I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
Text-only forums aren’t super expensive to run unless you are doing it on the scale of reddit (or do stupid expensive things like have video hosting)
Another topic, I’ve seen people here are super hardline about keeping Facebook out of the Fediverse, and I just don’t think that’s going to work, Now Lemmy Explain how I think this is all going to go down:
If I were Facebook, I’d pay a bunch of big celebrities, say, a certain very talented Academy Award nominated Australian actress, a lot of money, to use Facebook Threads exclusively for a while, and give them the Checkmark. The most difficult part of getting a new social network started is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting that initial audience, which is the problem that Federation solves. So, although some instances will reject anything Facebook related completely, there will be plenty of instances where the userbase would want to interact with their favorite celebs directly a la Twitter, so there will always be instances that wants to federate with this Facebook instance.
But then, those media companies and talent agencies are going to realize, as they did against Netflix, “Hey, wait a minute, why are we paying these middlemen like Zuck and Musk so much money to host a cheap forum? They don’t own the userbase on the Fediverse, so is it just for a Checkmark?”, and they are going to start their own instances of Mastodon/Lemmy where everyone on their instances is verified celebs, to be used as these celeb’s official account with no shitposting allowed, so they can control everything those celebs posts on their server instead. And THAT would be the downfall of Twitter/Facebook.
So, the best path for Facebook to move forward with is to offer easy cloud hosting of federated social media software for a subscription: Pay them 10 bucks a month, they’ll handle all the server and upgrades, and even moderation, which will become the easiest way to setup “your own server”, and that will be much more resilient to the anti-Facebook pact that is going on right now, because instead of one Facebook instance, now you may have to block hundreds of different Facebook hosted instances instead.
That’s super interesting and unfortunately would work well with the classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook
Which is why I’m expecting it to be their playbook if federated social media ever takes off. But there really isn’t a solution I can think of for that.