Just because we experiment with a technology doesn’t mean we can’t change our minds.

At the very least, we can have completely decentralized systems that don’t have an Elon or a Zuck running them and enshitifying them.

We have eliminated this possibility from our thinking, as if it’s inevitable we have to go in this direction and if only we could figure out the “right way” the technology wouldn’t be used for casual enslavement if populations and exploitation of social phenomenon for centralized control.

There is no good model for social media at this time, but we sure have been able to find some downsides.

Social networks lead directly to opinion and societal conformity and will eventually be used for social control and credit systems. We should turn them off before they enshrine themselves in the center of daily life.

Mark my words. You merely have to look at the Eyghurs in China to see where this technology is going.

Dude works for the “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation”, a US government propaganda branch. He’s not really a reliable source.

I mean, I saw Adrian’s video. It’s cool too. But if you’re trying to say none of this is happening because the guy who’s pushing it isn’t credible, I can’t agree with you.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

Charging is a non-starter for a newcomer due to the chicken & egg problem (nobody would pay for a platform with no users, thus it never gains any users), but it's not clear what will happen if an established platform with significant influence starts charging. It's worth a shot.

It could very well be that charging a reasonable amount for access ends up being sustainable and actually improves the platform, both in terms of fighting against unauthorized spam (bots, etc) but also "authorized" spam aka ads and other dark patterns since user-hostile features no longer make sense if it's those same users who now pay for it.

When it comes to monetizing social media without ads, one solution could be to get businesses/commercial entities to subsidize everyone else - using the network for personal use is free but no commercial content is allowed; for that a paid "business" account is required which in turn subsidizes free users.

The only thing that baffles me is that it seems that people do not want to pay for the service of social media. People don't mind paying their phone or water bills, but for some strange reason using an internet service that requires an infinite amount of bandwidth and storage (not to mention human effort in moderation and feature development) should either be free or have some other ulterior motivation to justify its price tag.

The very few social networks that may have tried this were too small to matter even as free services, let alone paid, so no surprise it didn't work out.

Seems pretty simple to me; cut "companies" out entirely.

The problem with Twitter isn't so much paying for it as monetizing it. Monetization is an endless user-experience sinkhole that optimizes for the lowest-common-denominator and never ends. Locking users in a sinking ship is a bad business model, Twitter only got away with it because it took 10 years to sink and Dorsey had a great poker face.

Platforms like Mastodon decimate this problem, for me. Instead of engineering for monetization, people optimized for user experience. Advertisements don't exist, because they harm the UX and get optimized out; you're not a competitive Mastodon server if you run ads.

I've heard convincing arguements that decentralized platforms lack real-world celebrities, but I only see that as a plus in a post-Musk world.

Small instances from enthusiasts are being funded by the person/people running it, but if we assume that one "small instance" can serve up to 100 people while costing pocket change to the admin, we would need 20 million "hobbyists" running their instances if the fediverse is to become an alternative to Facebook or Instagram.

Larger instances based on donations are all struggling. Fosstodon started open and donation based and promised to take any surplus and donate to the upstream projects. Their last donation was in 2021 [0]. Now they even closed down for new signups and made it invite-only. Newsie.social, an instance made for journalists have 20000 sign ups, 2300 active users and less than 2% of the active user base contributes. The admin has been pleading for support in an attempt to keep it open, but it's quite likely they will announce it will close. It's ridiculous.

[0]: https://hub.fosstodon.org/finances/

[0] http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/6/27/scaling-twitter-ma...

[1] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/3139

E.g, imagine you have one user in your server that has 100k followers, spread around ~1000 instances. Each new message from this user triggers a push to these instances, and each of these instances will then make a request to you at the same time. Then, add to this that each of followers may trigger another request to your server in case the message has an embedded card or image.

On a centralized system like Twitter this does not happen, on the fediverse this may lead to a self-DDOS.

Again, this may not be how mastodon works, but mastodon is clearly designed poorly. I have systems at work that have no problem gossiping thousands of updates per second to hundreds of subscribers.

You also don't have to have a single global federated network to have a useful system. If North America were isolated from Europe or India that would still be useful to tons of people. Or people might segregate into communities based on interest, and don't need to send the same tweet to different communities since it's not relevant to both groups.

Because instances are not always assumed to be online, or you don't want to push to all the connected instances...

> I have systems at work that have no problem gossiping thousands of updates per second to hundreds of subscribers.

So, I agree with you [0], but it seems that the Lemmy devs think it is not necessary. Be a kind soul and show your PR?

[0]: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245#issuecomment-1...

I see that as a perk. The local instance I’m on is funded mostly by donations and has been for more than a year now with success - it can’t become Twitter-scale.

Old forums used to be funded by selling memberships or limited ads - but the site owner was close enough to the community that they were reasonably sensitive to their needs.

I’m not particularly caring about large instances. Close registration if it’s getting too big I say! That’s not a bad thing!

I understand the sentiment, but I can’t stop feeling that it is too self-centered. I certainly agree that we do not need a billion people on the Fediverse, but at the same time I feel some moral imperative to free the billion people that are stuck on Big Tech networks, and we need to build an alternative for them.

Humans operate at community scale, not global scale. I don’t want a billion people in my community.

You might think that self-centered but it allows actual community bonds to form - on my instance last month I paid the $236 that someone was in arrears for their rent because they were part of my community and in need.

You don't need to "save" them, but to think that they are all there out of their own volition and that there is no systemic change needed is quite apathetic.

It honestly sounds to me like you want my community to destroy itself in martyrdom.

There is a systemic change needed - break ‘em up. Break up facebook, break up twitter, put regulations in place that prevent them ever being able to scale like that on the backs of people’s attention again. The solution isn’t some kind of new business model.

You want the real blackpill? The back-shelf, hidden box with an expiry of 'sometime soon' pill?

There's no way to reconcile what everyone wants with a single platform, product or set of laws. Twitter flew on the borrowed wings of RSS and regular blogging, serial-killing every syndication platform it could find to sustain the business of information. It's the "solution" to our current problem, except it's got a history of being owned by despots and is struggling to turn a dime in a slight recession. What Elon Musk did was a more extremist version of what Dorsey would be forced to do someday, which is why Jack and his shareholders folded.

In my opinion, what's happening right now is the inevitable curtain fall. The emperor is plainly naked, and we're still running articles about his new clothes.

As written, that is probably not possible. As long as people don't want to manage their own services someone will offer to do it for them (for some form of compensation) , and one of the corporate forms is the natural way to structure that, particularly in the presence of liability laws.

I expect to eventually see a mastodon service that does do ads as I think the current system is unsustainable with current attitudes. I have no idea how they'll make ads acceptable, but I have faith in the creativity of people looking to make a steady buck. Once they have the extra income, that will make it less likely to collapse than its peers, so evolution will kick in and many will do whatever it is that stabilized the income.

Plus, martyrdom seems to be par for the course if you're not willing to make a Facebook account. I'm perfectly content sitting opposite of Twitter, but your mileage may vary.

you want people to pay to communicate online? then you have to separate out the communication from the 'outside', and charge for access to that bubble. and you can't lie about the degree of separation, or it all breaks down to free-services again.

twitter as a free-for-all across society into people's tweets (readers, bot scrapers, governments, market researchers, moms, journalists, ai bros, ect) has killed it's ability to charge for access. well it never had the capability to charge for access.

if you make a bullet proof bubble and then open up the communication to market forces and government spying, (even in name only) then people will publicly say it's okay but the service will lose it's value and the service will descend into freedom again where nobody values it enough to pay.

the craving for security and the belief that all computer communications must run through the government and market scrapers, at all costs, has destroyed the ability to charge for access to information, the basic lifeblood and commodity of the internet.

the west and the western internet is in a bad place, because you cannot have a truly private conversation, for free and for money.

This pretty much forces indirect business models and that usually means something sleazy or user-hostile: surveillance, addictionware, paid propaganda, etc.

Software has potentially very high fixed costs but near zero marginal unit cost, and prices in a competitive market are driven down to marginal costs; more quickly if the N+1st competitors fixed costs are substantially lower than the Nth competitor for some N value(s) of N.

Sofware services have higher fixed and unit costs, and are designed to limit competition compared to actually selling software, but if the underlying software is open source still suffer (from the seller’s perspective) from the above for N=1.

To me the funny thing is that isn't particularly utopian given how many networks operate literally like that right now, it just takes one mental switch imagining yourself not as some passive consumer and everything you use as a product.

Do they? What do you think has more impact today in the formation of a teenager living in Greece: the Orthodox Church or TikTok?

The problem to me is not so much the lack of existent alternative networks, but the sheer dominance of the shitty networks over the majority of the population. Even those who try to refuse engaging in these networks still have their lives affected by them.

Because, _for a service like Twitter_, it _is_ stupid and it _would_ kill Twitter. Paid social networks can and have worked (examples would be SomethingAwful, plus a lot of dating sites, and things like Patreon as marginal cases), but it's not going to work for the social network that _everyone's_ on, and Twitter wouldn't be viable as a social network with like half a million paying users And as we've seen with the blueticks, the tiny minority of users who are willing to pay tend to be completely insufferable. As you'd expect; they're largely doing it for self-promotion purposes.

But in general, "situationally, this is a stupid idea" should not be read as "anything which looks vaguely like this is a stupid idea". There likely is a place for paid social media (and donation-supported social media, and so on); it's just that that place is probably not _Twitter_.

I would never pay for any kind of algorithm driven ad supported social media.

I also pay for Kagi and would not pay for Google. They’re surveillance driven so they have their payment already.

Mastodon is so poorly funded that even with 6 million users in the .social instance, they only get enough funds to pay two full-time developers, and even then the pay is ridiculously low. Gargron himself is reportedly taking 30k€/year, pre-tax, which for someone living in Germany is just a step above minimum wage.

Nobody pays for software unless it’s manipulative, intrusive, or addictive. If it just delivers value it has to be free.

I keep coming perilously close to declaring free software a mistake, but the problem is a lot more complex than that. It’s also a result of land, expand, enshittify models.

computing has no tools to protect software (tpm, ect not running yet) and people wondering why nobody pays?

if i could copy and paste stacks of gold bars for free, i would. and i would never pay for gold bars again.

valuable software has to be protected if you want to cut out the intrusion, manipulation and addiction.

the missing option to protect valuable software is a big hole in the guts of computing. let free be free, let protected be protected.

Whereas spammers have financial or ideological incentives for having accounts, the average user does not.

Because spammers stand to profit by paying for Twitter, they will not pay for it. Conversely because the vast majority of normal users do not have anything tangible to gain, they will pay for it.

It is possible that spammers might try to game the system and find ways to give Twitter as much money is necessary to continue using the platform. In that case, Twitter would logically spend any resources necessary turning away as much Bad Funds as possible while maintaining Good Funds from Good Users.

I do not see why anyone could find fault in Mr. Musk’s plan to charge everyone — it would simply be an expansion in the explosion of quality and user trust that resulted from the Twitter Blue program.

If that is their business model, it would be pretty stupid to not use the tools provided by the platform to stay relevant, more so when the cost is as cheap as $8 (presumably they're making more than $8 a month, otherwise it wouldn't be lucrative enough to bother).

Whereas an average user that simply wants to consume content would probably just find an alternate for free because they're not gaining any monetary value...

Then you raise your fraud detection controls and only activate the user after payment has been cleared out.

The point is that spam is not economically viable if it requires payment. It's not rocket science.

That is very much not true at all.

All Twitter would have to do is invent and maintain software that reliably detects ai-generated text with zero false positives. Done and done.

Should they do that and the spammers still seem motivated, they would have to do something outlandish like employ large amounts of humans to replace the bots, which isn’t something that has ever been feasible for spammers.

People really underestimate quite a few things, like Twitter’s ability to simply invent bot-fighting software of heretofore unseen power and complexity, the difficulty spammers have accessing dollars and other resources, and how unmotivated and prone to giving up spammers tend to be.

Just assume that it costs one dollar to sign up. The "spam-detecting" algorithm doesn't need to be foolproof. It just needs to find the spammer by the 10th message to effectively make each message cost $0.10 to be sent. What type of scam/spam has such a high ROI that can justify this operation for long?

Someone less adept might suggest something like “spammers could pivot to higher profit-per-target activities to make up for the cost by (for example) pushing crypto rug pulls even harder or just straight up phishing and theft schemes, or one of many many other examples of that sort of thing”.

However you and I know the truth: No they won’t.

- Reducing the type of crimes that are economically feasible has value in itself: some criminals will move on, it makes it easier to investigate the ones that remain and reduces the load on policing.

This is a good point. The sort of activity that could easily afford to pay to continue to access Twitter on day one of a policy change is presently underway. A large chunk of spammers would simply have to spend a small fraction of their current profits to maintain their profitable business without having to make much meaningful change to their business models.

For this reason, charging for Twitter will shut them down. The high profits and relatively low cost will cause them to pack up shop and go legitimate.

> A large chunk of spammers would simply have to spend a small fraction of their current profits to maintain their profitable business

It is only "profitable" because they are playing a lottery game where each ticket is essentially worthless but with an actual zero cost. The expected value of this radically changes if the cost of rolling the dice is anything nonzero.

Phone scams is a 10 billion dollar industry in India, because it costs virtually nothing to call anyone in the US. Do you think that type of scam would be possible in the world 25 years ago when international calls where $0.10/minute and the scammers need to have an account at the phone company to enable them to make tens of thousands of minute-calls per day?

Also please do us both a favor: stop with the smart-ass responses and stop creating strawmen. It makes you look like an a pathetic juvenile loser who just refuses to argue in good faith.

The problem is that people don't like to read text, and thus the above proposed social network might not have widespread adoption, thus reducing the network effect.

Second, Twitter Blue still has ads so you're still the product.

> how the hell is this whole thing supposed to work?

Twitter was relatively recently profitable. Surely they got bloated and through layoffs could have gotten back there or close. And the prior ownership would have stayed centrist enough to avoid pissing off either side's advertisers or users at scale.

And maybe the prior ownership could have launched a paid tier that people felt good about, rather than taking away features and APIs and selling an experience that was lesser than what we'd been used to getting for free.

Not really. They reported gross profit in 2019-2020 when every tech company was reporting crazy numbers, but even then they were not actually (net) profitable.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1704459036547059852?s=20

Am I taking crazy pills or is he not, in the timestamp the community note pointed to suggesting exactly what the community note says the media made up? Is the community playing some kind of prank? Did his followers not click the link or am I missing some nuance?

Paying for it is orthogonal. Social networks can be widely used, or they can be high quality (or they can be neither). They can't be both.

If everyone is on it and can see everyone on it, then the worst people with the hottest takes will always get the most engagement, which the service will prioritize (because it’s lucrative, or because it thinks the things people engage with are the things people are interested in) creating a death circle.

Trending lists, virality, etc. ensure that platforms will get worse over time. I don’t think paying for it changes that math at all.

Now that we know this problem exists we could just not do it. We won't, but we could.

But even in the abstract, even stipulating the damage Xitter has suffered can be washed away, it is unclear if a free-to-use social network can be converted to a subscription model without a long, deep, negative cash flow interval that could readily kill it. Ask yourself if Reddit could make that transition without failing.

However, when it comes to services, they tend to spy on you whether or not you pay for them. I won't pay for a service solely on the basis that it would improve the privacy situation because I don't think that it generally does.

As to Twitter specifically, I don't find value in it sufficient to be worth paying for, so I wouldn't. But I don't use it anyway, so I wouldn't count as a lost customer.

That doesn't seem to be anywhere in their plans, unless you're accusing market regulators of being taxpayer-funded (in which case, guilty-as-charged).

Currently, the only EU solution has been demanding interoperability of platforms. How that's done is up to individual companies, unless they use it for anticompetitive purposes.

But this can take years to happen! If a website has good services for now, you can use them for now, and then shop around for a better deal if they get worse, or something better comes along.

Instead of trying to stop the world from changing when you can't, better to learn some resilience. Learn to live with transience.

It's also possible for websites to improve. Who knows?

But wait, you're talking about building a social website?

My advice is that more users means more problems. Many users are pretty deranged these days, by this and many other terrible memes. Don't worry about scaring them away, they'll scare themselves away regardless.

Build something for yourself and a few people you like. Explain up front that it's not for everyone, and you're not going to run it forever. Why commit to something that's not fun?