I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it’s a matter of time before it’s enshittified.
I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there’s a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than “big tech” and get more done than just donation based development.
It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?
What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?
I mean we’ve determined what a living wage is, right? Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?
There are plenty of jobs similar to the roles that would be needed that we can compare to you. I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly. It’s not rocket science.
I also don’t think mods have to be paid. They can be, but I don’t see it as necessary. I’m talking about the instance maintainers.
…have we?
Yes. It just hasn’t been properly implemented nation wide in the US. We’ve studied it to death and know what we need.
What does “implemented” mean?
If you’re going to waste my time with bullshit bait I’ll waste your time with lazy answers.
If you have a point to make just make it. Stop this ridiculous song and dance.
Buddy theres no song and dance unless it’s the one you’re doing where you’re refusing to answer basic questions about things you’ve said.
Dude my point is simple. The concept of a living wage is well established and defined. Including how it can be calculated. There are countless studies and reports and estimates to the point where we could easily establish it as a minimum wage at the very least at the municipal and state levels depending on income needs to “live.”
This is not complicated. It’s a decades old, well established concept. Unfortunately it has not been implemented in to law in the US in any meaningful way beyond a handful of cities and states. I don’t Know if you were just playing dense or truly do not understand the concept, but there you go. Use fucking Google I don’t care. I don’t need to defend the existence of this concept and how thoroughly researched and thought out it already is.
Are you going to actually respond substantively or are you going to keep up your lame song and dance? Make your fucking point. What are you trying to say?
I don’t know why you’re treating me like a piece of shit for nothing more than trying to understand more about the words you wrote but I suppose I’ll stop doing that.
Cue the pearl clutching and jaqassery.
You open with a sarcastic comment, ask me what the meaning of the word “implemented” is, and then act like you’ve just been sweet and asking innocent questions? You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little incredulous.
In a centrally-planned system? Yes, it is very hard.
I assume you mean that you had to give a quote to a client?
If that is the case, your client has sole decision-making power and has “only” to evaluate whether the price you were asking for your labor is lower than the value you’d be bringing them.
How does this compare with a coop, where (presumably) the member-owners have all to agree on the price of labor? Are they going to accept to pay market rate for the people working there? Are they first find whoever is willing to work for the cheapest and then set the price on that?
Dude you’re acting like this is some Herculean feat when coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations. This is a very strange hill to die on.
The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.
IOW, I’m not arguing that “coops” can not exist. What I am arguing is we will never get rid of Big Tech if we keep forcing the idea that only community-owned services are acceptable models of governance.
When it comes to hosting instances, yes, I do believe we have to universally keep investors/a for-profit structure out.
Putting these two in the same bag is a mistake, this is what OP and I are saying.
Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend “on profit”, the methods they use and incentives that drive them are wildly different.
That’s a ridiculous statement. Context is just a malleable term you can use for whatever. Nobody is saying context is irrelevant, you can’t remove context from any statement.
Scale however does not matter.
Of course the scale of the business matters. If scale doesn’t matter, a bunch of farmers selling their produce at a local market would be bad for their local community as Walmart.
You’re making a lot of inferences that allow you to be as myopic or broad as you want. You do not have a consistent view that has been laid out here. You’re just speaking in grand terms that are easy to defend no matter what. I didn’t say “local farmers at the farmers’ market” are the same as corporations, I’m saying scale is irrelevant because profit motive corrupts other values. You’re falling into the same hand wavy bullshit that people who go “but small businesses” fall into, as if those businesses aren’t exploiting people just as frequently as large corporations
Make an actual point.