Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed [Opinion]
Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.
Such a valid point; success should not be measured only in dollars. I began explaining the basics of the Fediverse with some of my friends and the first question they asked was, “How do people even make money on there then?” It’s a bit disheartening to see how money-driven things are for some people.
Them: “How do people even make money on there then?”
You: "The same way I'm making money off of you now." (pause) "I don't. We're just friends."
Them: "What do you mean? Like friends... with benefits?" [unfriended]
Yeah, the best social networks are designed to prioritize…socializing. It’s like building a public park and people start asking where the money comes from. The point is that it’s made for people to use.
Well I can kinda see where they are coming from. How do you know it’s gonna stick around if it can’t make money? It isn’t even about making a profit either, but covering costs.
There are costs associated with hosting all this stuff. Right now donations are how instances keep the lights on (most of the time).
What happens when there is more and more users joining?
when I used mastodon for a while, people would talk about how great not having ads was, but there were a lot of people asking how they were supposed to sell commissions without an algorithm making people see their posts as if they didn't consider that advertising.
Those are people that came to the fediverse thinking that it was the exact same thing as corporate social media and that is where they were wrong. I heard the same quips and gripes from social media influencers. The whole point of the fediverse is to get away from ads, influence, toxicity and all that other crap.
I do also wonder how a website makes money before I make an account. It is because I want to know how secure my data would be, now and in the future. If they don't have a viable income source, the could get sold to someone else and the new owners would own my data. If such a possibility exists, I need to be careful on what I post or share with the site.
Even worse, just making money isn't enough: you also have to become a fucking global monopoly.
To be fair, often times that question is code for “how can someone contribute to that platform while also paying rent, feeding their kids, etc.”
I think that’s a fair question and IMHO, for a fedi project to succeed, we need some people who can get paid a reasonable wage to focus their full attention on the work.
We’re likely going to continue to see folks who ask for Patreon donations and set up fedi hosting businesses, like Ruud at Lemmy World. We’ll also probably see more folks like the Tapbots gang selling fancy clients for a price.
Individual people will make money so they can live life, but cash cow corporations likely won’t be a thing.
Agree with a lot there.
Actually, it feels like at this point there should be at least a couple social media platforms operated as utility services, not as for-profit organisations specializing in selling user data and/or providing access to users’ beliefs and worldviews to the highest bidder.
As much as people might not like it, SM services seem to only grow in relation to importance for a healthy well-functioning society, and reclassifying at least something as a public utility/human right/something in that vein is long overdue imo.
Not sure if it’s even possible though in current enterprise/governmental structures :(
Btw, that’s partly why I’m trying to participate a lot more here than I ever did on Reddit. I know fediverse probably isn’t going to be the next big thing, but if we can build some sizeable foundation here it’s at least worth trying. I’m sure as shit that large companies won’t even try.
Not sure if it’s even possible though in current enterprise/governmental structures :(
Yeah... sadly, it's already difficult enough getting governments to even agree that internet infrastructure itself should be a public utility. Even though it has long been at the point where you absolutely need it to participate in society (depending on where you live, of course) and largely been funded by the public through taxes.
I guess the first thing all people needed to do is self-hosting (Yunohost, Nextbox, or the like), and the second thing is paying for Open Source software they use (if they can pay, as digital communication should be free very much like the commons -fresh air, drinking water- but those who can should pay imo.)
I think of money as one form of contribution. People should contribute more instead of simply asking from a place of entitlement.
I agree there are many forms of contribution (e.g., writing code if you're a developer), it must not necessarily be money, but am not sure whether I understand what you mean.
Self-hosting is probably more affordable to do when ran out of your own home. I run my lemmy and mastodon servers out of my home on 16GB of RAM and 300MB of storage space. This would cost a small fortune to pay a cloud hosting provider for.
Seems a bit disingenuous to compare the niche of tech folks that used Google+ to the niche that use WeChat, with the later "niche" being... China...
Not everyone has to agree that dominating a country's social media usage is a good goal, but it clearly is the goal for many companies, and they're going to continue to persue it. Perhaps users of social media should redefine success, but for creators of social media platforms there are absolutely clearly defined measures of success and failure.
Why was it linking to web archive instead of the source?
Future-dystopian-proofing
Let's just hope archive.org doesn't itself go down.
I define success of a social network proportional to the level of fun in having there. So far Mastodon and Lemmy are the most successful for me.
Great article. When I came to lemmy/kbin a few weeks ago (I'm an old time now, right), I thought it will become great when most of those on Reddit realize that this is the place to be and come here in droves. That would be greatness. After reading this and thinking about it, I'm fine with the way it is now. There are lots of interesting posts like this one and interesting feedback to them. If anything having several million members in this community would make it worse.
Nothing ever replaced Google+, which was really popular in my own tech circle.
Except Slack and LinkedIn already kind of fed that niche.
Regardless...the article is pretty much spot on. It's fairly obvious that social networks are going to come and go; we've seen that over the past few decades. Every iteration of social media will revolve around the tech of the hour. I like ActivityPub and Federation because it brings additional options to the user base. It's an exciting shift.