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 9 hours ago (1 children)

Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?

In a centrally-planned system? Yes, it is very hard.

I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly.

I assume you mean that you had to give a quote to a client?

If that is the case, your client has sole decision-making power and has "only" to evaluate whether the price you were asking for your labor is lower than the value you'd be bringing them.

How does this compare with a coop, where (presumably) the member-owners have all to agree on the price of labor? Are they going to accept to pay market rate for the people working there? Are they first find whoever is willing to work for the cheapest and then set the price on that?

[–] LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Dude you’re acting like this is some Herculean feat when coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations. This is a very strange hill to die on.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations

The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.

IOW, I'm not arguing that "coops" can not exist. What I am arguing is we will never get rid of Big Tech if we keep forcing the idea that only community-owned services are acceptable models of governance.

[–] LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

When it comes to hosting instances, yes, I do believe we have to universally keep investors/a for-profit structure out.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 41 minutes ago)

keep investors/a for-profit structure out.

Putting these two in the same bag is a mistake, this is what OP and I are saying.

Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend "on profit", the methods they use and incentives that drive them are wildly different.