I'm sure we would lose some people if we switched to mandatory payments. Since this is already a pretty small community (dashboard currently says 171 active users), I wouldn't care to experiment, since we'd risk losing the critical mass necessary to have an active local timeline, which for me is a major reason to run your own server. I'd also hazard a guess that many people go inactive for a while, and then check in again randomly when they need more social media in their life for whatever reason, and mandatory payments might interfere with that movement in and out of inactivity.
Finally, I think pay what you want is better so long as it works, since it doesn't exclude people who don't have money, but do contribute to the community in other ways. The only real reason to move away from pay what you want is if it doesn't pay the bills, and our finances are fine for now.
I can see a place for mandatory payments if you're providing extra services at a steeper price, such as paid moderation, but I think the number of people willing to pay what moderation at a living wage actually costs... is rather small. Perhaps if we made moderation more efficient, e.g. sharing moderation decisions between servers, paid moderation could become more affordable by splitting the cost between more users, but there are several problems with that approach... one being that moderation by members of your community is always going to be more clueful than moderation from outside your community.
Do you think it's a fair assessment to say then you are making the same argument I mentioned in the other thread: very few people think that the service of a social media account is actually worth anything, and that this should only be treated as a hobby?
Follow up question: if everyone treats social media alternatives as a hobby, do you think that it has a chance of being a viable alternative to the Big Tech platforms?
I think the profit motive is literally destroying the world given the climate crisis, as well as destroying everything good or useful about the Internet. So I think figuring out how to do things without the profit motive is the only way forward, as impossible as that might seem. Surviving capitalism with that attitude may be challenging, but we don't have a future under capitalism anyway.
I think that if the value of social media comes from the network effects, then it's not a question of whether you can find some core of users who consider it more than a hobby. (Ugh, you want a network for professionals for whom it's their job?!) For social media to reach its maximum value, it has to reach literally everyone, and at that point you're talking about something that ought to be a government service, like the postal service. For smaller networks that are less focused on reach, maybe hobbyists are the ideal providers.
It's amazing how we can get two people to accidentally take the same action while fundamentally disagreeing on everything else.
Short version:
- Capitalism is not the problem. Corporations that can take their profits in one department and use their vast resources to drive loss leaders is the problem. Break down big corporations into smaller ones that need to compete, and I can bet that we wouldn't see pointless growth and needless consumption.
- "do you want a network for professionals for whom it's their job?" No, I want the service to be run by professionals who can make a living out of it. The people running the service need not to participate in it. Like email or phone service, you don't expect to be free and you don't expect to be talking with the service provider daily. It should be a simple utility.
- "Public funding" is magical thinking repeated by people who don't understand basic economics: specially if you are "against growth" (like your comment about the climate crisis seem to suggest) then where is the Government going to get the resources to pay for developers?
It's improbably hilarious how you basically don't deviate from personal attacks and strawmen at any point in your post.
You don't provide a foundation for the counters to the arguments the GP makes (f.e. you propose smaller corporations wouldn't have "pointless growth and consumption", without substantiating how you feel such a thing is possible with capitalism as described and commonly understood).
You call "public funding" magical thinking, but in the point right before that you mention something should be "a simple utility". Those are publically funded.
And of course we should not forget these are strawmen and/or personal attacks. This is not a respectable post that adds to the discussion, it's one that distracts and makes everything categorically worse.
Where do you live that your electricity is public funded? Your water? Your phone/internet? Heating for your home?
Even on places where these things are run by public companies, they are not public funded. It's not like Governments give these for free and and/or come out of any government budget.
