this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
572 points (98.3% liked)
Privacy
31609 readers
93 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The start of the bubble popping was the increases in interest rates. We've seen several online companies shut down already because the free money isn't there any more and there is no path to monetization.
The problem with the Fediverse right now is that it is all run on volunteer labor and donations, similar to an early Reddit. It will be interesting to see how a distributed system solves this problem.
I think the volunteer labor and donations strategy works much, much, better on a distributed platform like the fediverse.
Sure, but what happens if the population explodes? Primarily server costs will go through the roof, and then you're still relying on volunteer moderation. It works now because the fediverse is reasonably small, but a true user exodus for any major platform could overload existing instance resources. I think the saving grace here is that there is a bit of a learning curve with Lemmy that fends away the less tech savvy, but that could change in future updates
Maybe I’m wrong but I think the fediverse isn’t quite that fragile. Instances can always close new sign ups if they’re overwhelmed. More users means more donations and more people likely to self host, too.
I guess we could run into real issues if fediverse infrastructure doesn’t scale well (example: required server resources scale exponentially with more users instead of linearly)
In extreme circumstances instances can defederate from larger ones if their mod teams are overwhelmed (obviously this isn’t a good solution but it is something beehaw.org is doing/did with lemmy.world)
The issue really comes down to the infrastructure costs. The fediverse is by design significantly less efficient with hardware than a centralized system. It isn't that it's difficult to scale, it's just that it's expensive to scale. And since the hardware is maintained by generosity of donation...
This is offset by the higher interest in volunteer labour, though.
I think the "solution" is just to accept that instances will burst in and out of existence (and favour) based on time and generosity.
As long as user profiles and contributions can transfer between instances, especially if the process is easy, then instances coming and going won’t be that much of a problem.
I do hope that current and future open source tech moves towards monetization resistance if monetization can’t be done ethically. Donation and volunteers seem to be the working formula so far