Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you’ve been invited into.
It has been said that “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
Right here and now, you’re neither the customer nor the product.
You’re a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You’re using a service that you aren’t being charged for; but that service isn’t part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you’re participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You’ve probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it’s one of the most popular websites in the world, but it’s not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don’t imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They’re not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they’re also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.
This post missed the most important part people should know: someone is footing the bill for you to use this service. If you’re not paying, they will make their money in whatever what they choose. Potential resulting in you becoming the product. Yes, even on lemmy. So if your instance mod needs funding, kick em a few bucks, be their customer.
kick em a few bucks, be their customer.
Better yet, be their partner.
That’s a bit much, I’m not looking to get into a relationship here. /s
What about… comrade?
You’re right, what am I talking about. Updates relationship status: In a Federationship
Yes, and this will foster large instances, similarly to the Mastodon project, which means a concentration of power, which means easy targets for billionaires.
This is similar to presidential regimes: they can be useful temporarily in a “move fast, break things” motto (see France trying to be perceived as a “winner” of the Second World war after having constitutionally given the full powers to the Pétain Marshall, who then decided to collaborate with Nazis) but they’re much easier to corrupt and they make it much easier to say, privatize every public service than a parliamentary one.
You don’t want power concentration or the billionaires will come for you.
To quote the first words of the old Dune movie:
“A beginning is a very delicate time.”
What we should all take responsibility for is the health and quality of the community. We should be more active citizens, instead of the passive “consumers” we’ve all been corporately groomed to be.
I think more instances are the answer because this activity can’t be cheap. maybe Lemmy.world splits off into 2 or 4 instances. Lemmy1.world etc
This dynamic will have to stabilize in costs. I don’t know what that looks like.
One of my favourite things about early days Reddit was it’s growing community of positivity. There was actual encouragement to be nice to each other and subreddits were built around celebrating stuff.
Negativity was downvoted into oblivion so you never saw that stuff on the All page and popular pages.
I’m seeing the same thing with Lemmy right now and hope it continues long into the future. The lack of profiteering should really help with this.
Thanks OP. We have an opportunity to do things differently, and better.
When I signed up on a mastodon instance winter of 22, I moved a couple times, when I settled down, I setup $5/mo to the site.
When I signed up to lemmy.world, I did the same after a week.
No ads! No spying, no coercion, no CEOs whims to extract profit from accumulated past collective work. Sure admins mods etc can become assholes – and we can move.
Wikipedia’s innards can be icky at times, man politics around some pages is infuriating. GUESS WHAT. WE DONT EVEN GET TO DO THAT MUCH on a corporate site. Most Wikipedia.org pages operate just fine. There’s always someone “wrong on the internet” somewhere, we can choose where we put our energies.
Reddit seemed incrementally better than most – up to the Troubles. But I just got lulled by the mostly great people there and the great conversations, but jarred awake, again, by the reminder than in reality, it was just another pump and dump deal. It was just taking longer than my attention span.
It’s like hanging out at a friend’s house. Follow their rules.
I’m actually paying monthly to help with server costs. What am I?
You’re one of the awesome people hosting the site, of course.
Let’s make lemmy the best community in the world without corporate greed!
I’ve been on this earth long enough not to trust the “nothing sketchy going on here, just people giving away stuff for free!” never turns out well.
Here, have a donut. The color of the sprinkles on it is politically relevant.
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