tikitaki

yeah it’s still a sort of new frontier but the patreon model I think really should be the way going forward assuming it’s possible. everybody gets the content for free, but those who can afford to contribute do so. and to be honest, if you live in a 1st world country throwing a couple bucks here and there isn’t that much to ask. for the same price of a lunch at mcdonalds you can give $3 a month for nearly half a year to Wikipedia for example

but it’s not really viable for the internet as a whole right? Hoping for some spare change from a tiny fraction of your visitors

Why not? It works for kbin/lemmy instances. It works for Wikipedia. It works for Lichess.

Sure, some things like video hosting are going to require a lot more bandwidth / server storage so perhaps those need to be subscription based but I think large swathes of the internet could be turned into a donation/subscription model. it just isn’t done that way because it’s less profitable.

look at which video games are the most profitable - it’s always the free ones. fortnite, league of legends, etc.

Users don’t use adblockers because they don’t want to see ads at all; they they use adblockers because getting a usable web experience requires it.

Users don’t block advertisements; they block annoying advertisements. They block trackers. They block malware. They block privacy invasion.

I block advertisements because I don’t want to see any advertisements. They are poison for the mind and I want to eliminate any form of advertisement I can control. Obviously you can’t avoid a lot of it - but I can definitely avoid it in my web browser.

I would prefer a subscription based model or a donation based model. For example Wikipedia or Lichess I’ve donated to because I believe they provide a good service and show no ads. Or for example Kagi which is a search engine that charges a monthly fee.

i think it has little to do with hurricanes

sure, it increases the risk to a certain degree but companies can always just charge more to offset the costs of paying out premiums. the problem is that the state government has certain prohibitive laws in the insurance space meant to more or less subsidize homeowners insurance

it’s not easy to be an insurance company in florida with the high rates of fraud and the state needing to approve all sorts of premium increases

ultimately what i foresee happening in the near future is likely an increase in the state-funded insurance programs. which to be honest, i’m totally OK with. i don’t like insurance companies

although it is ironic if it does go down that route - collectivism in the state that “woke goes to die” as our dear governor delicately put it

excellent post and something I think people aren’t fully considering

there’s an argument that it’s better to know rather than not know. i understand the ideological stand against Meta and everything it stands for, but it’s easy to judge from the outside looking in. we don’t know what he knows

you reduced my comments and favorited your own. lol

look - nobody has given me a concrete mechanism by which they could do damage. neither on here nor on mastodon where I’ve had similar conversations. @thesanewriter was the only one who attempted to give some sort of method - and his was that Meta’s platform could become so popular it steals users. That to me isn’t really unique to the fediverse

I’m not gonna hop over to Meta’s platform just because it’s nice and shiny.

But look at the potential benefits of Meta investing heavily into the fediverse… we’re talking millions and millions of dollars in development. i say milk meta for all they are worth, they’re a failing company anyway, this is a desperate attempt on their part

I understand the concept of embrace extend extinguish

i just don’t see a significant chunk of fediverse user giving up on open source instances and flocking to Meta’s instance. I can’t imagine what kind of features they could add that could accomplish this. Sure, they could make a site that’s more polished but if Meta enters the game, we’re going to be seeing a huge influx of both users and development. open source alternatives will likely be very close in parity

i think when considering this whole situation we need to calculate the potential positives and calculate if it’s worth the risks - and those positives include huge amounts of money and people. this could be enough to push the fediverse to the next level of adoption… the dream of having a decentralized social media system could become the standard in such a future.

ok i’m not saying they won’t but i’ve asked this before and nobody seems to be able to provide some mechanism by which they would destroy it

is the system not federated? if meta starts acting up, can’t everyone just defederate them? this is what i’m not getting

if someone can explain to me what exactly is dangerous, i would appreciate

It doesn’t need to be said that Meta is purely driven by profit - that is any corporation. But Meta is incompetent and failing - yet still a behemoth. If they want to pour millions of dollars into the fediverse, then we don’t we let them? They would presumably just be another site on the fediverse.

I totally support them joining on assuming it doesn’t change the fundamental structure of the system.