The fediverse isn’t driven by profit, so growth for the sake of growth isn’t necessary. Word of mouth will let the fediverse platforms grow naturally and sustainably
It would be a mistake to not realise that they operate in the same virtual space as profit driven corporations though. They should still be professionally run with proper pr and marketing. Whether that is volunteer led, or alternative funding like Wikipedia or charging corporate clients etc.
Personally, I’d like corporate integration to fund the free part, but with no additional benefit. Just the same access that private users get for free. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope.
Hard to regulate though. How woukd you verify, who would verify? Could be like fair trade products, whereby there is a certifying body. User instances could decide to only federate with corporate instances that are registered with this non profit. They would pay for their access, like Reddit is asking from their apps, except actually reasonable costs. This could be disbursed to large instances with over X amounts of users to fund their computing needs.
Given the fediverse is a not for profit, any advertising campaigns would have to be fronted by someone who wants to pay for it. It’s not that we can’t do advertising campaigns, it’s just we can’t use the money people dontate to keep the servers running for marketing, because people expect that money to be used in making sure the server exists into the future - it would have to be a separate donation soley for marketing it, or maybe some rich person could decide to pay for marketing in full.
On top of that, we can’t let sign ups exceed to amount we get from donations - that would kill the server or force the server owner to shut down sign ups and, worst case if they happened way too fast- the owner remove some of the more recent signups, which would reflect badly on said owner.
In other words, if you want to advertise it, go ahead but don’t expect anyone else to contribute cash to help as marketing a open and donation based system like this could have its consequences.
I don’t think there’s any advertising budget being spent on these fedi platforms, which makes it impressive they’ve grown so much from media exposure and word of mouth.
Ribbit
The fediverse isn’t driven by profit, so growth for the sake of growth isn’t necessary. Word of mouth will let the fediverse platforms grow naturally and sustainably
It would be a mistake to not realise that they operate in the same virtual space as profit driven corporations though. They should still be professionally run with proper pr and marketing. Whether that is volunteer led, or alternative funding like Wikipedia or charging corporate clients etc.
Personally, I’d like corporate integration to fund the free part, but with no additional benefit. Just the same access that private users get for free. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope.
Hard to regulate though. How woukd you verify, who would verify? Could be like fair trade products, whereby there is a certifying body. User instances could decide to only federate with corporate instances that are registered with this non profit. They would pay for their access, like Reddit is asking from their apps, except actually reasonable costs. This could be disbursed to large instances with over X amounts of users to fund their computing needs.
Given the fediverse is a not for profit, any advertising campaigns would have to be fronted by someone who wants to pay for it. It’s not that we can’t do advertising campaigns, it’s just we can’t use the money people dontate to keep the servers running for marketing, because people expect that money to be used in making sure the server exists into the future - it would have to be a separate donation soley for marketing it, or maybe some rich person could decide to pay for marketing in full.
On top of that, we can’t let sign ups exceed to amount we get from donations - that would kill the server or force the server owner to shut down sign ups and, worst case if they happened way too fast- the owner remove some of the more recent signups, which would reflect badly on said owner.
In other words, if you want to advertise it, go ahead but don’t expect anyone else to contribute cash to help as marketing a open and donation based system like this could have its consequences.
Advertising requires money. Its a slippery slope that’ll lead us down the same path as Reddit again. We’re better than that.
I don’t think there’s any advertising budget being spent on these fedi platforms, which makes it impressive they’ve grown so much from media exposure and word of mouth.