Feature, not a bug.
Big Advertising can be stopped simply by denying their existence in the first place. It’s time to get advertisers out of our digital lives.
we do need to get advertisers out of our lives but we also need to not alienate the creators that make money from their art.
I’m not sure how booting corporations and their advertisements off of the platform will affect individual artists one way or another.
The kind of promotions that big businesses do is, well, incomparable to the kind of self-promotion that an artist does. It’s a different beast entirely. At the end of the day, I’d be happy to see individual creators promoting their creativity!
It’s a two-edged sword: if a creator makes money from their art by shoving ads and marketing in my face, I wouldn’t mind them being alienated from most of these communities.
That doesn’t mean they can’t make money from their art, in fact alternate strategies like crowdfunding and donations for supporting artists are increasingly viable online.
I know it requires a cultural adjustment for most people to actually financially support artists and online services as we’re so used to them being supplied gratis, but it’s one that has shown itself to work in communities.
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Seems that donation model has been working pretty well for years now. Mastodon has millions of users, and lots of active servers that largely run on donations. I haven’t seen any evidence that the current approach isn’t scaling.
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Mastodon amortizes load by having lots of servers, and the load on these servers is a product of the sizes of social graphs the users of these servers have. So, the size of the overall network isn’t actually relevant, it’s how big individual user graphs grow. I doubt that’s going to change dramatically going forward because you can only meaningfully follow so many people in practice. This is one of the main differences between Mastodon and centralized platforms like Twitter where the servers have to handle the entirety of the content on the platform.
The flip side is that Mastodon doesn’t really lend itself well to things like celebrity accounts that have millions of followers. That’s likely to be the more interesting problem going forward.
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Things are definitely getting lively on Mastodon. I’m excited to see where this all goes as well. :)
Let’s hope that Mastodon instances will be able to work on donations. Otherwise who knows what happens. Servers cost money.
Patreon, GoFundMe and other such services show that the average person is willing to pitch in a few bucks a month to something/someone they support. Already most of the larger mastodon instances either have financial backing through a corporation/non profit (vivaldi social for an example) or are donation run (mstsn.social for example).
Seems like crowd funding has been working pretty well so far, and I think that’s really the right model to pursue. I pitch in a couple of bucks for the server I use, and it only takes a small percentage of the users to do that to make this viable.
keeping track of costs and funding should be implemented on mastodon ui Open Coilective founder said she will look into implementing a health bar type element synced with the Open Collective api on their mastodon. wage transparency is something capitalists kept forbidden for a reason. im surprised the hyper capitalist crypto people dont have the balance from hyper communist coders making open source sustainability super easy and cool.
That’s the most enticing one-line summary of Mastodon I’ve read to date
mastodon doesn’t stop advertisers and analytics.
but it has advantages. it’s smaller and less convenient to deal with.It absolutely doesn’t, if I own an instance I can easily add ad features and analytics and allow advertisers to make accounts. However, culturally, there is generally a resistance to those things. It’s real and it’s meaningful. Sure, someone can scrape instances for some stats because they’re public websites but it’s not the same as tracking cookies and other technical invasive techniques that are commonplace.
Is that… The subtitle from a real article? Unedited? Western news is so off the rails that I genuinely can’t tell.
Haha I haven’t actually looked to see if it’s a real article they published. Completely agree that it’s becoming impossible to tell western reporting from satire.
biggest selling points
lol
As some wondered… yes, the screenshot is doctored. Here is as it was published by The Guardian:
Byline was not “The platform is still a lawless hellhole of no use to anyone for advertising whatsoever according to inside sources” but instead read:
The platform is home to a devoted base of left-leaning communities – and no one billionaire can control it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/01/mastodon-twitter-elon-musk-takeover
As to the topic of this thread, and the actual byline, if we replace “Mastodon” with the more accurate terminology of “Fediverse” then I think one can say “Yes, indeed no billionaire can control it in the same way they can’t control the Web. But they sure can come to dominate it”.
Lets keep it “lawless hellhole” of no use to anyone for advertising whatsoever for as log as possible :) and when defeated develop next “no use to anyone for advertising” system to move on to…
