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How are lemmy and other fediverse platforms profitable?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.
What's the general consensus as far as fear for future profiteering? Right now these platforms are great because the are run by people who genuinely care. Do you think there is any risk of this growing so much that federated content reaches the front page of search engines, followed by advertisers wanting space here? Or what about risks like reddit gold which was initially just a fun add on, which then became a "temporary" paid feature, which ended as a full scale scam.
Anyway, I love what we have for now, I just want to know what everyone else is speculating for the future.
Meta, a well-known for-profig company are gearing up to join the Fediverse, reaction is mixed, some server operators seem keen on welcoming them, some cautiously optomistic while others want nothing to do with Meta at all.
In terms of paid features, might be a thing down the line but it will very from server to server. Cool extra statuses (e.g. Wow I'm a gold tier superstar supporter on this instance) likely won't appear on other instances unless they decide to include something in the federation protocol that would display it.