Created this account so I could create the community. Decided on lemm.ee because my main account is on aussie.zone, which does not allow community creation (and limits its communities to things about Australia). Figured lemm.ee is better than lemmy.world due to the latter’s performance/federation issues.

[email protected]

  • @[email protected]English
    1•3 months ago

    I don’t mind the suspicion, but I think it is beyond silly.

    I’m one self-funded developer who is stubborn enough to run this at a loss for almost 5 years now, and my greatest ambition here would be to maybe get 10-15k customers to pay me $30/year to be able to live with minimal comfort, provide for my family and hopefully contribute back to open source and the open web. Yet people want to paint me as some mastermind behind some huge corporation burning money around from investors and looking for a way to exploit users.

    I’m honestly tired of this crab mentality. People think it’s a sin to be upfront about their work and how much they value their time. It’s also quite ironic that I can see the huge overlap: those who are always virtue signaling and complaining about bosses who don’t pay enough to their employees are the same ones who refuse to patronize a small independent business, but go look at the phones in their hands and there is an 80% chance they will be holding a shiny new iPhone.

    • Blaze (he/him)English
      1•2 months ago

      there is an 80% chance they will be holding a shiny new iPhone.

      Really not sure about this on Lemmy.

      live with minimal comfort, provide for my family

      Are you unhappy with your current job? It feels like all admins are doing this as a hobby, and none of them plan to make money out of it

      • @[email protected]English
        1•2 months ago

        What current job?

        I started Communick as a side-project in the end of 2019, but in July of last year I lost my job and decided to make this really work.

        • Blaze (he/him)English
          1•2 months ago

          Now I get more why you are pushing so hard to make it profitable.

          Have you considered finding another job in the meantime? The Fediverse isn’t going to be profitable any time soon

          • @[email protected]English
            1•2 months ago

            Have you considered finding another job in the meantime?

            What makes you think I am not looking?

                • Blaze (he/him)English
                  1•2 months ago

                  Because the chances of this actually happening are quite slim.

                  It would be nice the Fediverse became profitable, and if Communick could become your main source of income, but from every signal we can see, it is not going to happen anytime soon.

                  10-15k customers to pay me $30/year

                  That’s like a third of the current Lemmy userbase, who would be using exclusively your instances. Probably not realistic in the near future.

                  • @[email protected]English
                    1•2 months ago

                    This is not just over the Lemmy userbase.

                    • It’s the million+ people using Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc.
                    • It’s the million+ people that still pay for Reddit Gold, and could be paying a fraction of that and still have a good experience on the Fediverse.
                    • It’s the millions of people that were on Twitter and now are (likely) going to end up on Bluesky
                    • It’s the millions of people that pay $10/month for Spotify but could be well served by a Funkwhale instance
                    • It’s every writer that is on Substack but could be making a living with subscription-based access like https://sub.club or the payment gateway features from https://mitra.social

                    When I am dreaming of 10-15k users, I am looking at all the potential userbase, not the existing one.

                    Honestly, what bothers me a bit is you saying “It would be nice the Fediverse became profitable”, but from all our interactions you seem to only support efforts that do not require any material (i.e, financial contribution) from you, and you have been purposefully avoiding contributing to the topic-based instances that I have set up.

                    I’ll tell you one thing, I am thinking about giving away all the topic-based instances to the collective behind feddit.org. If I do that, would you move away your communities there?