this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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Sorry but lets agree to (fundamentally) disagree.
People coming in with this "who cares what my fun does to others" yolo attitude that assumes volunteer run public services are some sort of free resource up for the taking, are fundamentally at odds with what the Fediverse tries to achieve and extremely toxic to it. This is not a lazy cop out, that is clearly telling people at the door that they seem to have the wrong idea what this is all about. And no, this isn't only about those nearly 100 bots polluting the local timeline... its about having clear rules against such abuse and not making exceptions because someone with a big ego thinks their specific bots are harmless (spoiler: nearly everyone thinks that of their pet project).
And you are completely wrong if you think this effort can be funded by being "just a little bit more appealing to the masses". The opposite is the case. This leads to burnout of the volunteers, over-streched infrastructure and people that soon leave again because someone lied to them about what the Fediverse is. You can't put a Mc Donalds sign in front of a farmers market and expect that will magically bring customers and solve all of the farmers market's funding issues.
You don't need to tell me that the community-funded model is broken. I'm saying that for years already.
But there are two separate forces at play, here. Yes, there is this aspect of not having enough infrastructure and not enough manpower to support a larger group of users (which I agree, though I think it's entirely self-inflicted) but there is also this strong cultural aspect of Fedi that equates being on the fringe as "cool" and that actively pushes Fedi to be a tiny, niche space that should be treated as some sort of secret club to keep the plebs away.
For this crowd, even if OP was running the bots on their own server, they would still be met with scorn because "they are using a microblog to send notifications". It's this culture that is pathetic. It's this culture that pushes "normies" away, and if we don't change this culture then there is no amount of funding or goodwill that will make Fedi a nice, fun, appealing place.
This here is not a farmers market. I wish this was a farmers market. People don't go to a farmers market and tell the farmer they only need to cover the cost of the feed in order to get a whole chicken like people do here. No, sir. This is a soup kitchen where everyone pretends to be homeless in order to fit in.
To quote from one of your links:
Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.
If the idea that drives the Fediverse wants to succeed we need to build 60.000 volunteer run Pixelfed etc. instances, and that is not an unrealistic number at all, but it takes time.
You can't shortcut this process with more funding and commercial companies, because if you try, you end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.
You're arguing with a right-libertarian, FYI. This should explain some of their positions and arguments better.
You have no idea how wrong you are, but if this is what you need to believe to sleep at night, I won't be able or interested in changing your mind.
If it quacks like a duck, and it walks like a duck...
I once had this conversation with some other "indie entrepreneur" who was arguing something along the lines of "I don't care about VC funding because my competitors all come and go, and my business still endures." When I asked "Does this mean that you can make out a living out of your business?" and his response was "no, but I have a full time job, so my business is default alive"
He wasn't too happy when I pointed out (a) he had a hobby, not a business and (b) cockroaches are also optimized for survival, but outlasting your competitors mean jack shit if they are playing a different ball game. He spent all this time pretending to have a business while his competition was actually out there fighting for customers.
All of this to say: there is no consolation in being "right" in my death bed. I am not interested in something that "takes time" if in the mean time my kids are growing up in a world dominated by Big Tech. Anyone who understands how bad Big Tech is bad for society should be rushing and actively accelerating to build an alternative.
It's is basically impossible to create a monopoly around FOSS services. It's a commodity with high R&D costs but zero cost to distribute and replicate. You can only jack up the prices of commodities if you collude with your competitors or create a cartel.
The main thing holding back the development of a healthy cottage industry of hosting providers, consulting services, app customization, etc is not the Big Tech players, but precisely this "culture" of people expecting services for free.
There are plenty of examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology. Especially in social media it is more about network effects and having enough funds to buy up any potential competitors. Facebook could be FOSS and it would not change anything.
The culture to expect this for "free" is not exclusive to the fediverse, and while it has been exploited by adtech companies to build large surveillance advertisement monopolies, it is by itself not wrong for people to expect that basic services are not held behind a paywall. It just needs another organisational model to function, and comercialisation is not going to work.
And besides those general considerations, your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream. Digital services have a fundamentally different economic basis that leads to huge efficiency gains at scale. If you do not actively work against that, any cottage industry will quickly consolidate around a few big players and you will basically have replicated the current system.
Citation needed?
I have no doubt that you point out some markets and see a large corporation dominating it. But a de facto monopoly? Not so much.
I'm sure you know that there are plenty of small businesses making a living out of email hosting, even if Google and MS account for 80% of the market.
In pretty much the same way that lots of local business just ditched their own web pages to go to Facebook, but this didn't kill all the other website builders companies out there.
Now you are contradicting yourself. Sure, there are survival niches for small cockroach companies in the shawdow of the large FOSS based oligopolies, but that is the status quo and no improvement at all.
A "cockroach business" is something that has no significant revenue but at the same time takes up so little resources that can be operated forever. This is completely different from, e.g, small email hosting providers like Migadu or some agency that gets real customers to make wordpress customizations.
You can argue all you want about definitions, but that doesn't change the fact that these companies are at the wim of the large oligopolies and pose absolutly no threat to them, nor do they even want to because their business indirectly depends on these oligopoles existing.
Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?
Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I'd be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.
I'd rather work towards a world where Facebook has "only" 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and "community" alone.
Many of these email providers only exist as a less bad alternative but compatible with Gmail etc. And the oligopol could shut them down any time as their primary service is sending emails to the oligopol.
What you are proposing is basically to make the Fediverse a small managed opposition to Meta's Threads, which I am sure Zuckerberg would love.
But that is not what the Fediverse tries to be and neither does it aim to become mainstream. We are doing prefigurative infrastructure building here. If people want to join, great. If not, also no problem. But if society decides to finally get rid of this capitalist hellscape, then the Fediverse will be there and ready to use.
I disagree about "the primary service" of a minority provider. The minority provider can do a lot more than just "send" emails to the larger share, and I think they can be instrumental for us to bring a tool from the intolerant minorities to the mainstream.
I also disagree about the idea of "managed opposition". "Managed opposition" is what Mozilla does to Google with Firefox. They are paid by Google to be kept around. I am not saying that we should take the Fediverse and seek funding from Threads, or for us to depend on Facebook.
Finally, I have serious doubts that this "prefigurative infrastructure building" is effective. To me it seems like just a collective of aimless rebels who want to keep this universe secluded from everyone else, but it's just too afraid to say it out loud.
Anyway, thanks for the chat. I understand I won't be able to change your mind, but to go back to the original topic: I just wish that next time we don't see someone as "toxic" just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without questioning.
Something, something Chestertons fence...
These "rituals" are vital for the continued existence of the Fediverse. Without a clear anti-capitalist and anti-oligopolist stance it will be co-opted and destroyed like many similar efforts that came before. You are being very naive if you can't see that.
With this continued "anti-capitalist" stance there will never be anything to be destroyed. Without real investment and resources, this will be forever nothing more than a castle made of sand.
You sound like a reverse Tankie 😅 No proof of anything other than your ortodox economic believes, and when confronted with the living proof of the opposite (the Fediverse) you just claim that it can't and will never exist 🤦
Millions of people are using it every month, and it seems to do just fine despite contstant claims since many years that it can't survive...
"Millions of people", let's round it up to 10 million, ok?
Instagram reports 2 billion active users. TikTok reports 1.5 billion, Facebook reports 3 billion. So, the Fediverse as a whole gets maybe to reach 0.6% of the major networks.
Do you want compare only with the Threadiverse with Reddit? Let's be again be generous here and round it up to 60k MAU. Reddit is reporting around 75 million MAU. So, even if we consider that Reddit is lying like crazy and that 2/3 of the users on Reddit are fake, Reddit is ~400 times larger.
This is cockroach levels of usage.
Yes, the Fediverse will survive. But it doesn't mean that it ever was relevant.
See long argument above. It exists and is viable for millions of people. Once people decide they want something other than corporate social media, the Fediverse is there. There is no point in trying to make the Fediverse a copy of the corporate social media to appeal to users that see no reason to switch. The Fediverse is relevant regardless of the size, because it proves a real alternative is possible and viable.
Again, this is just a lazy cop-out and a perfect display of the hubris here that is so off-putting.
You make it sound that the people using Instagram or TikTok are there because they like the Surveillance Capitalism, or getting bombard by ads, or they are all sucking up to Zuckerberg. Have you ever considered that maybe people are still there because they actually like some of the features they use in the products and they can't find it here?
Have you actually talked to some people using TikTok? Yes, they do like the personalized algorithmic feed, and that is inseperable from the surveillance part, and they certainly don't want to pay for it either.
The ones with hubris are people like you that think they can turn the Fediverse into the next big thing. Of course people already on the fediverse are going try raining on your parade 🤷
There is absolutely nothing stopping the personalization algorithms to run on-device or delegated to a separate service from the video feed.
It doesn't have to be a "donation/public funding" vs "ads/surveillance capitalism" dichotomy. I bet we can find alternative models of governance and funding, provided we get to a place Fediverse is relevant enough to attract the attention of some small business, media channels, institutions, etc.
But that is not how the TikTok recommendation algorithm works and doing it locally only would be a very poor substitute most likely, as it seem to also recommend what other people with a similar behavior pattern have liked. And the same algorithm is used to identify suitable targets for advertisers, so the two are basically inseparable.
That's like saying the community garden needs to be relevant enough to attract a seed shop and a fast-food stand etc. And a few weeks later there is no more community garden but rather a strip mall owned by the local oligopolists renting out booths to entrepreneurs. That is just not helpful at all, because it destroys the very foundation of what the Fediverse tries to achieve.
Says who? You and the gatekeepers who'd rather have everyone stuck in the past, just to preserve some technical/ideological purity?
You are mixing up two topics here. If someone wants to experiment with a local only algorithmic feed that's fine, but I can practically guarantee that this will never be enough to convince people to switch from TikTok and the like.
And the other topic is about commercialization. You are the one stuck in the past thinking that is the only way for the Fediverse to succeed. Quite on the contrary, if anyone seriously tried that it would fail quickly and just result in burned investments and a lot of goodwill towards the Fediverse lost.
What do you think that Automattic, Flipboard and Ghost are doing? Do you think they are paying people to develop integrations with AP because they are really nice people and have zero intentions of profiting from their investments?
Look, I better leave this conversation. I should have learned by now that there is no point in arguing with ideologues.
The problem is that you are the ideologue but fail to realize that. Capitalism is an ideology and a very harmful one.
As for those investments, lets see, but I don't expect much to come from those.