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I wonder if the internet, possibly the worlds best accomplishment in cooperation, can survive a post-globalist world?
Perhaps it’s the purist expression of the wave in optimism for liberalised trade before it crested and rolled back out to sea.
I think these services need to think about monetization from the beginning rather than the “make product, get users, ???, Profit”.
TFW Calico Cut Pants has a better business model than 90% of websites in the world. It’s 100% user funded. You gotta give!
If you don’t give, it could go dark
I think the beauty of decentralization is that in many ways monetization doesn’t have to be necessary. Or it can be necessary on a much smaller scale. A big company like Twitter or Reddit or Facebook needs to make money on a massive scale. A small company, like somebody running a big Lemmy instance, doesn’t need to answer to investors who expect a 10x return. They just have to cover their costs and maybe make a buck. So we go back to the old days like when we had independent forums, half of them were just free as a labor of love, the other half had a banner ad or two and maybe some way to support the site by donating. I think we were better off that way.
The utility of twitter, facebook and reddit is their ubiquity. They each, in their own way, became the place you go to find [thing], and federated services will never have that. Discovering mastodon users who aren’t already followed on your instance is hard. Discovering lemmy communities that aren’t already followed on your instance is slightly easier. They’re never going to show up in Local if they’re not local, and they’re never going to show up in All if no local subscribes. Decentralization, even with federation, works against virality, and if there’s not a steady flow of content, then few people bother to sign up.
The instances get exponentially more useful as they get larger, but the costs of operation also get exponentially larger. If lemmy catches on, instances will absolutely grow beyond donations.
I think while Mastodon and Lemmy don’t solve those issues particularly well at the moment I’m still confident they are solvable problems.
As for costs, I don’t think it’ll be that bad. It’s not nearly as expensive if you’re just trying to cover expenses (and not focused entirely on growth and revenue), and if a server does get to a point where the admins are concerned about donations keeping up they can cut off sign ups. Push incoming users to other instances that can handle the extra load (or spin up new ones if no more remain). It won’t be the cleanest process and the inconvenience will make it tough to capture a lot of the potential incoming growth but Lemmy doesn’t need to chase that growth entirely. It can grow at its own pace and handle what it can handle.
Thankfully we won’t need to find out, there’s no evidence that we’re in a post globalist world, or entering one any time soon.
The EU and friendly ties via NATO are a great example, nations are realising more than ever that they must come together and work together to survive, and the Internet continues to make the world smaller, our communities closer.
Not to mention the ever growing essential economic links between nations.
There’s the occasional missteps of course, some xenophobes and fascists in various nations want to close their borders and essentially become North Korea, but that’ll never happen, it would be far, far too damaging for those nations if they actually listened to that vocal minority.
I hope you’re right.
I feel ratcheting tensions. The rise of far right, anti-immigration policies. The new Cold War between China and the Us forcing countries to pick sides. Tariffs. Cyber warfare. Extrajudicial killings.
Im expecting a “We didn’t start the fire” 2025 edition
Fallout boy released their own updated version 4 days ago. Just like everything else, it doesn’t even come close to measuring up to the past.
Haha, oh really wow - I’ll have to give it a listen