this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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The one thing that I am worried about for a decentralized future is incentives.
What keeps a federalized service owner going over the years? Donations alone won't account for server costs, let alone time spent maintaining code or moderating communities.
Most successful open source projects offer enterprise packages to sustain incentivization, or are a subset of a megacorp that releases (off of the top of my head: canonical, hashicorp, apache, mongodb, k8s, chromium, android, redhat) and the list goes on.
Most, if not all, of the donations based or FOSS projects that I have seen over the years lose traction because the hobby wears off for the core maintainers.
It's a fair question, although people kept phpBB boards running for years as hobbyist projects with decent communities on them and moderators are usually volunteers. We don't necessarily want tight-knit communities to scale to Reddit's size anyway and the only thing that's really changed other than Reddit eating the wind out of their sails for those types of self-hosted communities is that search engines are worthless spam-serving tools now so they're less discoverable which the fediverse seems like a decent enough solution to.