this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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There were a variety of price points, including $1.99 tickets for people who couldn't afford more. General Tickets were 40 bucks, but quite a few people spent more to sponsor the cheap tickets to help out. Only corporate attendees paid $250 per person.
The demos were recorded and uploaded, extensive notes for each breakout session were written, and some of us did live-blogging for the entire day while attending. The general format of an unconference is pretty grassroots, conversational, and informal.
It's the third event of its kind, bringing in a wide variety of people building different parts of the Fediverse, from Trust & Safety to standards bodies to developers and advocates. There's a lot of awesome things happening as people try to grapple with some of the biggest challenges the network has ever had.
Ah so, it is FediForum I was thinking of. @nutomic@lemmy.ml made a comment about not wanting to participate because he had to pay and I wasn't sure if it was this.
It all still feels really iffy. This could've easily been streamed on a streaming platform of choice or just like FOSDEM did during COVID: through matrix. Also, only demo videos were uploaded, not the talks themselves. That just feels like a marketing move: give them a taste so that next time, they'll spend money to get the real thing.
I can understand that there's effort and time required by the organisers to set this all up, but IMO there's a better way that makes this seem less... commercial and FARTSy (forced artificial scarcity). For example make it free for maintainers, stream with a delay for the public (e.g 5 minutes like in esports) and none for participants, let participants join in the live chat, record entire talks, upload the talks to peertube and add donation links.
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Honestly, I think this is an extremely cynical take. It takes a lot of effort to organize and run something like this, and nobody is getting rich off of it. If anything, it's pretty meagre compensation to set off infrastructure and organizational costs.
The talks themselves are also a informed by privacy concerns: some attendees are fine with being directly cited in notes / recorded / talked about, but a lot of people just wanted to be part of conversations and do not want that.
I think some of your suggestions in your last paragraph are actually pretty good, but I also think it's a little unfair to make demands here. No aspect of running this thing is easy, and the whole "why don't they just?" attitude from the sidelines is kind of unsavory when a lot of us went out of our way to pay extra to make sure there were more than enough $1.99 "almost free" tickets.
Like, if that's not good enough for you, I'm pretty sure nothing is.
I just stated an example of what's good enough for me 😐
If you think people's preferences are "demands", that's your issue. I didn't write a blog article and spam the fediverse to try and change how fediforum is run, nor did I look up who the organisers are and tell them "you must make these changes!".
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You have all of the answers. I look forward to the Threadiverse conference you put together