YSK: While you're on Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse, you're not "the product" but you're also not "the customer".

Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you’ve been invited into.

It has been said that “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.

Right here and now, you’re neither the customer nor the product.

You’re a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.

You’re using a service that you aren’t being charged for; but that service isn’t part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you’re participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.

You’ve probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it’s one of the most popular websites in the world, but it’s not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don’t imperil the service itself.

The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They’re not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they’re also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.

Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.

Oort ,

This is so sweet and wholesome that I might faint from a sugar OD!

zombuey ,

so a real question if a one instance decided to setup for advertising and used that money to pay mods would that be acceptable?

AnObscureTenet ,

Nope. You’re the USER. A concept that is as old as computing and yet has gone completely by the wayside recently with the corporate monopolization of the internet.

Good to see it making a comeback.

shadmere ,

USER

WARNING: INCOMING GAME

Belgdore ,

The only way to win is not to play

Sterben ,
@Sterben@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you for clearfy. Good thing to know.

Ephrite ,

“Do awesome things”

BEANS

Dr_Fetus_Jackson ,

“Do things awesome”

BEANS

vibe ,

I honestly think more instances should support some sort of donation or explicit customer model. Running such things is expensive, and sourcing money when things are ran for free is hard, so these kinds of platforms tend to be ran out of pocket, which makes them somewhat volatile. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of big platforms and instead should build something sustainable from the get go.

teuast ,

I bet if we stole the idea of reddit gold and allowed people to award comments and posts, but 1. no premium membership and 2. make it clear that the money is going to help keep the service running, that would bring in a lot of revenue without harming the community.

vibe ,

sounds like a decent idea, but how can it scale to so many servers out there? it’s a logistical hell

teuast ,

If it was just built into the base software, then every instance would have the option available by default, no? And then it would just be a question of directing the money to the right place and displaying the relevant icon on the awarded post or comment.

I’m no software engineer, though, so it’s entirely possible everything I’m saying is total bollocks. Still, worth considering if we’re thinking about the long-term health of this place, IMO.

Robaque ,
@Robaque@feddit.it avatar

How do you guarantee the money isn’t being used for profit?

teuast ,

That’s certainly a valid and important question, but I’m not sure how relevant it is to the question of how Lemmy increases its operating revenue. If I’m living minimalist but my issue is I can’t sustainably afford housing, food, and healthcare, there’s no way to solve that problem without solving the fundamental issue of me not making enough money. My impression is that that is the main question facing Lemmy at this moment, and so that’s what I was focused on.

I suspect most financial advisors would tell you that managing money is what you do when you have some.

Robaque , (edited )
@Robaque@feddit.it avatar

Yeah, very true. It’s quite the catch-22.

With decentralised systems and free software we can try to evade the control of these corporations (and the profit motive), but the irl parallels to this (e.g. self-sustability) are even more difficult to pull off.

wit ,

I think lemmy should do what Lichess.org does, which is: Give an icon to donators/patrons. That is all, just an icon. It is surprisingly effective. For example, see this: lichess.org/@/thibault. The wing, before his username is the icon to which I am referring. it is visible site-wide.

xikubs ,

That is magnificent 👏👏👏

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@lemmy.world avatar

Mostly what I feel is gratitude. Personally, I don’t have the skills, technical knowledge, or free time required to run even a small instance. I know I’m relying on the generosity of others, which makes me much more tolerant of delays, glitches, etc.

traveler01 ,

My concern is, as instances grow they will become a lot more expensive to mantain. So how will we fix this? Monetize with donations, advertising, block registrations?

schnex ,

Probably it will stop growing and never be as big as reddit, which will be totally fine with me. I want quality content, not quantity

cheeseblintzes ,
@cheeseblintzes@lemmy.world avatar

This is what I am hoping for.

I remember making MSN groups or whatever they were called back in the day for a favorite band or tv show or whatever-- I hope for Lemmy to mirror the forums and groups of yore… but if it doesn’t? Well… I’ve been on Mastodon for the better part of a year at this point and I still am able to have decent conversations with fellow humans. It may not stay perfect, but I am hopeful for the fediverse, to be honest.

SGG ,

While I agree and love the idea, it’s going to be very difficult to keep things this way. Main two reasons are:

  • It costs money to run a service like this as it expands.
  • The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.

I’m honestly fully ready to see ads sprinkled throughout Lemmy instances (but the problem with that is that due to the federated nature, you can place load on one server through the API’s without getting ads).

We’ve also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation (and probably server load as well) beehaw.org/post/567170. If that becomes a semi-constant issue I can see people leaving Lemmy, or at least not being as active as they would otherwise have been.

For now I’m enjoying things, finding it a bit “slow” but that’s been a bit welcome, no more threads with thousands of comments drowning everyone out.

fubo OP ,

The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.

There is no money to be gained from “gathering data” here. All the data is already public, which means that Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. are already free to copy whatever they would like. That’s part of being on the open Web.

meldroc ,

If things get big enough that hobbyist instance owners are getting overwhelmed, it might be a good idea to organize a nonprofit, under the NPR business model. Not collecting data or breaking your brain with advertisements, though periodically, they’re gonna have to go hat in hand, and beg users to feed their Patreon. Hey, I’m more than happy to throw a little in!

Nice thing about this business model is that being a nonprofit, the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive), instead of to make money for owners/shareholders.

McMillan ,
@McMillan@lemmy.fmhy.ml avatar

the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive)

I read that as “disturbed” and for some reason the sentence still made sense to me…

Firefly7 ,
@Firefly7@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The true mission of Lemmy is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable :)

teuast ,

oh-wah-ah-ah-ah

flashmedallion ,
@flashmedallion@lemmy.nz avatar

We’ve also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation

Troubling but understandable. Beehaw is basically fediverse tumblr, they need to prioritise their own safety.

It really highlights the other main issue though in that people really want a new alternative to work so are obsessed with growth at all costs. But maximising the influx of new users is going to have negative effects on quality, culture, and community.

A bit of friction to onboarding, and a slow steady growth that allows a community to form is what’s going to set this up for success

fenwickrysen ,

People always forget the last part of the quote: “The customer is always right in matters of taste.”

</pedantic> ;-)

TrueStoryBob ,

I’ve heard: “the customer is always right, until you get their money.”

iamr00t ,

I like this but I cannot find a reputable source to back this quote. Do you have one by any chance?

hex_m_hell ,
@hex_m_hell@slrpnk.net avatar

If you’re not paying for it, directly or through donations, you are the product. If you’re not paying for it via donations, someone else is paying for you. Nothing really changes.

Put another way, this is a commons. You share the job of maintaining the commons, or you recognize that someone else is supporting you and you pay it forward when you can. Nothing is free, and we can lose these spaces if we don’t take care of them.

mx3m ,

“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.

I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)

What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”

Smokeless7048 ,

There’s a reason I’ve decided to contribute to whatever “primary” Lemmy server I end on.

Infrastructure costs money, and so does the admins time.

GalileoHumpkins ,

I kinda like looking at Lemmy as a sort of Internet Pub on steroids (Activity Pub). Kind of like a busy street with all kinds of pubs, libraries, bookstores etc. But where those places have something to sell like liquor, coffee or books, Lemmy does not really have anything to sell but just offers a place of conversation. It alsof isn’t for everyone, anybody can join but each pub had their own rules.

I see a Lemmy admin like a barkeeper of one of the many pubs around. We sit in this one pub with one owner but we meet a lot of people from other pubs around. And if we like, we can walk across the street and visit somewhere else or even move there permanently. We have options, we as users have more power and especially actual alternatives to go to.

Donating is a thing to help the pubs keep existing. Like tipping the waiter. I’m a big fan of OpenCollective and Patreon for how they allow these small groups of people to take back parts of the internet for themselves!

There is no need to commercialize this space, it’s largely for conversation. Here there is no need for the waiter tot eastdrop on conversations, to make the pub all smart or to guilt you into a VIP pass tot enter.

I really hope we can find a way to tip the waiters and barkeepers incidentally like we would in a pub. Like a donation, and maybe also a more prominent place like a tip jar for the instance visible in posts or just the website. I think we can make it work, if we really try.

Yeah the big pubs might come knocking, but its up to each of us to decide if we want to visit any of their places.

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