That was a great read. ICQ…man that takes me back. How do we let someone make money off the Fidiverse, without giving them any control? I’m new here but I am excited about the possibilities. Internet the way it was supposed to be. Still, it will never be the platform I want, without some investment. Who’s going to invest? Will it be an open, crowd-souce volunteer system? Will that ever make it good enough?
And this right here is the disease’s expression: “How do we make money off of …”
Get out of the capitalist “your bank balance is your worth” mindset and just … you know … enjoy something for enjoyment’s sake without looking for some way to grift.
Money is the way society allocates resources. All this content is going to need resources. Server hosting, data storage, software development. I’ve already seen some server andmins begin to ask for donations to keep it all running. Is that how we’re going to run this? Is it going to be like Wikipedia, begging for money all the time? Maybe it’ll be like NPR and every server will have quarterly membership drives. I’m down for a lemmy.world totebag. But you can’t enjoy something and then just expect somebody else to pick up the tab. At least not all the time.
You are conflating “making money off of” and “paying for”. The mindset is very different.
“How do I pay for my home?” vs. “How do I make money off of my home?” if you want a really stark version of the contrast.
Yes, there are expenses involved in running a fediverse instance of any kind. No, the person providing it shouldn’t be forced to foot the bill alone (or at all, if possible!). But there is a huge gulf between “let’s get the money to pay for this” and “let’s use this to make money”. And if you can’t see the difference between them? Sorry to inform you that you’ve been diagnosed with terminal, late-stage capitalism.
I would totally let them federate and then blanket ban them all. Seriously, don’t even let their content sync on instances like world (not worth hosting costs). This way the fediverse gets to consider all Facebook users as part of its own user count and I don’t have to see their garbage. We can have our cake and eat it.
That’s not good. The beef we have is with Meta, not the people. Federating with Meta only allows it to suck Fedi’s users data more effectively, while blanket banning everyone just sends a message that Fedi users are elitist dicks. It’s exactly backwards.
“The beef we have is with the Nazis, not the people giving the Nazis money and raising the Nazis’ profile.”
I do have a beef with people using services that are literally tearing society apart from within. I guarantee you that any Mastodon/Pixelfed/Lemmy/whatever instance I use that doesn’t defederate any and all Meta connections will have at least one less user to worry about in their stats.
You know that old chain email about comparing someone to Hitler to instantly win an argument, as an internet cheat code, that was just a joke, right? It doesn’t really work that way.
I’m not saying Meta are Nazis. I’m saying the position vis a vis Meta and Meta’s enablers is very much the same as how you’d have to deal with Nazis and Nazi enablers: excision.
I’m sure a lot of people using Meta are very nice, decent, ordinary people. But they’re still keeping an organization that is literally tearing society apart from within alive and thriving. There’s no way to support them without also supporting Meta, and thus aiding and abetting Meta’s abuse of society.
I do have a beef with them. A large one. Large enough that I excised them from my digital world almost a decade ago and have not looked back. If you’re comfortable engaging with people who blithely give support to those who work hard to destroy the social order … well, you be you, Boo. You be you.
To be clear, I’m all for not federating with Meta, because of what a toxic company it is. Most people have escaped from Twitter or Reddit, how can there be a debate to allow Facebook in? Crazy talk.
I was reacting to the comment saying to allow Meta but ban all the users, which I’m saying is exactly backwards. Any normal user of Meta products should be welcome in the Fediverse. You can’t just say that a billion of people are evil because they use a product for some reason. Stupid maybe, but also may be forced to, and mostly just don’t know any better. Was I evil when I was using Reddit?
It’s the dystopian corpos that have no place here whatsoever.
I’m not saying the users of Meta are evil. I’m saying they’re supporting Meta and thus their presence is as unwelcome as Meta. They can leave it any time they like and I’ll welcome them with open arms, but anybody on a Meta-based instance is simply insta-blocked.