this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology
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It's a valid point. We can't expect to be free of corporations and also expect people to maintain servers for free. Running a service costs someone somewhere, and running a massive service can't easily work relying on just donations. I'd be happy to pay a small monthly/yearly fee to a nonprofit to guarantee an independent server, rather than to be a product to be traded.
Why can't it rely on donations? People poo-poo this, but I've yet to hear a substantive reason as to why.
Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of the moderators, admins and developers.
Is that an apples-to-apples comparison though? To me, that sounds like "Show me a soup kitchen that's able to pay market rate for chefs".
Also, by that logic, Reddit is a failure. They don't pay mods either.
Ok. Fair enough, moderators usually are also part of the community, so they also have the incentive to keep it going well even if unpaid.
Yet, the point stands. Remove "moderators" from the previous comment. Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of admins and developers.
Why aren't admins considered part of the community? When it comes to the mastodon developers, they're making 30,000 USD a month. I think they're fine.
That money is to cover everything: servers, designers, developers. Eugen gets maybe 10% of that money. A developer making $3k/month (without any employment benefits) is something completely unthinkable. People can make more money than that by just being able to spell Javascript.
It's not unusual for employees of charitable non-profits to earn less than their for-profit counterparts. Again, I refer back to my soup analogy.
Also, digging around, I found out that patreon is not the only source of fund-raising and that they have received a 50,000 EUR bug bounty grant.
Exactly. Non profit. I don't recall seeing that in this article. I don't think it matters what the business model is. If your social media is a for profit company their interests aren't the same interests as the user.