I've had three glasses of wine after a long day at work, and I've began thinking about the slow shift towards federalization/decentralization.
I find myself concerned about the question of incentives. What motivates the owners and maintainers of federated services to continue their efforts over the years? Donations alone are unlikely to cover the costs of servers, let alone the time required for code/infra maintenance, along with community moderation.
It is evident that most successful open source projects have found alternative avenues to sustain Incentivisation. One common approach is offering enterprise packages or services, which generate revenue to support ongoing development and maintenance. Additionally, some projects find support as subsets of larger corporations, such as Canonical, HashiCorp, Apache, MongoDB, k8s, Chromium, Android, Red Hat, and many more.
I am sure that many of us have witnessed many donation-based or entirely free and open-source (FOSS) projects lose traction over time. In my observations, this can be attributed to core maintainers losing interest or facing limitations in dedicating themselves to the project in the long run. The absence of financial incentives can make it challenging to sustain motivation, as maintaining and developing projects require significant time and expertise, and a genuine interest in the product.
What can be done to address these problems? Is it something like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)?
DAOs provide token-based incentives, allowing contributors to earn tokens representing ownership or value in the project. These tokens can be exchanged or redeemed for various benefits within the decentralized ecosystem. By aligning the interests of contributors with the success of the project, DAOs offer a sustainable incentive structure, while maintaining their decentralized nature.
Although incentives pose a valid concern for a decentralized future, it is important to acknowledge that sustainable models exist. Through the exploration of alternative mechanisms such as DAOs and hybrid models, we can create incentive structures that attract and retain contributors over the long term. I strongly believe that for decentralized projects to thrive and maintain momentum, it is crucial for them to embrace alternative models that effectively retain talented individuals. As these projects continue to innovate and adapt, exploring diverse incentive structures becomes essential to ensure their long-term success.
Thoughts?
Wikipedia is another example. One of the most heavily visited websites, operated as a nonprofit. Obviously they don't only rely on donations from visitors, as they have a whole foundation. But they are a great example IMO.