The things people need to build a livelihood on a platform are quality of life features. In a lot of cases, I think it's small stuff: being able to reward patrons with a tag on a specific community; automatically highlighting popular posts; making it easy to find a user's monetization page; etc.

I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.

At the moment, Lemmy is an ad-free version of Reddit missing some community and notification features. There are good political reasons to be here, but that hasn't driven a sustained increase in users.

So we won't get critical mass for network effects by being a better Reddit.

One to make the platform self-sustaining (or grow) is to give creators a reason to use the platform, which will give people a reason to come and stay.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not just ad-free, it's actively anti-corporate, anti-advertising, even anti-monetization. I would go so far as to say even anti-content in some ways. That's a cultural disconnect that goes beyond tooling.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not just ad-free, it's actively anti-corporate, anti-advertising, even anti-monetization.

There are upvoted positive posts and comments about

the Switch 2 announcement (but not Nintendo's legal policy),
the Framework advertising event last week,
Valve/Steam/SteamOS/Steamdeck/Gabe Newell in general,
Costco in general,
EVs in general (excluding Tesla and Cybertrucks 😂),
podcasts that solicit funding and carry advertising,
anime and anime adjacent products,
Lenovo's laptops,
individuals selling stuff on Redbubble/Etsy/OnlyFans,
subscription razor blade delivery (not from Amazon),
and "voting with your wallet".

It'd be cool if the platform made it easier for orgs to build and interact with a following here. Niches of users really like talking about them. That doesn't mean ads, it means features that would benefit regular users as well.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That's people just sharing their opinion freely. Word of mouth chatter is definitely not the same as advertising or even influencing, though of course they try to be.