Why Mastodon and the fediverse are “doomed to fail”
-> a small rant about how the profit lens distorts our understanding of success vs. failure:
https://write.as/eloquence/why-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-are-doomed-to-fail
@eloquence I think it’s worth remarking: The profit motive is capitalism’s way of telling people what to invest resources in. Ideally it reflects or responds people’s demands (in our case for a quality social network) but in order for this to happen demand must be turned into a profit opportunity, and this is not always possible. On a site like twitter, demands for a social network are met with ads. Here there are donations, but they don’t respond to a profit opportunity.
I don't think it's desirable for distributed social media to pursue profit. I do think it's desirable for them to pursue sustainability -- to pay for developers, UX contributors, community mods, ops folks, etc. at least in small amounts.
Some instances (including the one I'm on) do charge membership fees towards that end. This instance has an annual estimated budget of ~$15K raised via membership, which is tiny compared w/ for-profits, but very sizable in the Mastodon universe.
@eloquence
Right, but where does that money come from? Like you've said before in the context of contributions, that it works because people have "day jobs", the same holds true for donations too. So in a sense it isn't actually that easy to become sustainable.
@redlaserbm
Donations and subscriptions scale just fine, just ask Wikimedia (~$100M/year in donations) or Netflix ($20B/year in revenue).
How many full-time folks can the fediverse sustain? How many does it need to sustain to grow and thrive? I don't know what that number is, but it's certainly not 48,268 (number of FB employees). I think even a small team of folks being paid in various capacities for some of the top instances would go a long way.
@eloquence Ad space, paid subscription service, monetization for exposure — Cent does this — these are all ways a microblogging site could translate demand into profit opportunity. But none of that is had here.