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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site's moderators (qz.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas

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[–] 11 points 3 years ago (10 children)

Any instance or community can include paid content, but the numbers are still a bit low for that now.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago

    Thing is, if there was in instance or community doing ads, I now can simly block, mute or defederate them. With reddit I had to use an adblocker, scriptblocker and the reddit enhancement suite to be adfree. And I could not be sure it'd stay that way.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago* (8 children)

    The only whiff I got of anything money-related that's not a donation drive for hosting costs is a post by an artist asking whether there's instances ok with them posting links to their patreon alongside their artwork.

    ...and when it comes to hosting I think things will continue to be donation-run as even 1/1000th of users making comparatively small, regular donations cover costs for the rest. There's always going to be enough people willing to throw in a fiver a month.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    I don't see that continuing over time. There is no way that donations alone can sustain major servers as they see growth over time. You're also going to get to a point where a server's admin switches from being a hobby to a job.

    There aren't that many websites that can run on donations alone.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (5 children)

    Well the decentralized nature of the Fediverse helps spread out the cost. For example you can rent a VPS (virtual private server) for like ten or twenty dollars a month and throw a Lemmy instance on it. That's where many Lemmy instances are currently living. There's your own time involved in maintaining the instance, but the cost should remain pretty stable.

    Conversely, a centralized service where all users have to be supported by an individual or company owned cluster of machines can get very expensive. I can't imagine the operating costs for a site like YouTube with the demand for data storage and bandwidth.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (4 children)

    The cost gets spread out, but not completely. You are also going to run into problems if an instance takes off.

    The costs are manageable now, but is that sustainable?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    Well I think it depends on the balance of growth between nodes and users. If growth of users and growth of instances is proportional, it should be sustainable.

    That leaves the question of how well Fediverse software can deal with increasing node numbers. I hope that engineering question has been properly considered. It's like the available number of IP addresses when they initially designed TCP/IP, they never considered four octets might not be enough for future growth.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    Nothing on the Internet seems to indicate that use distribution will be even. Power law is going to get involved and some nodes are going to get massive.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Well yeah that will happen. Initially I looked for instances with the biggest subscription base. Then after some reading about the Fediverse I realized that kind of thinking does not apply. You get everything regardless of which node you're on (barring any defederation). Maybe most will realize that, but you're probably right most will not. We'll see how it goes.

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