I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
Totally out of a blue idea. Probably stupid but… what if there was a system which shows the community in real time how much money is needed/dev,mod,hoster time is worth, and people “top up the jar”. No mystery of „they’re probably already been donated enough”. We’d see how much is needed. Probably would need to have a bit of trust to the receivers not to abuse it but… idk just random thought lol
As a numbers junkie and server admin, I would like to see this start as part of the servers public/private metrics… the server admins can update a few values regularly (cost/time/usage) which can be mashed with active user stats to give a final cost/user that could be publicly available.
then you bolt on the donation pieces and youve got community funding with transparency.
yeah, youre going to need to trust a human being or 3 along the way, but … yeah.
I know that those that use Open Collective it does something like this, but you have to be approved