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.
Thanks OP. We have an opportunity to do things differently, and better.
When I signed up on a mastodon instance winter of 22, I moved a couple times, when I settled down, I setup $5/mo to the site.
When I signed up to lemmy.world, I did the same after a week.
No ads! No spying, no coercion, no CEOs whims to extract profit from accumulated past collective work. Sure admins mods etc can become assholes – and we can move.
Wikipedia’s innards can be icky at times, man politics around some pages is infuriating. GUESS WHAT. WE DONT EVEN GET TO DO THAT MUCH on a corporate site. Most Wikipedia.org pages operate just fine. There’s always someone “wrong on the internet” somewhere, we can choose where we put our energies.
Reddit seemed incrementally better than most – up to the Troubles. But I just got lulled by the mostly great people there and the great conversations, but jarred awake, again, by the reminder than in reality, it was just another pump and dump deal. It was just taking longer than my attention span.
Well put. Take my lemmy lemon🍋
are we lemoning now?
Stop trying to make lemoning happen. It’s not going to happen!
It’s gonna be a real lemon party!
Just don’t invite the whores, I hear they steal lemons…
It’s a travesty that this doesn’t have more upvotes
Lemmy Lemon is an amazing concept, plz make real 🙏
what is it?
No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative… It gets the people going!
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.
Edit: woah there, my app was going haywire. I removed the duplicates
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!
I purchased Apollo and also subscribed to Reddit premium as I was a heavy user and wanted to contribute my fair share. Happy to until…of course. Looks like a much better value here - an actual community. Worth my money (like Wiki too!)