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.

notimetowaste,

I’ve been on this earth long enough not to trust the “nothing sketchy going on here, just people giving away stuff for free!” never turns out well.

fubo,

Here, have a donut. The color of the sprinkles on it is politically relevant.

notimetowaste,

deleted_by_moderator

    •
    stevedidWHAT,
    @stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world avatar

    We’re all guests in an apartment building with an open door policy in a village of apartment buildings.

    Help out your building owners with the utility costs if ya can, design some cool apartments for others to experience and visit, but most importantly: take care of your neighbors and commune with each other to grow a stronger community

    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

    Sterben,

    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.

    Robaque,

    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 )

    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.

    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.

    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,

    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,

    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.

    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,

    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?”

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