cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27733087
Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to Bluesky’s GitHub.
I’ve never seen an ad-based tier on a Mastodon instance and the network does just fine 🤷♂️
Without executives leeching money from going to the actual cost of servers things seem to work better! Go figure!
Among every server that “do just fine,” there are more instances that are just gone for not having proper funding, especially for non-Western instance where paying for social media in not a common thing. I’m from Indonesian, and almost every Indonesian instance are cease to exist except for Misskey.id.
While Mastodon does not support ads, other fediverse software like Misskey support it. Misskey.io, the second biggest fedi instance after Mastodon.social, runs ads and subscription simutaniously.
Their ads is merely community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc. I think that might be replicatable for Western instance like Mastodon.art or Pixelfed.art.
However I don’t see blue sky following this model, I do support user funded content and It’s infuriating that we as an open source community have to recreate it time and time again. Large corporations buy up the social media and monetize it and mine it for metadata and AdSense. Meta, alphabet, Microsoft and to a greater sense now OpenAI.
Server hardware isn’t free. At the end of the day, SOMEONE has to pay the bills. Either you are the customer, or the product. If you insist on being the product, you don’t get to be surprised when platforms focus on the actual customers that actually pay the bills, by enshittifying the platform.
When you are not a predatory bussiness your “clients” are not your enemy. So donations come in.
People are willing to pay for something that they use. What people don’t like is paying for making someone rich without working.
Well said! My instance doesn’t need ads because the servers don’t care about profits.
Because most mastodon instances are running off donations, and have a relatively small user base.
The kind of people who use Mastodon are substantially more likely to be heavily invested in the technology and the vision, and thus more likely to donate.
Expand that out to the billions of people who use social media, and you have a funding problem.
Not to mention the much lesser need for moderation due to more homogeneous and well-intentioned micro communities and substantially lower rate of bots, which all means less “staff” you have to pay too.
It’s not a matter of minimum viability, it’s a matter of scale.
“Many small instances that can survive with a couple of donations” seems much more sustainable than a handful of large ad-selling business “powered by Mastodon”.
Please explain how having ads or subscriptions in any way requires you to have a marketing department and c-suite executives that get to siphon money from operational budgets.