I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it’s a matter of time before it’s enshittified.
I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there’s a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than “big tech” and get more done than just donation based development.
It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?
What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?
How do you decide “what they deserve”? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?
I mean we’ve determined what a living wage is, right? Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?
There are plenty of jobs similar to the roles that would be needed that we can compare to you. I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly. It’s not rocket science.
I also don’t think mods have to be paid. They can be, but I don’t see it as necessary. I’m talking about the instance maintainers.