Why Mastodon and the fediverse are “doomed to fail”
-> a small rant about how the profit lens distorts our understanding of success vs. failure:
https://write.as/eloquence/why-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-are-doomed-to-fail
@eloquence I think it’s worth remarking: The profit motive is capitalism’s way of telling people what to invest resources in. Ideally it reflects or responds people’s demands (in our case for a quality social network) but in order for this to happen demand must be turned into a profit opportunity, and this is not always possible. On a site like twitter, demands for a social network are met with ads. Here there are donations, but they don’t respond to a profit opportunity.
@eloquence Ad space, paid subscription service, monetization for exposure — Cent does this — these are all ways a microblogging site could translate demand into profit opportunity. But none of that is had here.
@redlaserbm
I don't think it's desirable for distributed social media to pursue profit. I do think it's desirable for them to pursue sustainability -- to pay for developers, UX contributors, community mods, ops folks, etc. at least in small amounts.
Some instances (including the one I'm on) do charge membership fees towards that end. This instance has an annual estimated budget of ~$15K raised via membership, which is tiny compared w/ for-profits, but very sizable in the Mastodon universe.