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I wonder if the internet, possibly the worlds best accomplishment in cooperation, can survive a post-globalist world?
Perhaps it’s the purist expression of the wave in optimism for liberalised trade before it crested and rolled back out to sea.
I think these services need to think about monetization from the beginning rather than the “make product, get users, ???, Profit”.
TFW Calico Cut Pants has a better business model than 90% of websites in the world. It’s 100% user funded. You gotta give!
I think the beauty of decentralization is that in many ways monetization doesn’t have to be necessary. Or it can be necessary on a much smaller scale. A big company like Twitter or Reddit or Facebook needs to make money on a massive scale. A small company, like somebody running a big Lemmy instance, doesn’t need to answer to investors who expect a 10x return. They just have to cover their costs and maybe make a buck. So we go back to the old days like when we had independent forums, half of them were just free as a labor of love, the other half had a banner ad or two and maybe some way to support the site by donating. I think we were better off that way.
The utility of twitter, facebook and reddit is their ubiquity. They each, in their own way, became the place you go to find [thing], and federated services will never have that. Discovering mastodon users who aren’t already followed on your instance is hard. Discovering lemmy communities that aren’t already followed on your instance is slightly easier. They’re never going to show up in Local if they’re not local, and they’re never going to show up in All if no local subscribes. Decentralization, even with federation, works against virality, and if there’s not a steady flow of content, then few people bother to sign up.
The instances get exponentially more useful as they get larger, but the costs of operation also get exponentially larger. If lemmy catches on, instances will absolutely grow beyond donations.
Sure but is anyone going to do a labor of love that costs $1000 or more a month. The scale of the net today vs back then isn’t even comparable. So many more users now there is a reason ads are everywhere and companies are closing or selling to the big guys. This is expensive.
Thankfully we won’t need to find out, there’s no evidence that we’re in a post globalist world, or entering one any time soon.
The EU and friendly ties via NATO are a great example, nations are realising more than ever that they must come together and work together to survive, and the Internet continues to make the world smaller, our communities closer.
Not to mention the ever growing essential economic links between nations.
There’s the occasional missteps of course, some xenophobes and fascists in various nations want to close their borders and essentially become North Korea, but that’ll never happen, it would be far, far too damaging for those nations if they actually listened to that vocal minority.
I hope you’re right.
I feel ratcheting tensions. The rise of far right, anti-immigration policies. The new Cold War between China and the Us forcing countries to pick sides. Tariffs. Cyber warfare. Extrajudicial killings.
Im expecting a “We didn’t start the fire” 2025 edition
Im expecting a “We didn’t start the fire” 2025 edition
Fallout boy released their own updated version 4 days ago. Just like everything else, it doesn’t even come close to measuring up to the past.
