No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
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All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
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On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
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Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
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Let everyone have their own content.
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Plot twist: not everything needs to be profitable.
Ok but it still takes funding. Servers cost money, admins time has a cost and they gotta make a living. So there has to be some self sustaining quality to it otherwise you're relying on peoples generosity to donate and having admins that might have to go days without checking things (and burn IT burnout is bad enough when you're getting paid. Plus if these people do similar for work the last thing you want to do when you get home is fix some server issue.)
@QuinceDaPence https://opencollective.com/mastodon#category-BUDGET
@Reddugee @Kir
Alright, fair enough
Donations are indeed key, at least for the major sites with thousands of users and a lot of pressure on both infrastructure and administration. It is not profit-oriented, but it does need to be sustainable.
It seems, however, quite a few people are happy to make some voluntary contributions to keep the operation up and running. I have not yet heard of a Mastodon server shutting down due to a lack of funding. In the threadiverse, a lot of people have been donating a coffee to the creator of Kbin and Kbin.social (who will provide a better means of donating in the coming days), and lemmy.world is receiving hundreds of dollars every month at Patreon and Open Collerctive, to name a couple.
Once you put users in control, many of them are willing to pay for products that they would otherwise never have spent a dime on. Personally I have never paid for any piece of software (other than streaming services), but I try to make a round and donate to open source projects every year. :)
@sab What streaming services do you pay for? I'm all for supporting small indie studios, but Disney and the like can deal with me pirating their content.
@Reddugee @Kir @QuinceDaPence
Excellent question. I wish I had an equally excellent answer.
I reluctantly use Spotify. There's a lot of things I don't like about them, but at least they have an API allowing for some great open source clients (such as the GTK client Spot). Eventually I'll probably resign to listening to online radios (FIP is a clear favourite!) and my Vinyl collection (which is currently in another country).
I had Netflix on and off for a while, but stopped for a number of reasons. I have access to the Netflix of friends, but like everything else it seems to be getting worse every day. Thankfully there are some cinemas in town showing classic movies on a regular basis.
I guess I also pay subscriptions to Overleaf and Dropbox, both of which are necessary for work.
As for companies like Disney, I agree piracy is far more ethical than a subscription.
Hey, it works for Wikipedia (and a ton of other Free Software & Open Culture projects).
"It takes funding" is not the same as "made profitable". If you can't see the difference, perhaps you should head over to the doctor to get that terminal capitalism condition reversed.
Waaah!? Profits are the key to life itself! Blasphemy!