Kevin RussellMastodon isnt just a life-raft, mastodon is how we win.
The next big thing is not corporate apps. Not corporate anything.
We arent running away from elon, we're replacing him.
seeteegee@kevinrns great, so what’s the funding model and plan to get billions of people on here? Also, how to deal with all the sociological and legal issues at that scale? Who’s going to work out the deal with Twitter that allows us to use one app that works with both systems during the transition period?
Brendan Jones@seeteegee @kevinrns the funding model is simple, you pay to be on your instance. It doesn’t even cost much - fosstodon has I believe 50K+ people on it and monthly costs are currently $2110 (source: https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/ ). Even if only 10K of those people pay, it’s 20c per person. That doesn’t pay the admins or moderators, but charge $2/month and their wages are covered. These are not unreasonable fees to ask people to pay.
@Brendanjones @kevinrns I'm not sure if this funding model is sustainable over the long term.
At what point do the admins decide that they need money to pay their rent/mortgage while dealing with all of the social issues on social media? Not to mention the possibility of large legal costs and costs associated with law enforcement compliance.
Besides, how does this money get spent strategically to position Mastodon as the Twitter alternative? I'm thinking advertising, outreach, marketing, deal making with other companies.
@kevinrns @seeteegee
> At what point do the admins decide that they need money to pay their rent/mortgage
That’s the entire point of paying them?
> Not to mention the possibility of large legal costs and costs associated with law enforcement compliance.
I don’t know enough about this to meaningfully discuss it. Someone else welcome to jump in.
@Brendanjones @kevinrns For example, Canada has laws regarding what we consider hate speech. RCMP will from time to time require compliance from server ops. There’s also issues associated with copyright and defamation.
So, are instance admins getting competitive compensation, benefits, etc.? Or is it just “gig work” where if they get sick and/or tired there’s another greater fool to step in? What happens when that ends and my instance goes dark?
Freedom based Democracies change, the nice part about democracies changing is freedom based democracy.
There is no arguing or remedy when microsoft cancels
MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger (1999-2012)
for example. But Mastodon is free software. Anyone can set up, you can set up an instance.
No more
@kevinrns @Brendanjones if there’s a viable funding model then somebody might buy one of those services knowing that they are able to keep things running, pay people to maintain it. What I’m concerned about here on Mastodon is whether there are actual viable funding models that don’t rely on people’s good will alone as fleeting as that will be. So, no, over the long term running a Mastodon is not actually easy for anyone to make it an enduring system at scale.