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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Technology
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There's no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there's not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there's a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.
I honestly think the only way this could work is like email. So you either take the gmail like privacy destruction and ads, or you pay for a service. Back in the day it was bundled by the ISP, but now I think it's way more likely to end up being some bundled 'online service' company that for a monthly fee provided a swath of federated content and services. But that it hasn't sprung up implies that it's not a workable model.
I mean the mods and admins won't all go away at once, right? It's probably gonna be gradual, so maybe the existing mods can keep any new/replacing mods in check? I dunno...
Plus, do you think maybe a donation model could be viable for platforms like this? It's split over multiple instances so surely at least the smaller ones could be ran off of donation money?
Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they'll keep going even if things aren't great, but they'll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there's a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we'll have that sort of trajectory.
As for donations, it's just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?