Almost all the servers on Mastodon and the wider Fediverse are run by unpaid grassroots volunteers that pay their server's bills out of their own pockets.
They don't sell your data or carry advertising, and they don't get any share of the donations given to the Mastodon etc software developers.
Please consider donating to your server admin, they usually have donation links on your server website's "About" page. You can also ask your admin directly about how to donate.
#FediTips
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services I'm just curious. Is this really sustainable on a long scale. Especially if we want "mainstream" to use Fediverse.
I personally hope that people can professionalize in the Fediverse and make a living out of it.
With the federated structure we finally have a way to counter the greed of single closed platforms. If someone starts enshitification, you can leave to a "competitor" at any time or do it yourself if you have the time and passion to.
@feyter@mastodon.gamedev.place
It depends on what is meant by sustainable and long scale. There are many instances that have been operating since 2017 (Mastodon only began in 2016) or similar.
There have been many commercial social networks which have come and gone in that time such as Post News and Hive, which were run by professionals. The commercial networks couldn't make enough money to please investors so they shut down. Whereas the non-professional Fedi just carried on as it didn't need to please investors.
@feyter@mastodon.gamedev.place @FediTips@social.growyourown.services
The mastodon foundation (the ones who manage the source code and run mastodon.social and I think at least one other instance) recently announced that they sell managed instances to organizations, partially as a way to subsidize the open instances and development.
It would be great if more instances were to do that for their own niches but by its nature, there will always be a massive amount of self hosted instances that just got big by chance.
@gbargoud@masto.nyc @FediTips@social.growyourown.services yes that's for organizations. It would be nice if this could Cross-Finance the Fediverse for private users, but I don't think that will fit. For a number of reasons.
I wonder how a sustainable implementation could look for a "general user instance". Something that would ensure professional it-security, backup and content Administration. Maybe that's only possible if "mainstream" accept that you have to pay for it. But again, I don't see that happening any time soon.
@gbargoud@masto.nyc @FediTips@social.growyourown.services yes that's for organizations. It would be nice if this could Cross-Finance the Fediverse for private users, but I don't think that will fit. For a number of reasons.
I wonder how a sustainable implementation could look for a "general user instance". Something that would ensure professional it-security, backup and content Administration. Maybe that's only possible if "mainstream" accept that you have to pay for it. But again, I don't see that happening any time soon.
@feyter@mastodon.gamedev.place @gbargoud@masto.nyc
"Professional moderation" on commercial social networks tends to be done really badly and really cheaply by LLM-based tools that look for keywords without understanding any context.
The ratio of human moderators to users on the Fediverse is much, much higher than on a commercial social network.
"Something that would ensure professional it-security, backup"
There are already backups etc available to instance owners through professional managed hosting providers.
@feyter@mastodon.gamedev.place @gbargoud@masto.nyc
"Professional moderation" on commercial social networks tends to be done really badly and really cheaply by LLM-based tools that look for keywords without understanding any context.
The ratio of human moderators to users on the Fediverse is much, much higher than on a commercial social network.
"Something that would ensure professional it-security, backup"
There are already backups etc available to instance owners through professional managed hosting providers.
Fedi.Tips
Feyter