Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you’ve been invited into.
It has been said that “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
Right here and now, you’re neither the customer nor the product.
You’re a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You’re using a service that you aren’t being charged for; but that service isn’t part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you’re participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You’ve probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it’s one of the most popular websites in the world, but it’s not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don’t imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They’re not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they’re also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
While I understand what you’re getting at, users can be viewed as “the product” if they are contributing content (posts, comments, votes, and other forms of engagement) and “the customer” if they are consuming this content in any way.
Without content or readers there would be no Lemmy, just like for Wikipedia with no editors or readers there would be no purpose for that site either. The terms “product” and “customer” aren’t intrinsically related to monetary value.
I like that perspective! But at the same time, if the user’s are both the producers and the consumers, where does that leave the platform hosters. We gotta pay our tax at somepoint if we wish to have the space to produce and consume.
I’ve always been a wikipedia donator, but with the fediverse its a little bit harder. I don’t ascribe to one community/instance more than any others, but I don’t want to have to figure out how to spread my donation accross all the instances that I interact with. If everyone just donates to where their home account is, does that balance itself out?
To me that’s trying to fit something that doesn’t belong into a capitalist box.
It just seems unnecessary to me.
It’s a place to interact with other human beings, and hopefully we can make that as positive an experience for people as possible.