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by znpy 2403 days ago
it's the old saying: "if you're not paying for using a product or you're not being paid to use a product, that means that you're the product".

Deciding to pass on a service that asks you money to offer you a service is completely fine, as long as you don't later complain about "privacy issues" and "massive surveillance".
5 comments
Kye 2403 days ago
Most Mastodon instances cover bills with a handful of supporters on Patreon. Centralizing is what racks up the big dollar figures. Even mastodon.social only cost about $280/month to run as of mid 2018.

https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Runni...

It's not necessary for everyone to pay if the topology is right. They could have joined the growing ActivityPub fediverse and set up a managed hosting thing the way one of the major Mastodon contributors did.

The centralized sites spend much of their money on marketing and making ad deals. You don't need that if the social network is a standard feature you bolt your software on to and don't depend on ads.

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bilbo0s 2403 days ago
Well, in fairness, you're not gonna be free from mass surveillance by signing up for WT social. You might not need to worry about people selling your data, provided none of your connections adds a privacy destroying app in the future?

But yeah, everyone will still be subject to the government showing up and going through your data if they deem it necessary. I'm not sure that can be helped? If there's an ironclad way to do that, I haven't seen it done.

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cpncrunch 2403 days ago
You can have advertising without "privacy issues" and "massive surveillance". I would say that google does a much better job of it than Facebook.

Another option would be to have voluntary donations, like wikipedia.

I'm not going to pay $10/month for a curated new feed which I can do myself for free, and probably do a better job of it.

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buboard 2403 days ago
> that means that you're the product

paying in kind is still a valid form of payment

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osobo 2403 days ago
But I'd like to sample or at least see the bloody service before I pay for it. Right now I'm hitting a paywall telling me I'm x0.000 in line and "Oh, we want your money". I'm not triggered to commit.
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