for the instance visible in posts or just the website. I think we can make it work, if we really try.
Yeah the big pubs might come knocking, but its up to each of us to decide if we want to visit any of their places.
You are a patron of the service.
if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product
So, were you all getting paid by Reddit for content and moderation? Because if Reddit wasn't paying for the service, that would make them the product too...
That saying breeds a complacent skepticism. Even if you pay for a service, that doesn't stop the provider from making you a product. Likewise, not paying may mean there's mutual benefit.
Sure, it could be more refined. So here you go:
If a commercial entity does something for free, you're the product.
...I'm sorry, but blind positivism won't get you, Lemmy and nothing else to anywhere. Nothing is perfect neither free of "predatory capitalism" -- one day, you will "be the product". And there is nothing you can do about it, because this world ain't a fairy tale where we've got fairies flying around and giving us anything we want -- we need money. And lots of it.
Shout at me, swarm at me with negative downvotes like it's the best thing you can do (which probably is), but this is the real world, giving it to you with a couple words, fair and square.
I see your point but there have been community-run message boards funded by donations in the past. I doubt Lemmy will replicate Reddit's scale.
I think part of the beauty of the Fediverse is that nobody definitively holds any cards. Don't like Lemmy.ml? Fine, setup Lemmy.world. Don't like that one? There are other options! The ability for folks to interact with one another without having to generate new accounts is a major benefit. There are still some growing pains, but I think we're on a pretty solid path.
My only concern is about excessive consolidation making de-federation more feasible and leading to high cost pressures (I know Lemmy.ca admin mentioned their costs and it was growing quite a bit). We have some folks looking at ways to address this and to possibly bring improvements to Lemmy code with respect to scalability. Fingers crossed!
Just because the world is negative doesn't mean everyone in it has to be too. This is the real world, and it could use more good.
What?
for now. dont the developers and admins of lemmy run lemmy.ml which stands for marxist Leninism because the admins are marxist?