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?

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 1 day ago

Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.

I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.

To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on...

Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.