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A reminder in the age of the Fediverse: if you're not the customer, you're still the product.
(slrpnk.net)
OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
I agree donating to instances and to things you believe in is a good idea.
But declaring that paying for things means they aren't going to be controlled by shitty corporations is just ignoring every other aspect of the global economy.
I don't know that I agree. Paying to support a site that supports your community isn't sufficient, by itself, to protect you from enshittification. But it's a necessary first step. Because sure as hell a website run by a for profit corp, that doesn't charge you to use it, is making its money off you. And if you want to lessen the percentage of your life directly controlled by corporations you need to get away from corporate social media.
I'm excited by looking at Lemmy instances over the past few months and seeing how many of them are openly and transparently discussing finances with their communities - this is how much running the instance costs, this is how much the community has given us, this is who makes decisions about our site and this is how we make decisions, these are our future goals and plans for the future, etc, etc. Sure they have to work with Amazon Web Hosting etc in order to function at all but making decisions that actually put users first and being transparent in both finances and decision making is a huge improvement from the FaceTwitTokGram monolith.
I pay $10/mo for Kagi search. If they stop satisfying what I want from them, or they start misbehaving, I'll cancel it.