This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A monthly fee seems idiotic but yes please do it! Please!
That said I think a $5 signup fee on Mastodon or Lemmy that is not refunded if you get banned would seriously help stop bots. They only make pennies per bot and if you make their cost even minimally painful the economics fall apart.
It would also stop most regular users from signing up. This kind of stuff being free has just become the norm.
Even better!
I'm not even willing to use it for free 💀
I'd be willing to use it if I get paid though. 10$/month and I'd even post something once in a while.
For those that are saying "no" because it's Musk: would you be willing to pay to your account on Lemmy, Mastodon, or any other social network that you happen to use?
Let me be specific: I am not asking if you donate or contribute to any server. I am asking if you'd sign up to a social network that required payment from every user as a measure to avoid spammers and to keep the service running.
I effectively pay to use my IRC, XMPP and email, since I rent a VPS. But that payment earns me much more pleasant usage experience (in case of my IRC bouncer) and a lot of cotrol over my servers in case of the latter two. So while paying a subscription feels a bit bad, I think it's worth it.
We can't expect everyone else to self-host. The question is, what would be the most viable solution for a better (ad free, Surveillance Capitalism free) Internet that can work at scale?
Donations. Wikimedia proves that some people will want to donate if they find something useful.
The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.
Donations only "work" if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don't see a penny out of it.
Isn't that the same for Reddit or Lemmy? The content creators and mods don't see a penny either. Operationally, a social network probably requires a lot more compute power and somewhat more bandwidth compared to a site that serves mostly static content. But I don't see why small donations shouldn't cover that. The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.
I wouldn't even join twitter, let alone actually use it, for money. I don't want to sell my soul.
Lol this saga just keeps getting better
