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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27733087
Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to Bluesky’s GitHub.
You’re targeting the larger sites as they exist, not the concepts and underlying functionality.
If you want social media, no matter if it’s Lemmy or Reddit, it costs a hell of a lot of money to host that. If you wanted social media, even a federated model like Lemmy or Mastodon to actually scale to all the people that are otherwise using other sites like Meta’s, you have to fund it somehow, and those funding models change at scale.
I’m not saying needing money like this is good, but it’s simply objectively difficult to fund any platform, for any purpose, when handling so many users. The only reason Lemmy and other federated platforms are funded so well right now is because they can be done at a hobbyist level, for a hobbyist cost, in most cases.
Once you scale up to the whole world, your funding model simply has to change. Donations can work, but they’re much more difficult to get working than either ads or subscriptions in terms of securing long-term funding at scale.
Seems to be doing fine, if scaled up cost and contributions would even out. IMO you actually proved my point.
The scale of the internet is mainly based on ISP’s and those are paid by users. Sites can be distributed, the technology to do that has existed since the mid 90’s.
These distribution models work fine, and do not have to deal with the added tasks of ads and trackers commercial sites use.
You could pretty easily build a youtube like site around it.
It’s possible, but funding changes at scale.
For example, more people using federated protocols like Mastodon or Lemmy are going to be early adopters that care more about underlying technology and have stronger ideological views about online platforms, compared to, say, your average Facebook mom.
So of course, they’re going to be more likely to donate. Once you scale outside of those groups into groups of people who don’t care as much, and are less invested in the technology, you get less donations.
Sites can work on donation models (again, see Wikipedia) but it’s much more difficult to have such a system stay afloat than one where monetization is much more heavily required, and thus generates more revenue.
It’s not ideal, but it’s also difficult to have such a system work otherwise in many cases.
They use these things because it makes them more money than it costs. If ads and trackers costed more to implement than not having them, then they wouldn’t use them in the first place.
PeerTube exists if you’re interested, by the way.
Certain aspects of sites can be distributed, but others can’t as easily be. For instance, you could have a P2P federated network where every user of, say, Mastodon, helps host and redistribute content from posts, but that’s not how these systems are built right now, and they’d have difficulties with things like maintaining accurate like counts.
It would be ideal if they could be built in a way that removes the need for a central platform in the first place, and can run on general-purpose devices, and thus doesn’t carry costs that require monetization, but because they aren’t built like that, they will eventually need to monetize as they scale up. Unless they change the entire underlying technological model of these federated platforms, they will inevitably need to monetize if they gain enough users outside the (relatively speaking) small bubble of dedicated users that can easily fund a platform through hobby money and donations.
This is true with how things are now, but an ad free internet would look very different, and users would behave differently and have different expectations.
Note that I’m not arguing for a total non commercial Internet, things like subscriptions and Steam are fine, it’s things like Google Meta Twitter and the likes, where the users are actually the product, and the customers are the advertisers.
Yes I know, but youtube makes it irrelevant, because everybody post there.