But no customer signs a contract with discriminated pricing. There is no bill saying “calling numbers on network A costs $0.01/minute but B costs $0.002/minute because we have better peering with them”.
Unless you want to live in a world where net neutrality is not a thing, trying to discriminate pricing based on partner carrier is insane.
Who is “they”?
Are you at all familiar with the concept of “market segmentation”? Do you think that every user thinks and values the same as you?
Because it’s a professional service and they are willing to pay to not have to deal with:
There are some other benefits (specific to my business):
You know what is funny? For years we have talked about “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”, and yet completely ignore this when it comes to the people hosting Mastodon/Lemmy/Pleroma/Matrix servers. I don’t think people really have learned the lesson.
You are creating a strawman. I’m not saying that this particular model proposed by OP is something interesting. I’m not going to respond to that or the crypto part, but I can respond about the “money movement” required by my service :
Who will keep the money?
It’s a business. People pay for a service. The service provider keeps it.
Who will calculate what users will have to pay?
It’s a business. There is a price for the service. Service provider says “I want $X/month for the service”. Customer pays if the price is acceptable to them, and goes elsewhere if not.
Who will verify that the money is being used for the purpose it was paid for?
It’s a business. As long as the service is provided at a level that the customer is satisfied, customers have no deal in “verifying” anything.
I don’t think your analogy holds. Peering agreements is something that companies do regardless of contractual obligations with their customers.
And they certainly do not require blockchains or cryptocurrency.
But why shouldn’t we have a mechanism that can make fediverse sustainable, not reply on the kindness of humanity?
You charge from your users. The costs of any interactions from other instances will be because of your users.
Open source doesn’t means enjoy everything for free.
Please show me the receipts of every payment you’ve made for every time you’ve used some free software.
What really pisses me off is that you probably never even tried to see for yourself what type of costs and work entails running an instance, yet you are here claiming to have a solution to all of the fediverse. The more you try to argue your position the more clueless you sound.
That’s just as extreme, and just as short- sighted.
Enshittification is about companies that offer a bunch of things for “free” (actually, using VC funds) on an attempt to get to dominate the market first. When they get the users and establish a monopoly, the VC starts demanding to see the returns of their investment and that’s when enshittification happens.
Smaller service providers that make a living out of charging directly for their services do not need VC and have no reason to squeeze their users and the nature of the Fediverse ensures that no single provider can create a monopoly.
Small, independent businesses are healthy and should be encouraged. Saying “money = bad” is a recipe to keep things indefinitely small and unable to compete with the alternatives.
No, if users paid to their own instances, the network would be fine.
if lemmy.world or some big instances got shortage of donation someday, then what should we do?
Then hopefully enough people will learn the lesson and start donating to the existing commercial instances that exist, or start supporting whatever-next comes.
Bottom line is: trying to charge people who are not your direct users is absolutely moronic.
No, that’s absolute nonsense. You want people “interacting” with your instance to also be paying you?
I’m all for charging subscriptions from users of your instances. I’m all for commercial instances, but charging from people on other servers is next-level bullshit.
Seriously, I got angry just by reading this. Imagine if Verizon wanted to charge from calls made to their customers. Imagine if Google wanted to charge people that send emails to any Gmail address.
What a stupid concept, and I haven’t even touched the crypto part of it.
There you go, straight from the source: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758 mm
To be completely honest, I simply do not want to contribute to anything that is on lemmy.world. Nothing against them, but I do not want to further increase the network dependence on any single instance.
If these communities were created on a smaller instance or (better yet) a topic-specific server, I’d gladly find a way to contribute and bootstrap them.
Unless the lawsuit is a fabrication, you are literally dismissing a story just based on who is telling it.
If they were shutting down their mastodon instance but continuing their efforts to work on Social Media that is open and not just an instrument of Surveillance Capitalism, you’d have a point.
But they didn’t. They shut down the instance because of some internal political struggle and their interest in becoming an ad company themselves.
Political. Steve Teixeira was the one championing the focus on social. Apparently the faction that wanted him out won, and now they are getting rid of his babies, too.
They shouldn’t be “running a social media”, they should be working on making their browser the best client for the Social Graph that is ActivityPub.
Nonsense. There is also /r/football, which is quite large and to me has more interesting discussion than /r/soccer and less obnoxious mods, but /r/soccer still maintains its dominance.
It’s not the name that matters. It’s the content and the match threads.
I am not arguing that. I am just saying that this is a very lame reason to avoid using it.
If I had found any “football” or “footy” domain that costs less than an used car, I would have used it. But soccer was cheaper, and football@soccer is redundant and kind of senseless.
Buddy, you are running out of excuses… ;)
At the moment the priority is to grow the community enough that’s not only me posting.
I’d be posting as well, and if you see the NFL communities, they are also getting some momentum from Mastodon users.
Not at all. Evan is advocating for the development of ActivityPub as the basis for the social graph, not any specific application: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/113143389340566731