I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.

Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.

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[–] dbtng@eviltoast.org 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Ok. I can follow this line of reasoning.
If you want to avoid corporate platforms, fediverse doesn't provide as viable an alternative as one might like.
This is clear, and makes sense. Thanks for the succinct explanation. At least I see some sense here now.

I'm not entirely sure that it matters.
Like, when was it decided that the 'making money' bit needed to be imported from YouTube?

[–] megrania@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I doesn't "need" to be imported, the question is just, where do we see the future of federated (non-)platforms ? Do we want them to be "small and cozy" with a small and fairly narrow selection of content or do we want a non-corporate alternative that can compete in richness and variety of interesting content of all niches?

A lot of folks only seem to see the crappy part of youtube and other platforms, and don't see the richness of content that exists ther. There's still so much interesting stuff to be found. I don't think there has ever been a bigger archive of, say, documentation about arts, crafts, history, food, than YT, even it its current enshittified form. If that's an ocean of content, the Fediverse isn't even a major river (at least that's my impression).

If you don't mind that, great. But I do, I'd love a non-corporate version to exist that can compete in terms of richness of content.

And monetary incentive is part of the puzzle, as it incentivizes people to spend time on it, which in terms generates a bigger audience, which in turn has a higher potential to support a wider range of content niches. Plain and simple.

[–] dbtng@eviltoast.org 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Well, the more of youtube we import ... the more of youtube we import. Part of the reason we aren't flooded with crap on the fediverse is that we are too small to matter. And perhaps we are small enough to effectively police our own. So ... why would we want to import youtube at all? Bigger is not better.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 9 hours ago

The advantage of the fediverse is how well it should be able to scale, thanks to its federated nature. A big part of the problem with YouTube is that its large scale but centralised nature means that they just throw AI at the moderation problem, and it is infamously terrible. Censoring important conversations and sensitive subjects, while letting through actual child abuse. And because it's centralised, users (both viewers and creators) don't have an easy option to turn somewhere else without losing the whole network effect.

It's compounded by the fact that the majority of monetisation on there is driven by advertising. Direct funding via a Patreon-like model (optional payment to receive some minor bonuses, primarily for supporting the creator), a Nebula-style model (subscription to access content), or a BATish model (forget most of the actual details of BAT, especially the crypto, but imagine a system—which could be voluntary or mandatory depending on the individual system, creator, or piece of content—in which users stick a bunch of money into a wallet, and it is automatically shared with the creators whose content they are viewing in some fair manner). Not having actual advertisements, combined with better, more local moderation decisions, would help stave off the biggest problems with YouTube.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 9 hours ago

The "making money" bit doesn't need to be imported, necessarily. It's not an end unto itself. But if we want a large amount of high-quality content, while society is capitalistic, then it does. Because high-quality content takes a lot of time to produce, and not many people can afford to do it as a hobby. The scenario you're describing means that who have the skills to do it could do it while making money on YouTube or Patreon, or they could do it for free on the fediverse while not making money (or making money in a more conventional job, creating the stuff that we love them for only in their spare time—limiting the quantity they can produce).