I’m a FOSS (free and open source software) contributor and enthusiast. So I prefer to use such products (Lemmy instead of Reddit, Linux instead of Windows, Firefox instead of Chrome, Signal instead of WhatsApp, you get the idea). Was just thinking that if everyone moved to such solutions, the tech and ad industry would lose billions of dollars. That would translate to governments losing billions of dollars in tax revenue. Would such a move ever be encouraged then by the governments?
Just because software is Free as in libre doesn’t mean it’s free as in beer. Running those services costs huge amount of money. Running enough instances of lemmy to replace reddit would cost collectively much more than the one optimized centralized service. So I guess that would translate to governments making billions of dollars in tax revenue.
If that is the case then how is Lemmy/the Fediverse going to be financially sustainable in the long run?
Donations, people always give Wikipedia as an example. You need to chip in every now and then. Wouldn’t that be better than “free” but your every click, scroll and interaction being tracked and you having an advertising profile being built in the background?
Smaller communities taking care and paying for themselves and just using federation to talk to everyone else. But yeah, I don’t think anyone has a really good answer for that yet. Everyone is against advertisement here and any other way of financing other than donations. Donations work well as long as the admins have fun with their work and are willing to do it for free.
What are the chances that the instance owners join together and buid a cartel or corporation. Then sells our data.
Fairly little right now, right now nobody cares about lemmy. They don’t need to sell your data because all the data on the fediverse, especially /kbin and lemmy is available for free via the API to everyone to take. Nobody would pay for it.
Besides the unsettling idea that we are like a message board in public display. It’s good to know that our data are somewhat immune to being monetized. .
We are never immune to being monetized. I guarantee right now there are MBA chucklefucks who’s jobs are hinging on finding a way to monetize the fediverse, and then implement it. Meta is working on the right now. The question is how do we defend our spaces from corporate bullshit.
Infra cost isn’t as high. A company reaping a billion in profit yearly would be spending around 10-20M only on infra (my previous company had 100M users and this is the estimate from that). So a nonprofit would just seek funds for infra and dev cost. Of course, it all depends on the kind of platform. But how about people embracing FOSS? Switching to Linux from Windows, to LibreOffice from O365, to GrapheneOS/LineageOS from Android, to Firefox from Chrome, that sort of thing. It’d be a drastic blow to the revenue of these companies. What people used to pay for earlier, they’d not be paying anymore. Maybe this would translate to other things like the cost of laptops and mobile phones rising because manufacturers will no longer be incentivised from software companies.