I absolutely believe the Fediverse needs to remain a space built on transparency, autonomy, and equity for users, instance admins, and developers working on ActivityPub. Look at the current state of social media, power and money concentrated in the hands of a few, stifling innovation and undermining trust. The centralized model isn’t just flawed, I think it’s had a devastating impact on an entire generation.
The Fediverse offers us a chance to rethink how the internet should work. It’s not just about being a space for free expression; it’s also about proving that a values-driven model can support those who keep the lights on. My main question is, can we implement monetization that honors our commitment to fairness, transparency, and equity, while still ensuring that the people supporting the network earn a livable wage?
This isn’t about getting rich, it’s about creating a sustainable ecosystem that empowers us all to build and maintain a trustworthy digital space. The Fediverse is already a success in its own right, but to truly evolve and thrive, I would argue we need a resource model that can drive sustainable innovation and meaningful progress.
TL;DR: I’d quit my day job tomorrow if I could secure a living wage from this work. Many in tech whold do the same. Is a monetization model that fairly compensates those who support and sustain the Fediverse possible?
Have a portion of my taxes be set to pay for fediverse general stuff, or for the fediverse instances hosted on my own country. Honestly, with how important remaking the internet is this should be being managed at the level of the big payers, not at the level of individual payers for whom a donation has more fees attached than the donation amount itself…
It’s called Web Monetisation. It’s a standard that’s in development. In short, you, the user, can donate/pay money on any website that follows the standard. No patreon, no PayPal, no VISA, no yada yada.
Setup: You install an extension or use a compatible browser, create a wallet with a web payment provider, login / connect with the extension / browser.
Example operation: while browsing you happen upon a website (Lemmy.world for example) or web page (tilvids.com/u/thelinuxexperiment or one of the video pages), the “tip” button is made available, you hit it and 1£ is queued to be sent to the website or person on the webpage. At your leisure, you accept the transaction.
This can be implemented any number of ways e.g statistics are collected (locally) about which websites you visited with web monetisation active, at the end of the month, you are shown a breakdown of that activity. Say 10% peertube, 30% Lemmy, 40% mastodon, and a smattering of other softwares. You say “I want 10£ to be split across the different softwares with a minimum of 1£ per transaction”. Or anything else you can come up with.
That’s it. The website operator doesn’t need you to have PayPal, or patreon, or some special bank. You have a " wallet", you decide how the money is transfered and to whom, and you’re done.
Unsubstantiated claim: Any set of rules that aim at distributing money according to some merit can be exploited in a way that those who get the most money are not those providing the most value.
Or less formally: Any game can be cheesed.
Unsubstantiated claim:
I’d say reality pretty cleanly substantiates this.
I don’t see why the Fediverse can’t be run as non-profit and by volunteers. We are 8 billion people on this planet. I’m sure we can handle it.
We can and we are.
It’s just that useful idiots have been convinced that nobody does anything because they actually want to do it.
To them, the only reason to do something is to make money from it or distract them from bigger issues. It’s why their lives only consist of working and playing video games.
The problem is if you run as volunteer only you can only recruit from people who are socioeconomically privileged enough to volunteer. Having a revenue model isn’t always about making a single person rich, it can be about being able to properly compensate people for their time, knowledge and experience who otherwise would not be able to because other responsibilities prevent them from it.
I agree. Look at email servers. It just works out. Email server owners don’t look at the content. They just host the servers. Both protocols are federated.
Forums will most likely be driven by the community and volunteers. Just move everyone over to the fediverse. Then it should be easier to find such people.
But do you remember how they monetized email
They…? If you choose to pay for something you can be getting for free, it’s kind of your fault for being a useful idiot.
Crazy idea here: would it be possible to have a model where everyone’s phone is a mini personal instance, syncing with others when the user opens the app? When a phone is offline that phones content would be unavailable too, but that is part of the truly decentralised model.
That would increase so much the costs of keeping my phone operating that I’d have to set up an obligatory payment system.
Instances could run stake pools and tie the two together somehow. Perhaps in this case, your username follows whatever pool you’re staking to.
It’s a solution look for a problem admittedly. It works better in the case that instances act as retail “clubs” like Costco for example. In that case, stakers to said pool could be authorized to get certain deals on products sold by that instance.
First sign of crypto and I am out. I would speculate that is true of a lot of people in the Fediverse.
From my perspective, there are only two use cases for crypto 1. Criminal activity 2. Pump and dumps
Yeah! How dare people try to have wealth that is actually borderless and self-sovereign. Those idiots are scammers! I will own nothing and be happy. Get out of my way, I need to step in line to bow before the Federal reserve (an organization that I fully admit is corrupt to the core and the very root of the issues in our society). I’m actually a Marxist living in a capitalist society. So, I am too cool to worry about the fact that I actually need money. I’ll just pretend that I don’t need it even though I REALLY do. I’ll do whatever I can to piss on viable alternatives to the Fed just because people were degenerate gamblers and got owned by obvious scammers. Sure the fed can take away my money for no reason, inflate the dollar so that my savings are worth less every single day, and do whatever they feel like with my money but that is a good thing because scammers exist in the world…
sarcasm
/s
Nice rant. A very provincial take I must I add.
Thanks. 😂 Honestly, I hate scammers. I really do. But they’re SO easy to spot.
I feel that the hivemind threw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to crypto. Thanks to Do Kwan, Sam Bankman Fried, etc, a whole viable set of technologies aimed at wrestling power from the world bank has been vilified by the hivemind.
I don’t know if you know this, but in many places obsession over central banks is simply not a thing. Maybe you need some real problems in your life? It would help you gain perspective.
And btw, the World Bank isn’t actually a world bank in the literal sense of the word.
I don’t have time to educate you but:
- civil asset forfeiture is a thing
- runaway inflation (and deflation of currencies) due to excessive money printing is a thing
- the work bank may not officially be a bank but what it is is a giant conglomerate of corporations that owns nations, takes part in coups, assasination, price fixing, and controls the dollar.
Did you really think I haven’t heard of this copytext? It’s pretty standard spam, no?
This is not a real thing, it’s more about acting out and tantrums. You don’t care or understand about the issues you describe.
With the right oligarch propaganda, you can be trained to claim that spicy mayonnaise is limiting freedumz and shiiiit!!!
