i don’t defend targeted ads since they are bad (i use uBlock)
but what monetization system is a bit more ethical than targeted ads but can last unlike donations
how would you solve that issue
My Opinion
well it is make that there are version which you own but if you pay for 1 the one after it you pay again for that new version but with a small discount
Fundraising drives. Pair time and money provided to the ability to shape policy, in part to allow for vested members to have a say in the community.
End capitalism.
Something that I saw royal road was they only accepted Ads from other authors. Which led to some fanstatic MS Paint ads trying to get people to look at their books.
We could do silly stuff from the fediverse to “fund” each service. The more human made the better. Could be fun to get a MS Paint looking lemmy/piefed ad.
Id put a 20 in a shitty paint piefed ad. That can only be shown if you click the “I want ads please” in the settings lol.
Maybe opting in for the types of targeted ads you are okay with being exposed to but not personally targeted ads?
So maybe I’m okay with opting in for ads about video games or movies in my primary language, but I personally would not opt-in for ads for gambling sites. Also, I’m okay with advertiser knowing their ad went to someone that opted in to see that genre of ads, but not tying that ad data to specific individuals because that’s weird.
feddit.org is hosted by the Fediverse Foundation, a volunteer based nonprofit organization in Austria. They also run other instances on Mastodon for example.
When feddit.de crashed down after the Admin went to North Korea for a business trip, the community decided to build feddit.org on stronger shoulders.
This way we have multiple people and admins, a shared infrastructure instead of a server in somebodies basement, a legal entity that is stronger than a private person and much more. It is of course based on voluntary donations, but as far as I know, they are covered.
Non-targeted ads can also be an option.
You buy a fixed space on a certain page for a period of time and pay the owner. The way it worked in the early days of the internet.
Imagine if ads were related to the content of the page? Like, if I look up a webpage about video games, and get ads for… Video Games? I made the mistake of looking up a particular eGPU a while ago, and now when I’m looking up kayaks online, I get ads for eGPUs.
Came to ask if non-targeted was an option. I’d rather see random ads than what an algorithm thinks I want. Great way to find products and services you didn’t know existed!
I remember this from some torrent sites that were using this well past everyone else moving on to spyware ads. Obvious choice there, you don’t want spyware on such a site if you’re trying to be reputable and tons of users are going to use adblockers and javascript blockers which affects syndicalized ads, but not necessarily oldschool ads.
Nonprofits with public earnings and expenditure records sustained by government funds and donations maybe? Idk
You want government funds, ya gotta deal with a wide range of humans and attitudes.
Probably a lot more subscription based stuff. People don’t flinch about spending $50-$100 on their phone subscription but email, which is equally important, people expect it to be free from places like Google.
I don’t want to be that person and bring up this argument which isn’t answering your question but does big tech need to be funded? There is great open source alternatives to most big tech which are either ran by volunteers or funded by donation. They would be so much better supported if big tech alternatives did not exist.
Big tech selling hardware would still be funded that way. Apple, Lenovo, etc etc would be similarly funded. Microsoft sells licenses to their operating system.
I would argue the world would be a much better place if big tech wasn’t funded and open source projects were king.
The code might be open source, but the infrastructure it runs on needs to be paid for somehow
Yeah, subscriptions and donations would have to be more than what is now. But distributed and federated systems and not chasing profitability at corporations would go a long way to running systems. Lemmy for example can be an alternative to Reddit while running off of hobbyist and donarion run servers. Gmail probably costs a fortune but what about 100,000 small independent email servers taking its place? Email is already a federated system. And then there’s self hosting. I bought a second hand computer and run the equivalent of Google Photos for myself and others on it for very cheap. Putting all these together, and if these were the default and more supported, the infrastructure costs can be spread thin.
Yep. I took OP’s question to be about big tech. If business isn’t using it, you can’t get too big.
Look at MS and all the people around here predicting their downfall because they personally switched to Linux and the Xbox division is suffering. Y’all, 85-90% of Microsoft’s profits are corporate Windows and Office. The rest is fluff. LOL, they long ago dropped resistance to pirating and I’ve paid them zero pennies over 30-years of using Windows for personal use.
On infra though, we sysadmins had predicted another wave of business bringing compute and storage back inhouse. Despite the stunning charges from AWS and the like, that doesn’t look to ever happen. Wierd.
I want to preface this with saying I 100% prefer open source to closed source. That said I’m not sure open source without closed source would be as good simply because I think that open source would just inherently be even more fractured than it is now. Choices are good but too many choices are bad.
I actually ran into this European initiative earlier which aims to help fund public European social media, maybe something like this could help?
From the little research I did it seems this isn’t necessarily for the Fediverse, but the funding could be used for it from my understanding. I’m curious what others think of this.
A self sustaining endowment, courtesy of a few headless billionaires
Donations - regular is also fine, it doesn’t have to be one time
No one should be locked out of software becauee they can’t pay
WMF (Wikimedia Foundation), AO3 (Archive of Our Own), and Internet Archives seem to be doing okay with donations.
They’re pretty much the exception, vast majority of FOSS and freehosted projects could not survive on donations alone if not for volunteers.
Many big tech initiatives in the fediverse are funded via nlnet grants. I think they have one open specifically for pairs made up of an artist and technologist to promote content creation currently, but they open fairly regularly.
Buying applications and subscriptions to services are definitely an option, but you need to find ways to keep transaction costs low (e.g. a 10 cent payment should still mostly go to the people who make the software/website/service, not the payment infrastructure), keep it as private as possible, which is a difficult issue to solve in itself, and prevent centralization.
We still need ways to provide access to people who genuinely can’t pay though, which might be where this truly fails. Some people are just that poor, and some people get unlawfully debanked.
Donations, or if that doesn’t end up working in the long run (even though it is definitely working as far as I can tell because we have numerous instances and platforms already), I guess you could switch to a subscription model, but I think that’d put a lot of people off.
unpopular in some circles, one could sell user generated content
