Most people are only willing to pay with non-monetary resources (PII, ad data, etc.). You can't approach this with charging money in mind, because people will just go back to the places where they aren't expected to pay. Start charging for Mastodon? The majority will go to Bluesky, Twitter, and Threads. Lemmy would just feed back to Reddit. Either that or they'll drop off social media altogether.

We've already got proof of this: PeerTube. Most PeerTube instances either charge a fee to upload (call it a 'donation' if you prefer, but if you're gating an action behind money, that's a fee), or simply don't allow any users not connected to the admin to upload. YouTube, Twitch, Dailymotion, and a few other sites are free. The sites where it's free to perform the core activity will keep winning, especially as we see rising inflation and increasing costs.

[–] Steve 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There's no reason instances can't use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I'll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The reason they can't show ads is actually pretty simple: if I'm going to have ads in my feed, I'm just going to go back to Reddit for the same experience. Plus, when you consider dbzer0 et al, you're going to come to the conclusion that ads will either be a waste because everyone is using a strong adblock on Firefox or a browser that doesn't care about Google manifest standards, or the people who see them will be incredibly pissed, leave the instance, and either return to Reddit (or an alternative) or move instances and make a lot of noise toward defed'ing from the ad-ridden instance.

For me, I would rather just run an adblock and an anti-adblock-blocker on a different service than go through the frustration of ads on a non-corp platform.

[–] Steve 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It sounds like you're thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren't ads and it's free?

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 1 day ago

That's basically correct, yes. I don't see the fediverse platform(s) as being "special" compared to others. Sure, there's political and social momentum that keeps people here, especially due to anticorporate causes. People are here because they got ticked about the Reddit API changes, the ads, and the monetization (Reddit Gold, etc).

If any of those things change, people will see that they're not getting the value they were looking for, and will go back.

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