This wasn’t true in the past and we might simply be experiencing a historical anomaly right now

While our exact pacing might be slightly different from the pure extrapolation, human history has been a long, steady increase in the rate of invention. Access to education has meant that more people are making things, and then the next generations build on top of their work to make even bigger things.

Not just this, it’s AH. Not… terrible, but super hype-y from what I’ve seen.

Do you want Reavers? Because this is how you get gorram Reavers.

Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can’t just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren’t resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).

If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.

Unfortunately, the way federation works means that a 100 user instance that never grows past that can still see cost increases from the ecosystem growing. The number of network effects involved in all of this makes planning for meaningful sustainability a lot more difficult.

Federation frustrates that, as well – for cross-instance posts, what’s the split? 50/50? What if one instance is charging $1 per coin, but another is $0.50 per coin, what price becomes paid? How will you even ensure that the split can occur reliably? Heck, how will you handle trying to do that transfer internationally?

I know I’m probably coming across as a downer, but without answering these questions, we don’t have a solution, we just have a patchwork of ideas that people worked on and implemented without every providing anything useful. I want this to succeed, desperately. I’m tired of corporate interests ruining everything – but we can’t succeed at this without figuring out these long-term issues.

Donations are not consistent, that’s the big trouble. Especially after a big exodus, people may move, and they may donate for a while, but those donations will typically drop off eventually, even if they keep using it.

You’re right that people are usually more willing to spend on community projects, and that’s largely true - but watching open-source software as long as I have, I know that donations rarely cover things in the long-term, and most of the projects that are funded well enough to have a team behind them are actually funded by corporations. Heck, even getting one person able to run an instance as a full time gig is going to be difficult without it turning corporate.

That starts running into a few issues. It’s high friction (“You mean I have to enter card details every time I want to do this on someone from a new instance?”) and it has some serious risk of disproportionate impacts.

So… it could work. But that’s not going to be consistent, and the federated nature of things like Lemmy makes for some weird structures. Can you give rewards across instances? What if one instance has “gold” at $1, but another has it at $0.50?

Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs – and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we’re moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn’t have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.

I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn’t sustainable.

Because that dip isn’t due to the blackout. Reddit was pretty hard down for about an hour.

That said, for a federated system, it doesn’t really matter that much since people can just increase the number of instances to help share the load.

This is only partially true. There is a finite number of people willing to run an instance, and increasing the costs associated with a given size of instance means that we need more of them, or that they may not find it worth the time to pay $X per month for hosting when it only fits so many people.

Federation is a beautiful thing, but we have some economic issues we have to reckon with.