Folks still spending too much time worrying about how Meta *might* monetize the Fediverse and not enough time figuring out how to make the Fediverse financially sustainable. Is the "plan" to live off donations forever? Is it to *hope* that everyone self-hosts? If so, how are they supposed to gain that knowledge, and how are systemic inequities factored into this "plan"?
Or is the "plan" to tone-police everyone onto managed hosts that obfuscate capitalism behind a virtuous layer of abstraction?
Pointing to email or podcasts as a counterpoint isn't the compelling argument the folks in my mentions seem to think it is.
@DataDrivenMD Why? Email is a federated service in a similar manner to ActivityPub and has widespread adoption. Why don't you think that parallel applies here?
@LouisIngenthron @DataDrivenMD Email is pretty much impossible to self-host if you want to be able to communicate with people on gmail, yahoo, outlook and a couple of more.
It's as if mastodon.social would demand a very strict adherence to the ActivityPub protocol as they implement it, and all other fediverse instances would have to comply or be labeled as untrustworthy and silenced/restricted.
(what happened to email is my prime argument for shunning facebook et al at)
@Mabande @DataDrivenMD That's just simply not true. I host my own email. Hosted cPanel servers are cheap and easy to maintain. I spend maybe an hour a year troubleshooting email issues. That's it. And I have no problem communicating with any of those big email systems.
My primary email address has been self-hosted for more than ten years now.
@LouisIngenthron Congratulations. Your experience isn't shared by a lot of people and organizations (one example written up: http://www.igregious.com/2023/03/gmail-is-breaking-email.html).
There's more than one reason a bunch of universities either get outlook for their official mail or encourage students/faculty to use their private addresses.
(and from now on I'll detach @DataDrivenMD from the convo, just noting it here)
@Mabande Yes, I've experienced issues with smaller email providers getting emails blocked by major providers for no apparent reason, and @pluralistic wrote about the same thing here, I believe:
https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d
So I would say that email is, at best, on life support as a truly federated service and is becoming closer to an oligopoly.
I will agree that the federated nature of ActivityPub means in principle there can be heterogeneous models for supporting servers, but I don't see much evidence of that in practice. I'd like to see donation-based instances, fee-based instances, and, yes, even "free" ad-supported instances (though I hope those remain the exception). However, I gather that discussion of these other types of models in the past has provoked talk of defederation.
