OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
I sometimes pay for things and still end up being the product. Smart TVs sell tons of data, and you may still pay buckets for one. YouTube Premium is no guarantee that Google won’t use your data in other ways. A modern luxury car has tons of ways to spy on you.
This is why I refuse to bow down and accept monetization, because it’s never enough money for them. they want all of your money. All of it. Any money that you have that they don’t is evil to them.
If Lemmy stops being ad free or charges money I’m gonna leave here just as fast as I did reddit.
Lemmy is different I think. I was donating until they started defederating from stuff like piracy groups.
They should ask for more money to fund servers / lawyers to make the community stronger which will attract more people and money.
I agree donating to instances and to things you believe in is a good idea.
But declaring that paying for things means they aren’t going to be controlled by shitty corporations is just ignoring every other aspect of the global economy.
I don’t know that I agree. Paying to support a site that supports your community isn’t sufficient, by itself, to protect you from enshittification. But it’s a necessary first step. Because sure as hell a website run by a for profit corp, that doesn’t charge you to use it, is making its money off you. And if you want to lessen the percentage of your life directly controlled by corporations you need to get away from corporate social media.
I’m excited by looking at Lemmy instances over the past few months and seeing how many of them are openly and transparently discussing finances with their communities - this is how much running the instance costs, this is how much the community has given us, this is who makes decisions about our site and this is how we make decisions, these are our future goals and plans for the future, etc, etc. Sure they have to work with Amazon Web Hosting etc in order to function at all but making decisions that actually put users first and being transparent in both finances and decision making is a huge improvement from the FaceTwitTokGram monolith.
I pay $10/mo for Kagi search. If they stop satisfying what I want from them, or they start misbehaving, I’ll cancel it.
Hard pass.
No. I would be fine with the Internet returning to a bunch of little passion project sites. I hate the internet as it is today.
Yay for supporting sites you want to stick around!
Gentle reminder to watch out for places that take your money for a product and still treat you as a data factory. Such as the three largest US based tech companies.
Internet Giant: “You need to pick one:”
a) pay for the service,
b) accept we’ll sell your data,
c) accept we’ll show you ads.
Consumer: “Er, okay… I pick (a)”
Internet Giant: “So (d) then. All of the above.”
And apparently all car companies
I’m broke, and have no capacity to make money in a capitalist society. This isn’t to say what I do doesn’t have value, it’s just not valuable to rich people.
Am I just FUBAR in this purely-transactional NWO?
Unfortunately I’d say yes.
Paying for website access will only make things worse, not better, because the major players are so extremely malevolent.
Spot on!
As soon as the disgusting tendrils of capitalist greed get a taste, the whole game is cooked. It’s better as a hobby project. Just donate to your instance to help cover costs!
Well, first of all, this is capitalism - if people suddenly were okay with paying for the big online services that are currently completely free but harvest a lot of user data, they’re just going to put the paywall up AND harvest your data at the same time. Why choose between one option or the other for monetization when you can combine them and make more money from both?
Besides, speaking of the fediverse - due to its decentralized nature, it can’t really be paywalled or monetized. If some instance decides to put up a paywall or ads for some reason, you can just hop to another instance and have access to pretty much the same content.
Counterpoint: In this day and age hosting and sharing text can be done on donated resources, we have basically reached post-scarcity there .
Devil’s advocate here - as soon as you introduce monetization to the use of a service you have locked in it’s potential as an income stream which will inevitably lead to the downside you are afraid of.
Fediverse services being distributed means no central host has to bear the entire weight. I could probably take on all of the server load that I use if I repurposed my PleX server:
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1592223884107218944
This is not about money, it is about control.
I would rather be the product than pay for each site I use.
The problem is if you pay for it you still end up without privacy.
Pay in crypto.
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I’m a Kbin Patreon for this very reason.
