Do people have to make a living of it?
Can't we have a place online where out data isn't being sold, aren't being bombarded with ads, or begged for subscriptions?
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Only when people can afford to have a hobby.
Or post revolution.
Do people have to make a living of it?
Can’t we have a place online where out data isn’t being sold, aren’t being bombarded with ads, or begged for subscriptions?
We can, and we do have some such spaces, thankfully. Another question to ask then is, could online workers have the sort of spaces where they're not ceding their data to be sold by others, where they aren't at the whims of corporate platforms wary of losing advertisers' money, and being given scraps of the advertising money and pressed to split their subscription revenue with corporations making billions?
If people don't want them in the fediverse, and people are sick of the corporate web (either in part or in whole because of online workers there), where are online workers to try to make their living?
I don't know, but I do understand the exasperation at it all.
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(13 replies)
I don't think anyone should be able to monetize themself on here. Donations are fine, but only for the select few actually keeping the servers on.
Bring money into it and most things go to shit.
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Selling ball pics $20 ball vids $45 (1 min w/ jiggle). dm me to purchase.
If you pay me $1,000,000 I will consume an entire pineapple, skin and all. This is my final offer.
I can just add a link to send me money through Cash app on every comment I make 🤷🏻♂️
CashApp is only really used in America, it’s basically unheard of over here in the UK
What's big over there? Venmo?
I think that the fundamental issue that you're going to run into as that as things stand, the Fediverse -- and especially the Threadiverse, lemmy+kbin -- is smaller than similar social networks. And it's probably a good bet that any kind of income scales up with with audience size, and cost likely doesn't.
So whatever you do, I suspect that one of two things are going to be true:
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It's something that violates ToS on other social media and so can't be done there.
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It's something that is also being done on other social media, and you're just also doing the same on the Fediverse to expand reach a bit.
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Donations; things like Patreon or whatever. If you enjoy someone's content and are financially stable you have a bit of a moral obligation to give them a bit of money for it. Likewise, you should give your instance admins a few bucks to cover their hosting costs.
Creators could use the Fediverse to show off their products in order to get people to support them on Patreon (or Subscribestar or Ko-Fi or your subscription platform of choice). Or maybe even get them to buy their products on Itch, Bandcamp, Etsy, Steam and so on. Twitter and Reddit never really were ways to make money, but instead a way of pulling people towards other revenue streams.
The traditional model where people get paid by ads (such as Youtube or Twitch) is honestly dying with the rise of adblockers. Although I could imagine people on the Fediverse running a "premium subscription" plan and sharing their revenue with creators like Youtube Premium though.
For a full fediverse alternative to Stripe/Patreon/Paypal that isn't crypto based? Probably not going to happen. Besides the technical challenges, you need a good rapport with payment processors that you can only get if you are a big company and comply with their demands (which many fediverse instances would not be willing to sacrifice their morals to do).
Thank you, Yeah Donations seem like the only way people can really do anything massive, well not taking away from what the Fediverse is and needs to be. An ad-free, free speech place that doesn't take your data.
I'm sure people who move from Video based platforms could also take sponsorships like they normally do across YouTube and Twitch.
It would be nice for the Subscription platforms like Ko-Fi to have some sort of way to integrate your posts into the Fediverse in the future.
Same way as anywhere else, but with fewer built-in middle men.
Ads can be served by instances or by individual creators. I expect if the Fediverse grows, many creators will be posting regular ads or sponsored content. The Fediverse has no built-in system for that, which makes it more difficult, but also so much more flexable as instances, platforms, and users can build, integrate, or negotiate whatever fits their needs.
Similarly, creators can take commisions or sell their work as rhey would elsewhere. If anything, this is easier as creators can easily link or promote whatever service fits their needs from a personal website (IE a store) to a Patreon.
Go on mastodon and click on public, it's 80% spam and ads
It's a Social network, not a social media. Most people don't know the difference
Not everything needs a profit motive attached. I'd argue nothing should, but I don't think profit has made social media better overall.
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I've wondered if "premium instances" will become a thing at some point. Not sure how that would work federation wise though. Maybe you're just paying for an uptime SLA and improved moderation?
Any premium or restricted content kinda works against how the fediverse works.
Maybe certain communities could be instance only? Or only local, paying, users can post or comment.
That's what Nostr is supposed to be for. Looking for ways to monetize decentralized social media. So far, they've only imagined cryptocurrency transactions.
That’s what Nostr is supposed to be for. Looking for ways to monetize decentralized social media.
I thought it was more interested in making a more censorship resistant form of online communication, with the crypto/monetization junk being tacked on as kind of an afterthought (but then amplified because cryptocurrency people are nothing if not vocal).
As far as I can tell, it was basically intended as a cryptocurrency pushing network from the beginning. Here's some marketing babble right from their site:
Integrated with lightning [cryptocurrency], Nostr enables new value-for-value business models that have the potential to be more fair.
More PR speak about zaps (cryptocurrency exchanges), wallets, etc are all accessible from the official website.
Ah yeah, my bad, I also see this on another part of the site regarding "zaps":
From the beginning of the Nostr protocol, it was common to see Lightning invoices in notes.
I think I remembered it otherwise by coming at it from the decentralized comms angle instead of the cryptobro angle.
Yeah, that doesn't seem right. Correction 1: I guess, for instance, they may become pay monthly just to have upkeep and moderation covered themselves. That would be an ok thing in my eyes.
But for content creators and stuff, a pay-to-view system isn't really a good idea. Guess it would have to be done through donations instead, as that's the only thing that sort of makes sense.
This is just an idea I'm throwing:
Similar to old Reddit Gold system, a visible marker (or a tipbot that replaces it maybe?) that shows amount of donations a post gets in a digestible manner and also contributes to server hosters.
This could incentivise keeping up servers and communities for longer times and even encourage higher quality content.
That would be a very cool idea if it could be done across the Fediverse but annoyingly it might only be per-instance especially as most probably don't want to deal with Transactions across ActivityPub as that could get shady real quick.
Good idea though as it would be amazing to spread the cost between the instance you and the receiver are using as well as the person you are donating to.
Crypto could be used as a way to track all incoming - outgoing donations without dealing with any centralised payment services; but it doesn't have a good reputation and could disinterest a lot of people.
However having a centralised payment regulator could give them too much control over how the posts look to users.
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