Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you’ve been invited into.
It has been said that “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
Right here and now, you’re neither the customer nor the product.
You’re a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You’re using a service that you aren’t being charged for; but that service isn’t part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you’re participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You’ve probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it’s one of the most popular websites in the world, but it’s not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don’t imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They’re not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they’re also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
I’m starting to work out a concept for funding servers a little differently. Since the Fediverse / Lemmyverse is not just one server admin, but a bunch of them, I want to run an experiment to see if it’s feasible to make a subscriber based, or even activity-based calculation of how to dice up each user’s donation.
It’ll all be just a proof-of-concept at first, maybe it works and it’s legally possible too (biiig if), then it could work something like a FOSS funding system.
It’s just in documentation phase now, figuring out what would be a proper algorithm and such, but if you’re wiling to think along (or talk me out of it), please send a dm.
Can you explain how this would work a bit? I’m not familiar with the concept, but wondering if it means that funding would pool through a single system and be distributed across different instances?
Hello, I made a community for it, /c/lemmyfund, feel free to join there! I’ve written some stuff down on GitHub as well, a link is in the community.
So is the idea that an individual user makes a donation of an amount of their choosing, and the donation goes to instance admins based in some way on which communities they are interacting with?
Hello, so, yeah, that’s the gist of it.
You sign up, and on the cut-off date the system should at first check what instances you’re part of and divvy up the shares, and later on we can dig down and slice up parts in more detail.
I’ve made a community for it, /c/lemmyfund, feel free to join there!