I’ve had three glasses of wine after a long day at work, and I’ve began thinking about the slow shift towards federalization/decentralization.

I find myself concerned about the question of incentives. What motivates the owners and maintainers of federated services to continue their efforts over the years? Donations alone are unlikely to cover the costs of servers, let alone the time required for code/infra maintenance, along with community moderation.

It is evident that most successful open source projects have found alternative avenues to sustain Incentivisation. One common approach is offering enterprise packages or services, which generate revenue to support ongoing development and maintenance. Additionally, some projects find support as subsets of larger corporations, such as Canonical, HashiCorp, Apache, MongoDB, k8s, Chromium, Android, Red Hat, and many more.

I am sure that many of us have witnessed many donation-based or entirely free and open-source (FOSS) projects lose traction over time. In my observations, this can be attributed to core maintainers losing interest or facing limitations in dedicating themselves to the project in the long run. The absence of financial incentives can make it challenging to sustain motivation, as maintaining and developing projects require significant time and expertise, and a genuine interest in the product.

What can be done to address these problems? Is it something like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)?

DAOs provide token-based incentives, allowing contributors to earn tokens representing ownership or value in the project. These tokens can be exchanged or redeemed for various benefits within the decentralized ecosystem. By aligning the interests of contributors with the success of the project, DAOs offer a sustainable incentive structure, while maintaining their decentralized nature.

Although incentives pose a valid concern for a decentralized future, it is important to acknowledge that sustainable models exist. Through the exploration of alternative mechanisms such as DAOs and hybrid models, we can create incentive structures that attract and retain contributors over the long term. I strongly believe that for decentralized projects to thrive and maintain momentum, it is crucial for them to embrace alternative models that effectively retain talented individuals. As these projects continue to innovate and adapt, exploring diverse incentive structures becomes essential to ensure their long-term success.

Thoughts?

  • codesmith@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    At best DAOs are simply an extension of shareholder capitalism with less regulation.

  • rysiek@szmer.info
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    2 years ago

    Absolutely not. Cryptobros showed that the whole cryptocurrency scene is either in on the scams or at least not bothered by them. Just consider Web3 Is Doing Great: for every promise “web3”/DAO people make, there is at least one story there how “web3”/DAO does not deliver and cannot deliver.

    Here are some additional resources about why any suggestions of cryptocurrency/NFT/web3/DAO-related actions need to be pushed back on with full force:

    Cryptobros had all the time to build sustainable, equitable, decentralized communities, and failed to do so. Instead, they scammed a lot of people out of their money, and a lot of artists out of their work.

    Letting them in on the federated social networking action is letting in foxes into the hen house.

    Donations, Liberapay, etc are the right way to support these federated social spaces. DAOs and other cryptocurrency scams are absolutely, positively not the right way to support them. Relying on them will let cryptobros benefit financially from it, while destroying the movement.

  • RedMarsRepublic@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Any kind of governance that fundamentally relies on how much wealth the participants have (like DAOs) is completely unworkable.

  • king_dead@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    The idea of introducing web3 to the fediverse makes my skin crawl. Realistically this is more like a return to web 2.0 principles and codifying them into a modern framework than something new. I remember those communities dying and largely it was because of those people moving to social media which sent activity and interest into a death spiral. There are ways to gamify activity but theyre largely the sleazy underhanded methods that people here rightfully hate.

  • knokelmaat@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    Signal is doing just fine with donations only.

    Debian is one of the biggest free software communities and it isn’t going anywhere.

    Most projects have a limited lifespan, this is not just limited to open source projects. The good thing is that when there is a need, people get together and start building. For example music players on Linux have come and gone, but I will always be able to listen to my stuff comfortably.

    Money is needed to survive, but these projects exist because we want more than that, to live satisfied and happy lives. This is something that goes beyond money or survival, but is still a very strong and genuine incentive.

    Thank you for opening up this discussion!

    • patchymoose@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Wikipedia is another example. One of the most heavily visited websites, operated as a nonprofit. Obviously they don’t only rely on donations from visitors, as they have a whole foundation. But they are a great example IMO.

    • rustyspoon@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      It was bound to happen. On a related note, I feel like the word “fediverse” is too gimmicky and might invite more cryptobro/NFT noise. What’s wrong with just calling it federated social media?

  • Riley@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    Get that crypto shit out of here lmao. The answer is just building strong communities that give a shit about building good internet spaces. It’s political, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s not hard, and it doesn’t need to be profitable to work.

    • ultraHQ@beehaw.orgOP
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      2 years ago

      The answer is just building strong communities that give a shit about building good internet spaces

      Like I said in my post, interests fade. Most open source projects I’ve seen fail. What keeps a core team around over the years, most of the time, isn’t giving a shit.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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      2 years ago

      That’s my stance on it.

      Once the cross-instance community discovery in Lemmy becomes easier, more integrated, and polished, you could just subscribe to a handful of SelfHosted communities and interact with them all in your feed just like you would a big, monolithic one. You can do that now, though the discovery process is still a bit rough around the edges.

      What could be more r/SelfHosted than 30 moderately sized Self Hosted communities all being self-hosted?

  • ehleks@lemmy.javant.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Cost of servers and maintenance is really not that much, last I saw lemmy.world pays around 350€ per month.

  • tallwookie@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    I’ve noticed that as technology has progressed over the last few decades, it has gotten progressively cheaper - like, it used to cost some serious $$$ to host your own website/community back in the day, but now you can easily get away with it for less than ~$100/yr.

    people that like to create things have a vested interest in maintaining their creations - presumably they’d pay some small amount in order to have their creations (or a digitally archived copy) preserved for posterity.

    not familiar with DAOs, but it sounds sort of like a form of currency. if everyone adopts it, or recognizes its value (much as American currency is valued in countries with weak economies), and the tokens are redeemable across multiple platforms (or have a real world value), then that, along with other sources of remuneration (crowdfunding, donations, etc) could easily pay for the cost of hosting content long term.

    • ultraHQ@beehaw.orgOP
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      2 years ago

      like, it used to cost some serious $$$ to host your own website/community back in the day, but now you can easily get away with it for less than ~$100/yr.

      Sure, at a small scale. But if you want to run a highly available, horizontally scalable platform that will cost $$$.

      I agree with your other points!

        • leetnewb@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          Small servers also tend to disappear, though. As far as I know, federated content simply goes away when the server does.

          • DengueDucky@lemmy.ml
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            2 years ago

            I think some of the content, like comments on other instances, remains. Overall, a small server disappearing shouldn’t have a major impact on the network as a whole.

            • Lohrun@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              Until enough small instances fail/disappear. It’s kind of like with users, if you have a bunch of users that only comment twice a year…if one leaves, meh not a big deal. As more and more of them leave that is 2^n less comments you are getting. At first the drain isn’t noticeable but by the time it is it’s likely too late, too many people are gone and your website is a shell of what it used to be.

              People keep saying to push people into a bunch of smaller servers but the same thing will happen. Especially since the person that started the server will be likely footing the bill from their own income. If they lose interest or don’t feel like paying for it anymore, poof there goes their server and users. (Yes their users can make new accounts on new instances but how many times do you think people are going to put up with losing their account)

              • rysiek@szmer.info
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                2 years ago

                “How to fund fedi” is an important, valid question.

                “Use DAOs/cryptocurrencies to fund fedi” is a completely wrong answer.