• dingleberry@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    The real cost of enshittification is that they make it impossible for others to run honest business.

    Who will pay a subscription for privacy respecting services when there are a dozen free alternatives. True cost of running online business has been completely hidden from users and for so long that they will never accept those that want to cover the costs upfront.

    e.g. how many of you remain on Lemmy if instance owners asked for a monthly fee to cover their server costs?

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      We should hear about these costs more often, see emcouragement posts towards donating and stuff. I’ve seen some admins did these.

    • hillbicks@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      At least in feddit (main German instance) there were a lot of posts offering up financial support, but it was declined because it was not needed.

      I think especially the smaller communities wouldn’t have a problem coming with funds for hosting. Donations for lemmy developers have also increased significantly since the main exodus.

      I get your scepticism, but I think the lemmy community for the most part wants this thing to “succeed” and is willing to chip in a reasonable amount.

    • TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Depends honestly but there’s a fee I’d be willing to pay to support if there was ongoing development and efforts for things user privacy and responsible moderation.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A few but nowhere near enough. I do pay a few “optional” subscriptions to support good services but not many

      • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Well, not entirely. We can move out to the wilderness and live off the land with very minimal interaction with civilization. We don’t because iPhones and medicine are too good to give up.

        • Bilb!@lem.monster
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, and it also happens to get me access to the tool that was able to summarize this video without watching it. But most people would probably choose the $5 tier, I think.

          • qaz@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I was thinking about using Kaggle myself, but it’s more expensive than my site hosting, mail and 1 TiB storage Nextcloud instance combined. It’s hard to justify that cost if the alternative is free and works fine enough most of the time.

    • DrGunjah@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If they are 100% transparent in regard to where the money goes, I’m in. The problem with something like youtube premium is not that it’s unaffordable to the majority of users. It’s that at this point you have to assume that they don’t need the subscription fee to cover their costs, but to shove that money up some CEOs or shareholders asses. Yeah that’s not gonna happen unless they force me to and even then I’d think twice about if I really need that service.

    • thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Kind of surprised (and a bit disappointed) you didn’t get more replies saying “I already pay”. Which does admittedly support your point!

      p.s. I already pay.

    • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The last two words of my username will official disappear by that point. And it’s not like someone other than me is already referring to themself as “Resol” without a suffix anyway.