Wandering Adventure Party

It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

Facebook allegedly extracts $14/month of value from each of their US-based users, ~$12/european user, $7/month for Latin America and $4 from Southeast Asia.

If each active user contributed $1/month for their instance and $1/month for the developer of the software they use, the Mastodon developers would have an operational budget of ~$800k per month, the Lemmy developers would have $50k/month.

I don’t think that the problem is we’re “too small to be a job”. I think that the problem is that the average “enthusiast” is an hypocrite. They will profess their hatred of the business practices of Big Tech, but they will look for any and every possible justification to excuse themselves to contributing to the pool.

We have tens of thousands of people who (…) are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

Sure, but what I don’t get is this: why is that people are absolutely fine with paying 10-20€/month (or $50-$70/month in the US) for their mobile phone service but expect that the server hosting service and software development service to fall from the sky?

Most people don’t pay for services on the Internet

Yeah, but we are not “most people”. I thought “we” understood if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product. I thought “we” understood that “Free software” was not a “free lunch”.

And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they’d milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.

This is also why I think we should flip the script and stop cheering admins that run “free” instances. We should stop helping admins who can not make rent and we should start telling them to start valuing their work and demand proper compensation.