I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it’s a matter of time before it’s enshittified.
I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there’s a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than “big tech” and get more done than just donation based development.
It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?
What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?
Non-profits only IMO. Pay folks what they deserve, all the rest goes back in.
Investors can’t go near it. They’re always the problem.
You could do a for profit without investors. Any profit goes back to employees and paying users. Make it the operating agreement from the get go and no one could come in.
Non profit in many places means you can’t sell a service. So you rely on donations. Which means you’re constantly asking for donations.
I think there’s a difference in definitions, as well as difference between non-profit/not-for-profit and charities. As far as I know what your described is a non-profit and a non-profit can sell services.
Leadership changes. Employees change.
Look at valve: when Gabe dies it could become an absolute shitshow for us. We cannot depend on generosity and benevolence. It has to be a non-profit to limit the potential damage and force transparency.
Yeah I regret commiting to a pc steam library, its just as bad as going console
FIFA is a non-profit. Doesn’t exactly make them a good organisation.
Didn’t say being a mom-profit makes it good
Even non-profits aren’t immune to hostile takeovers. OpenAI is a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit, and that hasn’t stopped them from turning into something indistinguishable from a regular for-profit company. They’ve also been making noise about abandoning the fig leaf of the non-profit.
Mozilla is another one where nominally they’re a for-profit controlled by a non-profit, but they’re now getting into shoving ads in your face just like any other company.
It is harder to turn bad when you’re a non-profit but not impossible, without something of a poison pill that makes it unacceptable to for-profit takeovers.
Didn’t say they were immune.
Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.
I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.
To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on…
Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.
Yeah but Valve is centralized ownership still. One guy has majority and that makes a difference. A coop could be customer led from get go. 51% customers 49% employees or something like that.
The point being if you structure it as for profit you can charge for things and build a good product. You can make rules that says 100% of the profits have to be redistributed and no one can change that. It’s how many farm co-ops work.