this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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The real cost of enshittification is that they make it impossible for others to run honest business.
Who will pay a subscription for privacy respecting services when there are a dozen free alternatives. True cost of running online business has been completely hidden from users and for so long that they will never accept those that want to cover the costs upfront.
e.g. how many of you remain on Lemmy if instance owners asked for a monthly fee to cover their server costs?
I'd do it.
That's the neoliberal secret -- you have to play the game, no matter how immoral the rules.
Well, not entirely. We can move out to the wilderness and live off the land with very minimal interaction with civilization. We don’t because iPhones and medicine are too good to give up.
No, we can’t.
There’s eight billion of us which is way higher then the earth’s natural carrying capacity.
In maybe a hundred years we’ll have a frontier again.
which is how much, and according to what source?
For us all to live as hunter gatherers?
Much less then eight billion.
Besides that I’m not playing this game so you can do your own research on the subject.
Have a nice day or night!
At least in feddit (main German instance) there were a lot of posts offering up financial support, but it was declined because it was not needed.
I think especially the smaller communities wouldn't have a problem coming with funds for hosting. Donations for lemmy developers have also increased significantly since the main exodus.
I get your scepticism, but I think the lemmy community for the most part wants this thing to "succeed" and is willing to chip in a reasonable amount.
Kind of surprised (and a bit disappointed) you didn't get more replies saying "I already pay". Which does admittedly support your point!
p.s. I already pay.
If they are 100% transparent in regard to where the money goes, I'm in. The problem with something like youtube premium is not that it's unaffordable to the majority of users. It's that at this point you have to assume that they don't need the subscription fee to cover their costs, but to shove that money up some CEOs or shareholders asses. Yeah that's not gonna happen unless they force me to and even then I'd think twice about if I really need that service.
Depends honestly but there’s a fee I’d be willing to pay to support if there was ongoing development and efforts for things user privacy and responsible moderation.
A few but nowhere near enough. I do pay a few “optional” subscriptions to support good services but not many
I used to donate to BBSes, and my BBS ran on donations, so that's how I'd approach the issue.
I run my own Lemmy instance, I already pay $23.00 a month just to be here.
I'd pay if the price was reasonable.
Would you pay $10/m for a search engine?
$10 per month? Probably not.
$5 maybe as long as the search results are good and accurate.
Yeah, and it also happens to get me access to the tool that was able to summarize this video without watching it.
But most people would probably choose the $5 tier, I think.
I was thinking about using Kagi myself, but it's more expensive than my site hosting, mail and 1 TiB storage Nextcloud instance combined. It's hard to justify that cost if the alternative is free and works fine enough most of the time.
How much of your time does $10 buy? Surely the solidify is worth $10 of your time
$10 isn't a lot, but currently that is 2.06 hours for me (including conversion to USD). I might reconsider it later when that changes.
No, because I used the web before web search. It's a convenient thing. Not a necessary thing.
We should hear about these costs more often, see emcouragement posts towards donating and stuff. I've seen some admins did these.
Dunno if for other people, but that's the main issue for me. When you pay a subscription, at least in my mind trained in the 90s and early 00s, plus now with Enshittification, you are not only basically paying rent to a landlord, but you are basically paying a "ransom" – a bet that the service won't be rug-pulled from under your feet at any moment's notice.
Instead I'd prefer something like a one-time lifetime payment, like what SDF does, or a long-period subscription eg.: 5-yearly or 10-yearly instead of monthly / yearly. That way, even if it's going to eventually be Enshittified, you have better reason to trust that you're going to get some useful lifespan out of it.
The last two words of my username will official disappear by that point. And it's not like someone other than me is already referring to themself as "Resol" without a suffix anyway.