IMO whatever comes next needs to be decentralized from the get go, like a torrent system where the network sort of automatically scales with the user count. The fediverse is pretty cool right now but it's bound to get shitty real soon as people get tired of fronting the costs purely out of goodwill. Either the cost need to be spread around such that the individuals paying it really don't mind, or there needs to be an incentive to pay / way to monetize that is aligned with the common goal of a decentralized social network. Otherwise we'll end up with either a network of insignificant size (arguably what this is now) or a monetized shit hole like what Reddit has become

I keep thinking about how a system like that could work but I'm sure someone smarter than me has already figured out that it can't

Facebook is makikg their own Twitter aoternative apparently based on Mastodon, so at least that instance will be monetized probably.

I think there should be some monetization. Otherwise how will people pay for the server costs. Maybe small ads placed in the platform across the fediverse?

I think if a instance owner decides to try to profit, it can happen. They could let advertisers have an account that promotes products and allow such posts to bypass community rules and disregard vote counts. You could theoretically profit from running a lemmy instance. But now your instance risks defederation and user might start leaving.

Edit: I think the smarter thing could be just asking for more donations than is needed to run the server, and pocket the excess funds. That could go on undetected as long as you falsify your operating costs to make it seem as if more funding is required. I mean I don't know if someone could actually make a living of asking for absurd amounts of donations.

It's definitely possible to see scammy for-profit strategies pop up.

A more likely outcome is Big Tech coming in and fragmenting and dissolving ActivityPub servers like all the Lemmy servers. It will most likely be Big Tech incorporating the big tech websites/servers (Meta, Twitter, etc) into ActivityPub and then creating a closed Big Tech ActivityPub-like system where the artifically popular servers/instances (Meta, Twitter, etc.) migrate from FOSS ActivityPub to a closed for-profit system and essentially close off FOSS Lemmy. And most people wont understand FOSS ActivityPub vs Big Tech ActivityPub-like system thereby rendering OG Lemmy useless.

I prefer the idea of have separation; one whole server(s) for bots, one for for‐profit big tech, etc. Big Tech can play but won't interfere with the heart of the AcivityPub.

But who tf am I?

I think long term someone will come up with something. How hostile the community they arrive to?

Entirely up to how well we remember how it went the last time.

I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Imagine inge a stable commercial service with high quality moderation (hopefully paid for by the operators) but with an option to follow other instances and transfer your data to another instance. That could be pretty good for drawing in people who just want something that works and refuse to leave reddit.

The Fediverse will never be monetized. It's open by nature, instances are maintained by donations and out of the administrator's pocket. Why? Because they have a passion for it.

Even if someone chooses to monetize one instance, people will move to another that isn't monetized. It's free and open by design, and will always be that way.

Most servers already seem to have Patreons or similar donation platforms running, and subscriptions would not surprise me as everyone starts to settle into this thing. It would make a lot of sense to help spread the load and since content wouldn’t be gated behind the subscription, I can’t see why it would be bad.

I think I have similar thoughts on ads. If an instance wants to run ads to support itself, I don’t see an issue as long as those ads aren’t “federated” out and sent to other places.

I think the ability to have all of these different setups, without restricting any access to content, is the beauty of the fediverse. At least as I understand it.

Monero.town has a donation address and while you can prove you are human by linking an existing social media account during signup, you can also do this anonymously by donating a small amount of Monero. So far this model seems sustainable :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Text-only forums aren't super expensive to run unless you are doing it on the scale of reddit (or do stupid expensive things like have video hosting)

Another topic, I've seen people here are super hardline about keeping Facebook out of the Fediverse, and I just don't think that's going to work, Now Lemmy Explain how I think this is all going to go down:

If I were Facebook, I'd pay a bunch of big celebrities, say, a certain very talented Academy Award nominated Australian actress, a lot of money, to use Facebook Threads exclusively for a while, and give them the Checkmark. The most difficult part of getting a new social network started is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting that initial audience, which is the problem that Federation solves. So, although some instances will reject anything Facebook related completely, there will be plenty of instances where the userbase would want to interact with their favorite celebs directly a la Twitter, so there will always be instances that wants to federate with this Facebook instance.

But then, those media companies and talent agencies are going to realize, as they did against Netflix, "Hey, wait a minute, why are we paying these middlemen like Zuck and Musk so much money to host a cheap forum? They don't own the userbase on the Fediverse, so is it just for a Checkmark?", and they are going to start their own instances of Mastodon/Lemmy where everyone on their instances is verified celebs, to be used as these celeb's official account with no shitposting allowed, so they can control everything those celebs posts on their server instead. And THAT would be the downfall of Twitter/Facebook.

So, the best path for Facebook to move forward with is to offer easy cloud hosting of federated social media software for a subscription: Pay them 10 bucks a month, they'll handle all the server and upgrades, and even moderation, which will become the easiest way to setup "your own server", and that will be much more resilient to the anti-Facebook pact that is going on right now, because instead of one Facebook instance, now you may have to block hundreds of different Facebook hosted instances instead.

I'm not really clear on the way the networking works with federated systems.

Say that an instance decided to charge a subscription fee, would they then have to defederate from free instances on a cost basis alone? To handle server load for requests from those instances?

Or, say that subscription was sustainable, would there be anything stopping someone from making a free instance to give users full access to that subscription-based content? The answer there is defederation right?

Trying to work out in my head how this system could be scalable without communities becoming walled gardens and thus removing part of the appeal of federation.