My point is that the cost and revenues are not a function of each other as much as they're both a function of usage. Once you get a high volume of users, it's pretty natural to convert at least a small part of that to advertising revenue, even if doesn't fit well to your platform (cf. Twitter). It takes a principled decision not to dip into that revenue source -- I remember once reading how Jason Calacanis was pissed at Jimmy Wales for not wanting to include ads on Wikipedia.
Majority of that complexity is not there to make user experience better. I actively use both platforms, and I find that Mastodon provides a better user experience in pretty much every way. The UI is snappier, it has better features for interacting with others, it doesn't restrict the API, and so on.
The main cost of Twitter comes from building tools to monetize and exploit the users of the platform.
Which is precisely my point. Or at least one half of it.
Surely there must be a middle ground between an app that people enjoy using being worth $570B and employing 25,000 experts to tweak it slightly, and being worth less than nothing after server costs.
I agree with you that should a decentralized social media app take off, it’s likely to be less profitable, but I dont think that necessarily means that no-one wants to work on it, that no-one wants to use it, or that it won’t exist.
Just yesterday a Google spokesmodel talked about “balancing user privacy against business needs”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_pri...
But making profits is not a human right!
This is not a contradiction. When you post, you can choose, what informations get out. You have control. (in theory)
When you get spied on, you can't choose. In other words, yes the whole world may see pictures of me and my friends (even though I don't post on those services), but I still don't share my bedroom insights nor pillow talk.
Yeah, tanks hows about I get to see the tunes that I liked myself and make those judgements. Never pressed the "love" button again.
I presume this is what you're getting at. That these companies get to harvest my data and make insights about me that I don't get to make myself.
Hosting is incredibly cheap nowadays, and the whole point behind decentralization is that no single server has to host all the users. You can run a Digital Ocean server for 5 bucks a month and host your own community. Meanwhile, containarization makes it much simpler to deploy and keep complex apps up to date.
Other decentralized services such as PeerTube are also popping up, and all these services are able to talk to one another via an open protocol called ActivityPub.
You might be wondering how people are supposed to make money off this and the answer is that they aren't. We don't need walled gardens and megacorps mining our data in order to talk to one another.
DRM for user data: you have a stock of data about yourself and everytime someone want to access it they have to ask for permission using the DRM you have put in.
ShopIn is working to decentralize buying personas and put users in the drivers seat of how companies can use that data.
It’ll be interesting to see how it works.
Because our personal data is incorporated into a highly networked system (the various ad platforms), is worth much more than if it isolated, or “decentralized.”
Unless a new system, that allows individuals more fine grained control over how their data is designed to aggregate with mass numbers of other users’ data, this personal data will have a marginal value approaching zero.
This implies that other means of financing the vast client-server system,that is increasingly dominant in the first and second world societies, will have to be found.
It will also require pretty restrictive regulation to prevent companies from simply proceeding as they are, aggregating mass quantities of user data, from which they profit.
While awareness of the problems, potential and real, is slowly dawning amongst the “civilian” population, it is a confused and ill- informed type of concern.
I’m thinking of friends who get upset at learning the government is spying on everyone, who simultaneously post countless intimate details of their lives on Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)