[rglullis]

As someone running a commercial provider for Mastodon (and Matrix, and XMPP...), I am somewhat envious of these posts. "Wow, 30000 users! If I had that many users on my service paying the $0.50/month I am charging, it would be enough to pay myself a full salary!".

But then I realize that they are only getting these many people because they are not driven by commercial interests: even with donations, I can bet they are not collecting enough to keep things afloat and they only keep going because they don't mind spending all this time, money and resources of their own on this project. They can treat it as a (relatively expensive) hobby, and they can keep it running as long as it satisfies them.

The problem is that I think that this is harmful in the long run. Yes, people now are finally seeing the issue with ad-funded social media. But if we want to have a healthy alternative, we need to understand TANSTAAFL, we need to accept that we need to give real money to the people working on this and to have the servers available 24/7 to store and distribute the hot takes and stupid memes that we so bizarrely crave every day.

I worry that if we don't change the mindset quickly, the whole Twitter drama would be a wasted opportunity and Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general) will go back to the status quo, where surveillance capitalism is the norm and truly open systems are just a geeky curiosity.

I wish I could fund a tech-equivalent of the "buy local and organic" campaign. I wish I had more people thinking "ok, I will pay $5/month to this guy and I will bring 10 people to this instance" because it is the ethical thing to do.

[buovjaga]

For financials, see https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2022/12/04/growth-and-su...

[rglullis]

You lost me at "call for moderators and volunteers". Unless these people are actually paid for this taxing and stressful work, I don't believe it can be called "sustainable".

[beachy]

Wikipedia would be unsustainable using that test. Yet it's been around for two decades and shows no signs of going anywhere - if that's not sustainable then no web business is.

[rglullis]

When I make a edit on wikipedia, I am doing it for my own benefit and others and I am not dealing with stressful work. That is totally different of having to work as a moderator on an instance where some of the members might be reporting cases of racism, harassment and sometimes just petty uncivil people.

Also, Wikipedia has donation drives, non-profit status and a highly controversial history of how it spends the funds they collect. Lots of high quality contributors already left because they were not recognized in any way and ended up feeling exploited.

[beachy]

I agree with all that. However you said "You lost me at call for moderators and volunteers".

I do not agree that just calling for moderators and volunteers means a business is unsustainable.

Perhaps it does in this case - I don't know enough about Hachyderm to know for sure. But it's possible that the roles of moderators and volunteers at Hachyderm might not be (or could be made not to be) so terrible, in which case relying on free labour is a proven and sustainable business model (for some businesses anyway).

Also worth noting that a "highly controversial history of how it spends the funds they collect" at Wikipedia is not directly correlated to Wikipedia's sustainability at all - the history shows otherwise.

[rglullis]

> I do not agree that just calling for moderators and volunteers means a business is unsustainable.

The problem is that example you gave (Wikipedia) is not a business.

> I don't know enough about Hachyderm to know for sure.

My point is not about Hachyderm in the particular. Like I said in the first comment, I think they have what it takes to continue operating and serving their community for the longer term.

My issue is with the overall ecosystem and the expectations of the people coming in from "traditional social media sites". If we want to provide an ethical alternative to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, we need to find a way to serve hundreds of millions of users. How are these people going to be spread around the instances? For context, we would need ~15000 Hachyderms to replace Twitter and ~60000 pixelfeds to replace Instagram. Are they all going to be dependent on volunteers? Are all these instances be operated by highly paid professionals from SV who can sink a few hundred dollars every month? Or are they going to go to appeal to "your donation is very important to us" and expect that a few generous souls make up for the free-riders? Or are they all going to eventually cave in, start treating it as a business and start charging from their users something that can pay actual salaries for everyone involved?

[OkayPhysicist]

The ideal volunteer moderator for communities like this is someone who A) already uses the application a lot and B) has a proven track record of not being a dick.

You then give that person the ability to delete stuff that violates the rules. Repeat with giving the highest trust / highest use users that power until you stop seeing garbage get through.

It is not at all any more stressful than being any other user, but instead of occasionally seeing garbage posted and being disgruntled that it's there, they can just delete it.

[berkes]

Aren't the people running the servers and services, playing arbiter in fights, removing spam and illegal stuff on WP payed? I imagine there's quite some "stressful work" being done for and on WP that is still unpaid and voluntary.

[rglullis]

No, they are not and Jimmy Wales politely gave them the finger.

This is why they are quitting in droves, and this is why I stopped donating to them.

[wmf]

I suspect Wikipedia has a very different reader:writer ratio than social media and thus Wikipedia needs proportionately less moderation. On the hardware side, Wikipedia is centralized and mostly static content so it should be cheaper to operate.