We will need small and independent commercial providers for the Fediverse.

  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Why can’t it rely on donations? People poo-poo this, but I’ve yet to hear a substantive reason as to why.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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      1 year ago

      Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of the moderators, admins and developers.

      • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Is that an apples-to-apples comparison though? To me, that sounds like “Show me a soup kitchen that’s able to pay market rate for chefs”.

        Also, by that logic, Reddit is a failure. They don’t pay mods either.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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          1 year ago

          Ok. Fair enough, moderators usually are also part of the community, so they also have the incentive to keep it going well even if unpaid.

          Yet, the point stands. Remove “moderators” from the previous comment. Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of admins and developers.

            • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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              1 year ago

              That money is to cover everything: servers, designers, developers. Eugen gets maybe 10% of that money. A developer making $3k/month (without any employment benefits) is something completely unthinkable. People can make more money than that by just being able to spell Javascript.

              • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                It’s not unusual for employees of charitable non-profits to earn less than their for-profit counterparts. Again, I refer back to my soup analogy.

                Also, digging around, I found out that patreon is not the only source of fund-raising and that they have received a 50,000 EUR bug bounty grant.

                I don’t mean to imply that Mastodon devs are rolling around in a pool of gold like Scrooge McDuck, but they are getting funded.