we had the centralised model (big corpos hosting all of the stuff) because our devices were shit and internet access was rare and precious. nowadays, with ever-present internet, when my $50 pocket computer has 8 cores and 8 GB RAM, the laptop many times that, let alone the desktop, we should be moving to Pied Piper’s vision of a decentralised internet and dedicate all of our resources to that goal.

I’ve been a part of the fediverse some while now and I admit, I didn’t understand it fully. I operated under the premise that whoever put this thing together and then spent their time and energy promoting it has thought this through and then seeing more and more people jumping on, I took it as validation of that idea.

a few years down the road, I have a better understanding, and I don’t really like it. it’s wasteful and disorganized and I don’t see a way where some order out of this chaos emerges.

I thought it’s a sort of fail-over distribution of content. so if lemmy.bing is offline/gone, you can interact with lemmy.ding or lemmy.bong and access all data and post and comment and whatnot. not so, when ding is gone, it’s gone. its radiated content may be present on other instances, but still there’s a ton of issues that way.

instead, I believe a decentralised and distributed system, with no single point of failure, no admins spending their hard earned cash on maintaining lemmy or mastodon instances or, god forbid, dedicated hardware in the vein of i2p or similar, should be the end goal.

People see social media and other things like e-mail and video content as free services.

They just want to join and get on with their lives. Most “normies” don’t really care about being served ads or being tracked. If you tell them about the surveillance industry behind the scenes they just shrug and keep scrolling their Insta feeds and clicking their youtube videos. Even people who complain about ads seem to be incapable of action if you suggest they install ad-blocker.

The people who understand or care about the problem are the ones who might donate, but not all of them. It’s a subset or an subset.

As Jerry says, the donation economy would not be sustainable if the Fediverse was the size of Facebook. Unfortunately that has more to do with human psyche than actual technical merits of ActivityPub or the Fediverse.

There is a lack of payment options.

This is the most important issue for me. I am happy to send a couple of bucks to a couple of services via bank transfer. It doesn’t cost anything. Paying >3% to paypal or stripe is just nuts. I won’t do that.

Edit: I would send 50 cents to many projects but I’d have to pay huge fees on that, so I don’t.

Yeah, Beehaw doesn’t have anywhere near that MAU, but I cannot fathom how it is costing him $5k a month to run a few instances, a few of which have many less MAU.