[idiotsecant]

This is a problem inherent with walled garden social media. Their garden, their rules. Instead of trying to police behavior we don't like in those walled gardens (which is mostly like trying to walk in quicksand) we should be supporting open protocols and systems that don't require a walled garden at all, like the internet used to be.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

An open garden cannot compete with Facebook, Twitter or Spotify. We need regulation and legislation which clearly outlines what is and is not okay, while creating black box behaviours that is impossible to navigate.

[berkes]

Oh, but it can. And already does.

Maybe not for your exact use-case. But "open" doesn't need large numbers, market saturation or a monopoly: those are traits that come from investor-fueled business-models.

A mastodon account that has great communication with seven other accounts is a 100% success! It doesn't need access to billions of people, it just needs to fulfill a need: talk to several fine people. And it often does this just fine with a very small social graph, even.

A musician doesn't need a million streams, they need enough revenue to be an income. On spotify (or youtube, etc.) that, indeed, means "millions of streams". But it could just as well be five tshirts sold, twenty-eight .zip files @ €9.88 sold, and three vinyl shipped in a month.

The "numbers" that mark "competing with" faang, really don't matter. We don't need to make billions, we just need to make a good income.

[mikeryan]

Mastodon is not an “open garden” and can easily, if not more easily, be as arbitrarily administered as any of the social media platforms you’ve mentioned. Each servers admin can and have cut off access to other nodes.

See what’s happening with journa.host as an example.

[berkes]

Why is that a problem, and how does it contradict my point?

[smoldesu]

What's wrong with what happened to journa.host?

[seanw444]

I would have to agree with your sentiment. But for most people, good enough just isn't good enough.

[berkes]

I don't understand what you mean.

If it has to be "better" then it must improve. But improvement doesn't mean "competing with FAANG". It just means being good enough today, and keep improving from there.

My income 35 years ago was vastly different from today. I needed far less, but it also grew over time. But that doesn't mean I must make millions today to consider my life a success. I'm happy today. Isn't that "successful"?

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Thanks. Exactly zero of my friends use mastodon.

[marcus_holmes]

This. You can always host your own music on your own site. Of course then you need to deal with monetisation and how you actually get paid. But you have control!

Sincerely, as Spotify (and the rest of the streaming services) are forced to make more and more user-hostile decisions to keep their revenue growth curve going up and to the right, it might make sense to jump ship early.

[winternett]

Even if you run your own site, search engines and SEO work against you in many similar ways. Music has been run on a "pay for play" basis for many years now, it's creeping into aspects of pretty much every kind of entrepreneurial business.

If you don't participate in promotion on social media for your art or business, there is absolutely no contact with new customers unless you run a brick and mortar or maybe rent billboards.

In order to monetize streams on your own personal web site you'd likely need to run ads, charge for user accounts, and/or generate paid memberships, which is harder than pulling teeth even as a well known musician.

[nigamanth]

One of the best entrepreneurial decisions to make in early start ups is to take control of your customers. This is regardless of the business, if someone is selling their products on Etsy or Amazon, part of the money goes to the company Etsy or Amazon.

While, on the other hand the business could sell their products on their website and therefore get 100% of the money on their website. Many companies sell on their website for this reason.

[ytygg775]

> While, on the other hand the business could sell their products on their website and therefore get 100% of the money on their website

And then they also need to deal with all the crap that this entails.

[jeroenhd]

> Their garden, their rules.

Actually, the EU has passed the DMA which will prevent exactly that for very large (i.e. Facebook/Twitter scale) providers.

I suspect some companies/features may not be available in the EU because of this, but I hardly lament this if it means the garden walls are being torn down.

[cortesoft]

How would you make any money as an artist with open protocols?

[idiotsecant]

If your money making model depends on hoping real hard that a giant megacorp throws you a few pennies once in a while I would argue your whole premise needs a rethink.

But to answer your question directly, artists make money the same way they always did - making art for rich people that appeals to their tastes.

[jamespo]

Strange, artists have made money in lots of different ways other than that

[seanw444]

Most artists make more money from merch and branding, anyways.

[ilyt]

Open protocols don't make for open platforms. Mastodon is "open" yet big server admins are free to block anyone else they don't want, going back to the closed garden model. It is for good reason of course, there always be bad actors, but open or not it's all to easy for organization to use same tools to further their own goals

[cdmckay]

Couldn't you make the same argument about email? It's an open protocol but anyone can block you.

Even though that's the case, I think email is much more open than WhatsApp or Signal, and a big part of that is the fact that it's a federated open protocol.