Re:Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
by mym1990 on Friday March 10, 2023 @02:48PM
(#35099871)
The ad experience will come, because that's really the best option for a lot of platforms to monetize...and no one is running a charity. By that point a lot of users have been locked in and essentially just going with it.
Re:Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network
by gwd on Friday March 10, 2023 @05:11PM
(#35101915)
Loads of organizations have been running core infrastructure from donations for decades now. If you don't need to write new code, and don't have a pressure to actually turn a profit, and have people with enough investment in the community to donate time doing moderation / sysadmin tasks, then it should be easy to get enough donations to keep a server up and running.
In any case, one of the core functionalities of most federated software is the ability to migrate your profile somewhere else.
I went off FB for a year or two, only to come back on when the pandemic started. I definitely missed the connections and conversations I had with family and friends across the world while I was gone. If I could have that without feeling like I was contributing to all the shenanigans, I would do it.
For work I created a Mastodon account, and so far it seems very nice. There are lots of cool people posting interesting stuff, and no ads. Unfortunately I'm not interested in the "public-only microblog" experience for my personal life, and fine-graned access control in a federated system is a tricky problem; and my experience with the systems that are attempting to address that issue haven't been very positive.