At a meta level, something I find mildly interesting is how many people are writing stuff on Mastodon about how it's impossible for Mastodon to scale up without using an ad supported model (b/c server costs), it's better to have ranked feeds because most people want them, etc.

The thing I think is interesting is that the people writing this stuff, implicitly, seemingly cannot conceive of a model where the organization is not growth and profit maximizing.

If I look at my own site, I make $30k/yr off donations and could easily do 10x that with big ads, but I don't currently need the money enough to put ads up.

Likewise, if you do the math on how much it costs to run a Masto server, even if the fediverse gets way bigger and hosting costs go up, you should be able to run a small instance on donations.

Donations aren't profit maximizing compared to have ranked feeds with ads, but it's ok for there to be things that aren't profit maximizing.

It's so obvious that it's ok for things to not be profit maximizing that it's sort of absurd to think that someone would think that someone would say that things must be profit maximizing, and I think that if you asked the people writing the comments I'm referring to, they'd agree in the abstract that it's ok to not maximize profit.

This is the really insidious thing about absorbing values from the environment around you.

As absurd as it seems, a lot of people who've spent a bunch of time in tech really can't imagine what it looks like for something to not be profit maximizing and not switch to an ad supported engagement-boosting feed.

I've been on the lookout for this kind of implicit, general accidental, shift of values (corruption?) ever since I noticed this happened to law students back when I was in school.

As a group, incoming law students and 3Ls have very different goals and values.

@danluu also that they don't seem to understand how little the cost of a lot of the server part of the infrastructure has gotten to be over time. A single modern box can do amazing things and be acquired relatively cheaply...

Ads are a tool to make money / sales by raising awareness and getting people in a funnel/path to monetize with the real "product". Communities have events, fundraisers, ... All of that can exist in a non-centralized infra without as much of a cut taken off the top...