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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Technology
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In my opinion, we're reaching a moment where people are realizing that having lots of users doesn't matter that much if you can't monetize them. We took a lot of services for granted that maybe don't make any financial sense, which probably only survived because both the company and investors hoped that as long you could attract users, you could monetize them later.
I think that "later" is now.
Today I noticed that youtube has a new feature that unlocks more bitrate, but only for premium users (there's two 1080p options, one normal and another with more bitrate). I'm expecting that these social medias and other tech companies will try to monetize us further
Yeah exactly. I think what we need is decentralization and a move back to smaller hobbyist message boards - the costs of running such communities is more sustainable for individual owners and they are not so big that their owners would look to sell them out.
That's certainly my hope for the federated model. Scope and scale have been issues since the advent of social media, which encouraged users to centralize all of their interactions in one spot. One hundred people shooting the shit on a specific interest will always be a better experience than orders of magnitude more people who know nothing of the context spouting off to feel good about themselves.
I found the quality of my Reddit interactions had gone so far downhill that I took a month off to start the year. I'd gotten sucked into the belief that upvotes == quality of what I was writing, which creates perverse motivations completely unrelated to being more informed about the world.
I mean upvotes are related to how old a post is.
Anyways I don't expect places like Lemmy to fix the ills of social media - eventually running something like this will cost their owners too much money and something will have to give. Also moderation has always been an issue, even with the message boards of old.
Agreed on the last point. That's part of what I was alluding to in terms of scope and scale. The smaller communities from early internet days (my experience overlaps with the time of BBSs but never included them) were pretty light on moderation. If you were a dick on IRC, you got booted. If you spouted off about politics in places that weren't about politics on phpBB, you were ignored then booted. These days, that sort of dynamic has moved to Discord, with people expecting that they should be able to say whatever they want, wherever they want everywhere else.
But I feel you're begging the question on funding. The ownership and profit model is the problem. User subscriptions can solve that funding issue in a vacuum; reality tends to be a bit messier, but I'm hoping we'll find that it works.
Well on the Lemmy subreddit, some people are already complaining about moderation issues here, and how you can't block federated servers you don't want to see individually - that is up to the federated server itself. Honestly, while Lemmy seems cool, I can see issues arising as it scales, especially with regards to moderation.
Beehaw seems to be fine, but some users have explained that they take issue with Lemmy.ml's moderation - chiefly from the main developer who created this platform to begin with. And that's troubling too. For example, on Lemmy.ml, any talk about Russia or China (or anything similar) is banned. You can't safely talk about the war in Ukraine here without getting banned from the main federated server.
I'm versed in ActivityPub to the extent the Twitter imbroglio landed Mastodon on Ars and Techdirt, so ... not very well. But wouldn't someone who really wants control over which instances they see be able to spin up one of their own and then just not let people join?