Before you start throwing 💩 , hear me out…
I’m a huge fan of the fediverse…it’s returning to the original design of the Internet…where everyone can communicate freely and openly and corporations have a very difficult time pulling anything creepy that LinkedIn/Twitter (yes, I’ll still call it Twitter)/Facebook does.
But I sense a huge frustration with businesses that want to network with others but feel their hands are tied by these walled gardens.
I figure, why not make the fediverse business friendly?
Right now most people on Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. seem to be more of the anarchist/weekend hacker types. So part of my concern with this is that it would taint the fediverse with a bunch of spam. But by the same token it would also help grow the job market and provide opportunities for people that they may not have had on LinkedIn. Of course, I’d stress for anyone on the site to operate in a community-first mindset.
So, some question…
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Would this type of instance be met with disgust? I mean, obviously the great thing about the fediverse is that you can block servers you don’t want on the network, but having the instance blocked would kind of defeat the purpose. 😅
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If you’re excited by the idea, what things would you like to see? In my own armchair brainstorming, I thought joint accounts would be a good idea, as well as analytics.
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Suggestion for already-existing platform? Can’t find a good one that would be ready-to-go to build off of. There’s friendica, but I’m not much of a fan of PHP, and it seems to not have great adoption, either.
I don’t quite see how paid and federated go together. Would only the users on that platform have to pay while others would be able to access it from their free instances?
Yes exactly.
You can pay to fund the instance you use. To help ensure it’s worth the time of whoever is managing it.
It’s how Communick works. Or is hoped to work. It seems difficult to convince fedizins to pay for this great stuff.
Yeah, that’s what I was hoping for. I’m a believer that money = value. If something or someone is valuable, it should be paid for and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m also a believer that you can operate in FOSS/Fedi-mode and still make money.
I mean, they could operate on an allow list model, and your instance domain is federated with them as long as your subscription is active (ofc it’d be a subscription because it’s 2024 and everything is awful).
Yup, an instance would be paid, but if someone wanted to launch a service of their own they totally could…they just won’t have the upstream features and the primary support from the paid instance.