I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
No ads, no tracking, just donations. The model proved itself when twitter went to shit and a big influx of users came to mastodon, it all worked out.
Many mastodon instances shut down. There’s always a risk that at some point the donations are not enough to sustain an instance. It could be very problematic if mods lose their communities when an instance shutdown.
Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.
Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.
I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.
Yeah, especially with Lemmy which is a lot more permanent than Mastodon is. You can screenshot your old toots but you can’t screenshot a userbase. There should be a way to migrate a community to another instance while keeping the subscriptions.
You’re just not noticing that the ads are ads.
I’ve been on Mastodon for months and haven’t noticed any ads. Just people letting me know about some product they like. Wait…
That’s been always the case on other platforms on top of the official ads. Damn every now and then you’d see what’s clearly an guerilla ad campaign hitting the front page of reddit.
Oh shit was I the ad the whole time??
Maybe we are all ads on this disgraced day
Speak for yourself
The real ads were the friends we made along the way.
Nonsense. This place is refreshing, like the bold taste of New Coke.
Cuke?!
I love Cuke!
[ smiles with brown teeth ]
It’s heaven in a can!
I just got thirsty all of a sudden.