Convener: Johannes Ernst (https://j12t.org, @j12t@j12t.social, @j12t.org)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Mark Reeves (@heymarkreeves@mstdn.social)
• Jeremiah Lee (@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold)
• Andy (@andypiper@macaw.social)
• Kyle R. Conway (@K_REY_C@social.coop)
• Jaz-Michael King (IFTAS, @jaz@mastodon.iftas.org)
• David (@daj@gofer.social)
• Dmitri Z. (@dmitri@social.coop)
• Georgia (@georgiagemo@threads.net)
• Scott M. Stolz (@scott@loves.tech, @scott@codejournal.dev)

Notes

Johannes presenting slides:

• How do we get money into the space? So many problems become solvable with it.
• What does it cost to run a social network? Using publicly available data about active users and core costs
  • Twitter: $1.15/user/month. (Revenue: $1.95 user/month)
  • Meta: $1.54/user/month (Revenue: $4.10 user/month)
• Funding sources possible:
  • Donations and grants
  • Volunteers
  • Charging for products/services
  • Ads
  • Equity
• First 2 limit us, but other options have notable drawbacks
• Distinguish two classes of users: promoters and regular users. Promoters behave differently because they have a business reason for posting.
• Tech providers: tech / product / service developers / operators
• In existing systems, Regular users fund promoters who buy ads who fund providers
• On fediverse, not so many promoters, so money is flowing from users to providers and is quite limited
• What would it take to get 100x donations from regular users?
• How would users love promotions and buy?
• What would promoters pay for lots of other than ads? And how would they recoup money from users?

Discussion

Jaz: Mastodon 4.4 will finally provide an option to turn on referrer so we can now show sites that Mastodon is actually sending traffic to places. Publishers don’t see that traffic to consider Mastodon important right now. (small drawback is that it will be from each instance, not all from “Mastodon” - but, Sarah Jeong from the Verge told me [Andy] that she thinks this is a “game-changer”, which it could be)

Jeremiah: This is why I append ?ref=activitypub to all my links

(unnamed): think Advertisers are NEEDED. Advertisers sell the ads. But ads don’t have to be the shit we’re used to. They can be seamless. Accounts on Twitter go viral for interacting silly, funny. But it’ll look like something wholly new that the advertisers can figure out.

Jeremiah (chat): Lots of evidence of privacy-preserving advertising that’s not hostile to the user experience:

• https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/
• https://www.carbonads.net/
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising

Johannes: question of how to get more developers in, but need to figure out how to get more money in

(unnamed): Fear of enshittification and hesitancy to introduce advertising.

Kyle: Challenge of getting people onto the social web apps and that’s getting better. Challenge of consent for ads on content.

Dmitri Z: also a matter of lower cost. If another decade, how do we raise money to use email? It’s not hard to figure out how to fund email. Ads are only possible when you have client capture. Think of RSS: ads got put into RSS posts or other places, it didn’t work well. The first client that introduces ads will be easy to switch away to another one.

Johannes: Blogs went away.

Chat: Consideration of public infrastructure, such as universities and libraries.

Jaz: I want as many people on the social web as there are on the web. Strong dislike of ads in general. We shouldn’t be trying funding software and developers. We should be trying to fund communities, people operating the software. OECD (other than US) funds these kinds of community, cultural groups. The Welsh government wouldn’t be interested in hosting a Mastodon instance, but it would be interested in supporting a community being on the social web.

Johannes: So that’s tax payer money, a supercharged version of donations

Jeremiah (chat): I want my email provider to also be my social web provider. Come on, Fastmail. It already hosts my email.

(unnnamed): Recruiters pay a lot to reach people. Perhaps a more person-aligned form of advertising or alternative to advertising.

VRM: vendor relationship management proposes that the user “advertises” their need to vendors, not the other way around: https://projectvrm.org

(unnamed): The cost to run a server just for yourself is no much. Small amount to run just for your family. People owning their servers should be reasonable, like $5/month

Johannes: Not so much operational cost, but management overhead. How to deal with moderation, spam, abuse, etc.

Jeremiah (chat): Moderation for your o own server is not much different than spam management for email. It’s not a major problem when it’s for yourself and not managing the behavior of other people.

Johannes CTA: can we find ways to fill out the costs for Fediverse services similar to the costs shown in the slides for existing public (private) companies

Chat: We have had three decades of social web shaped by US affordances and perspectives, I feel like we owe it to ourselves to explore different paths as opposed to just exploring the marginally better version of those affordances/perspectives as the most/best we can imagine

Comment: Member contributions, public fundraising for doing this with the community. Johannes: Challenge is scale.

Comment: Advertising is not fundamentally evil. Need to figure out what the mechanism is for someone who wants to get their message out. Best thing to do now is figure out how to get a good version in the protocol before a bad version comes in other forms.

Comment: Everyone is self-funding their own Internet access. Jaron Lanier talking for decades about how if you’re not paying for a service, you’re the thing being sold. We have to pay for them in some way. A subscription fee is normal for digital access. Could become normal for social media access too.

Jaz (chat): FediTax on all ISP bills! I’m in!

Jeremiah (chat): ISPs originally provided your email address.

Johannes: Telcos could be encouraged to provide as an add-on. Attempted to pitch telcos years ago and they don’t understand this sort of thing. They prefer to just complain about becoming dumb pipes instead of doing something about it. Would be a good business model for them if people ran it on their modem in their home.

Georgia: +1 to not all advertising is evil. Different is the consent to be advertised at. I like so many of the ads. I find out about events, buy beautiful things. Don’t know if we can do ads that well without the intense surveillance. Generic ads don’t have that special feeling.

Comment: Experiment with libraries in the Netherlands, have a role in providing digital access and support. Allows providing a safe space to start journey onto the fediverse. Paid for by the patrons of a library.

Jaz: Concern for any civic space is their ability to moderate. The tools are not good enough yet when hate or pornography flood in.

Kyle: Hate advertisement that I didn’t want to see. Bandwagon is inoffensive to me.

Jeremiah: Enjoy sponsored posts by people I follow, but need to have ability to designate posts as such, a legal requirement in most countries.

Jaz: One experiment (mastodon.business?) got so defederated quickly that it’s not just protocol supporting it, but others being willing to accept it.

Libraries: https://openbiblio.social/about