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.
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
That’s not really the saying, it’s what everyone thinks the saying is, especially Karen’s, but it isn’t.
The saying is “the customer is always right, about the price”. I.e. that value of a product is equal to what people are prepared to pay for the product, not what you’d like them to pay, as a business owner.
It has nothing to do with businesses have to appease customers, regardless of whether they’re being ridiculous or sensible.
I remember seeing “the customer is always right in matters of taste” on Reddit many times, but I can’t find any real sources now. Maybe that was just an artifact of the echo chamber.
People always forget the last part of the quote: “The customer is always right in matters of taste.”
</pedantic> ;-)
I’ve heard: “the customer is always right, until you get their money.”
I like this but I cannot find a reputable source to back this quote. Do you have one by any chance?
Ideally, we are participants. This can have many forms like donating, voting, commenting, reporting, posting, helping and explaining.
The whole thing also lives off substantial support, mostly to the codebase, but also the wiki, the various tools people use to search and monitor, apps and pages like https://join-lemmy.org/. Consider contributing what you can, and what feels right for you.
if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product
So, were you all getting paid by Reddit for content and moderation? Because if Reddit wasn’t paying for the service, that would make them the product too…
That saying breeds a complacent skepticism. Even if you pay for a service, that doesn’t stop the provider from making you a product. Likewise, not paying may mean there’s mutual benefit.
Sure, it could be more refined. So here you go:
If a commercial entity does something for free, you’re the product.
While I agree and love the idea, it’s going to be very difficult to keep things this way. Main two reasons are:
- It costs money to run a service like this as it expands.
- The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.
I’m honestly fully ready to see ads sprinkled throughout Lemmy instances (but the problem with that is that due to the federated nature, you can place load on one server through the API’s without getting ads).
We’ve also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation (and probably server load as well) https://beehaw.org/post/567170. If that becomes a semi-constant issue I can see people leaving Lemmy, or at least not being as active as they would otherwise have been.
For now I’m enjoying things, finding it a bit “slow” but that’s been a bit welcome, no more threads with thousands of comments drowning everyone out.
The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.
There is no money to be gained from “gathering data” here. All the data is already public, which means that Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. are already free to copy whatever they would like. That’s part of being on the open Web.
If things get big enough that hobbyist instance owners are getting overwhelmed, it might be a good idea to organize a nonprofit, under the NPR business model. Not collecting data or breaking your brain with advertisements, though periodically, they’re gonna have to go hat in hand, and beg users to feed their Patreon. Hey, I’m more than happy to throw a little in!
Nice thing about this business model is that being a nonprofit, the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive), instead of to make money for owners/shareholders.
the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive)
I read that as “disturbed” and for some reason the sentence still made sense to me…
The true mission of Lemmy is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable :)
oh-wah-ah-ah-ah
We’ve also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation
Troubling but understandable. Beehaw is basically fediverse tumblr, they need to prioritise their own safety.
It really highlights the other main issue though in that people really want a new alternative to work so are obsessed with growth at all costs. But maximising the influx of new users is going to have negative effects on quality, culture, and community.
A bit of friction to onboarding, and a slow steady growth that allows a community to form is what’s going to set this up for success
My concern is, as instances grow they will become a lot more expensive to mantain. So how will we fix this? Monetize with donations, advertising, block registrations?
Probably it will stop growing and never be as big as reddit, which will be totally fine with me. I want quality content, not quantity
This is what I am hoping for.
I remember making MSN groups or whatever they were called back in the day for a favorite band or tv show or whatever-- I hope for Lemmy to mirror the forums and groups of yore… but if it doesn’t? Well… I’ve been on Mastodon for the better part of a year at this point and I still am able to have decent conversations with fellow humans. It may not stay perfect, but I am hopeful for the fediverse, to be honest.
Furthermore, even if you wanted to operate an instance on a small scale you’d still have to deal with the full volume of posts from the rest of the Lemmyverse getting pulled and saved to your instance. If we had Reddit levels of activity here, every instance host with more than a couple dozen users would basically end up maintaining their own personal database copy of Reddit (more or less, provided those users were still joining the popular communities across the 'verse) which doesn’t sound like something I’d want to deal with as a hobbyist.
Good point. But thinking further I guess saving this data amount is less of a problem than serving it to users. Maybe someone hosting a Lemmy instance can comment on this better, but they’re all pretty busy right now ig ^^
Mostly what I feel is gratitude. Personally, I don’t have the skills, technical knowledge, or free time required to run even a small instance. I know I’m relying on the generosity of others, which makes me much more tolerant of delays, glitches, etc.
That is magnificent 👏👏👏
Particularly in these early stages, really clear and transparent communication and plans are key I think.
Nice to see some info on the sidebar links, hopefully will be combined with posts and further info as things progress.
Help people buy into supporting the service they use, but knowing who they are supporting, why, and what their support via Patreon enables.
I think a lot of people would be happy to pay small amounts, but what are the running costs, and what is the roadmap and requirements and cost to scale and improve performance etc. What happens to additional funds over and above the running costs? (Fair compensation for time should be a thing!)
Another consideration is aside from the financial side, what other support will be required to scale and what are plans for that - additional admins, any other mods for “official” communities etc.
It’s a very exciting time, delicate but full of potential!
Thank you for the reminder, it’s a breeze of fresh air with all transparency on this platform that’s we’re not used to - coming from Reddit. I can only hope that this “movement” persists and that lemmy or any similar fediverse app will eventually become the norm. It certainly feels inevitable to me, having seen that the grass is greener on this side
Thanks a lot for the post! Super nice to hear. Would also like to point out that “the customer is always right” was originally meant for sales. I.e. if they want a meat themed car, sell it to them, dont tell them its in bad taste. So for more ways than one treat those that serve you with respect. Theyre serving the community, not your servants.
This is honestly so refreshing. I forgot what it felt like to not be the product or customer online.
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
If i’m not mistaken, the original saying was more along the lines of “The customer should always feel he’s right”. Anyway, the gist is that any side is “always right” should never be the mindset of any sane business or service.
Not entirely related to the topic, but something that I think everyone shold be aware of
The old saying is that “the customer is always right in matters of taste.”
If you just love making green widgets but your customers buy blue ones 10x more than green, you should make blue widgets, not green ones.
I think its better summed up as “sell what sells.”
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“The customer is always right” is a very popular saying, usually uses by managers to tell their front-facing employees that they must prostrate themselves before the customer on behalf of the corporation.
This is to create a false feeling of entitlement and service in the customer while the corporation seeks to squeeze all value from both employee and customer.
None of those relationships fit into the fediverse scheme.
I heard it was shortened from “the customer is always right in knowing what they want”
I don’t really think there’s a risk of a business having an abundance of deference to the customer. Would be a nice problem to have, these days.
Karen demands to speak to your manager
The version I like is “the customer is always right in matters of taste”. You can’t tell them what they should want, but they can’t get it for a penny.
And that’s where I’m just loving it. All dope apps and services without a single person being greedy. I still haven’t seen a dev ask for money for any apps and the crazy part is I would pay for Memmy in a heart beat.
Let’s make lemmy the best community in the world without corporate greed!
