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.
Couldn’t agree more, we need to continue to attract the kind of people who would really be able to help grow this kind of community, so if you have friends you think would like this, try talking to them.
Drop a couple bucks into support the admins and servers - think about streaming services you pay for and use less. $5-10/month to donate to a service you are using daily is pretty cheap considering.
Nope. You’re the USER. A concept that is as old as computing and yet has gone completely by the wayside recently with the corporate monopolization of the internet.
Good to see it making a comeback.
“Do awesome things”
BEANS
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.
I’m not a developer of any sort, but I’m super interested if a “folding at home” style option is doable. I can’t front the costs for a whole server for an instance, but I’m totally willing to contribute some resources from my pc to avoid falling into the same reddit trap. If we all did it as users I think that would avoid the centralization problem as well as distribute costs effectively.
Unfortunately, there is no way to distribute the work in that way. the @Home projects worked because it could give your computer a hard problem to work on with little traffic to and from the server.
no, unfortunately, the best way for all of us to contribute in those smallest of ways is to run an instance at home. That way, whatever amount of “thinking” (CPU) thats done by Lemmy server would normally have to do, you can do. Its not a lot of processing (CPU) though (compared to @Home), but its a lot of traffic
