I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it's a matter of time before it's enshittified.

I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there's a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than "big tech" and get more done than just donation based development.

It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?

What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?

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[–] rglullis 0 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Newsie.social has (had) 20k active users, mostly professional journalists. It has been threatening to shut down due to lack of funding for two years already. Every month their admin needs to beg around for people to donate.

Fosstodon started with enough donations that they could even send some of their money to upstream projects. Nowadays they are invite-only because they don't get enough funding to sustain infinite growth.

Moth.social was active while they were sponsored by Mozilla, they are shutting down in March 12th due to lack of funding.

I could go on.

There’s no “shortage of instances” going around. As more people join the Fediverse, more admins will start instances.

This is just wishful thinking. Go ahead and open an instance with open registration, see how long it will take for you to regret it.

the vast majority of instance-owners are bored, twiddling their thumbs due to their lack of users.

And there is a huge number of admins that got users and then burned out due to harassment, spam, entitled users asking for/against federation due to petty drama...

[–] commander@lemmings.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Newsie.social has (had) 20k active users, mostly professional journalists. It has in the brink of shutting down due to lack of funding for two years already.

Fosstodon started with enough donations that they could even send some of their money to upstream projects. Nowadays they are invite-only because they don’t get enough funding to sustain infinite growth.

Moth.social was active while they were sponsored by Mozilla, they are shutting down in March 12th due to lack of funding.

Can you provide any sources for where you're getting this information? Did any of these instances share their server expenses and how much was being donated, or are we just supposed to "trust them bro"?

This is just wishful thinking. Go ahead and open an instance with open registration, see how long it will take for you to regret it.

Are you delusional? I'm not even going to entertain how stupid this response is.

And there is a huge number of admins that got users and then burned out due to harassment, spam, entitled users asking for/against federation due to petty drama…

And there's a huge number that don't and enjoy having power over the discourse, as evidenced by how many of them do it.

I have to say, you're pretty ~~naive~~ innocent to the world around you. It's to be expected that you're going to bat so hard for people trying to take money from you without verifying their expenses.

*Apparently he reported my comment to have it censored for calling him "naive" rather than present arguments that show us that he's not.