Not all of Reddit works, but some of it does for some people, and the reason it works for them is because the moderators shape communities that the community members enjoy participating in.
Personally, I think active communities below the Dunbar number (about 150) in size are some of the most rewarding to participate in, long term. But, there are always a lot of people who flock to wherever the biggest crowds are.
I’d say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing’s sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.
That’s how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I’ll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I’m not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.
But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I’m certain they’re out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.
Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!
Smaller communities don’t get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don’t cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.
Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.
Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.
Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.
Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.
I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.
Curated experiences are the reason we’re in the shit right now.
But yeah, maybe boutique curated exepriences will somehow be qualitatively different, and not just finer market segmentation.
Not all of Reddit works, but some of it does for some people, and the reason it works for them is because the moderators shape communities that the community members enjoy participating in.
Personally, I think active communities below the Dunbar number (about 150) in size are some of the most rewarding to participate in, long term. But, there are always a lot of people who flock to wherever the biggest crowds are.
I think they meant human-curated.
I’d say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing’s sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.
That’s how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I’ll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I’m not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.
But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I’m certain they’re out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.
Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!
Smaller communities don’t get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don’t cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.
Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.
Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.
Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.
Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.
I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.