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1. Thorwegian ❄️ (thor@berserker.town)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 21:42:24 JST Thorwegian ❄️

   my perspective on this is nuanced.

   generally speaking, if you are rendered a service, it incurs a cost to render it, and you're either paying for it in cash, or you're getting it for "free" in return for seeing adverts. if Mastodon was ever to scale up its 1 million active users to the level of Facebook, with 3 billion active users, costs would probably go up orders of magnitude.

   as it is right now, individuals in the tech community provide this service for free, and the costs are relatively small. if the general public ever starts using it, non-techie users are going to grow quicker than techie-users, and expenses per server/techie are going to go up.

   there is a possible model where everyone holds Wikipedia style fundraisers, but this, too, is technically speaking a form of advertising.

   you've got to ask the users for *something* ultimately.

   • Disinformation Purveyor :verified_think: (thatguyoverthere@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 21:42:19 JST Disinformation Purveyor :verified_think:

     in reply to
     @thor there is a Monero based ap server but the name escapes me at the moment
   • Thorwegian ❄️ (thor@berserker.town)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 21:42:21 JST Thorwegian ❄️

     in reply to

     we also have perfectly functioning micropayment systems that are here today.

     you can make micropayments with the click of a button if you have a Bitcoin Lightning wallet installed. payments are instantaneous and fees are so small that even small change can change hands with no trouble.

     the Nostr social network (which is *not* blockchain based, despite the number of Bitcoin bros who use it) has these in place. people can give each other tips really easily.

     i think there should be a fork of Mastodon that implements this. maybe it can be used to collect donations or subscription fees for Mastodon servers.

   • Thorwegian ❄️ (thor@berserker.town)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 21:42:23 JST Thorwegian ❄️

     in reply to

     adding to this, money can be used for good or evil.

     when a cooperative sets up a store for the mutual benefit of the participants, this is definitely "commerce" but it's not capitalism.

     when investors fund a business, and this business advertises, this is "capitalism", because both the investors and the business that was invested in has injected capital with the expectation of future profit.

     when a business offers a service free of charge and sells ads on its website, this is also capitalism.

     but it isn't surveillance capitalism until this business begins to track its users in order to display targeted advertising.

     the reason surveillance capitalism exists is because advertising is an absurdly inefficient way of selling your product. you must blast it at millions of people to get a small fraction of them to buy your product. targeting the ads makes it more efficient, and thus corporations can spend less money per sale secured.

     the most common alternative is something like the Netflix model where you're paying a subscription fee for every website you use.

   • :blank: (i@declin.eu)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 21:44:19 JST :blank:

     in reply to

     • Disinformation Purveyor :verified_think:
     @thatguyoverthere @thor https://codeberg.org/silverpill/mitra
     Disinformation Purveyor :verified_think: likes this.