- Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
- Support the hosts with our own funds.
- Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let’s own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
One of my biggest concerns about Lemmy is the seeming inability to prevent astroturfing by various groups. I also wonder how it will survive when (not if) they receive GDPR fines, legal holds from law enforcement organizations, and a variety of other legal and regulatory topics that Lemmy (or at least the instance owner) is subject to even if the user base doesn’t believe that to be the case.
Hopefully the donation model will allow enough funding to address the realities of running a popular service.
Someone else mentioned a problem with the donation model, which is that large popular instances will likely have an overabundance of funding while less popular ones won’t and will eventually shut down.
Over time this pushes towards a small number of large instances, defeating the purpose of federated social media.
A foundation that distributes funding across a sector of instances may help, but comes with it’s own problems 🤔
Does GDPR apply to non-commercial web services?