YSK: While you're on Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse, you're not "the product" but you're also not "the customer".

People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.

Thanks OP. We have an opportunity to do things differently, and better.

When I signed up on a mastodon instance winter of 22, I moved a couple times, when I settled down, I setup $5/mo to the site.

When I signed up to lemmy.world, I did the same after a week.

No ads! No spying, no coercion, no CEOs whims to extract profit from accumulated past collective work. Sure admins mods etc can become assholes -- and we can move.

Wikipedia's innards can be icky at times, man politics around some pages is infuriating. GUESS WHAT. WE DONT EVEN GET TO DO THAT MUCH on a corporate site. Most Wikipedia.org pages operate just fine. There's always someone "wrong on the internet" somewhere, we can choose where we put our energies.

Reddit seemed incrementally better than most -- up to the Troubles. But I just got lulled by the mostly great people there and the great conversations, but jarred awake, again, by the reminder than in reality, it was just another pump and dump deal. It was just taking longer than my attention span.

This post missed the most important part people should know: someone is footing the bill for you to use this service. If you're not paying, they will make their money in whatever what they choose. Potential resulting in you becoming the product. Yes, even on lemmy. So if your instance mod needs funding, kick em a few bucks, be their customer.

One of my favourite things about early days Reddit was it’s growing community of positivity. There was actual encouragement to be nice to each other and subreddits were built around celebrating stuff.

Negativity was downvoted into oblivion so you never saw that stuff on the All page and popular pages.

I’m seeing the same thing with Lemmy right now and hope it continues long into the future. The lack of profiteering should really help with this.

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To quote the first words of the old Dune movie:

"A beginning is a very delicate time."

What we should all take responsibility for is the health and quality of the community. We should be more active citizens, instead of the passive "consumers" we've all been corporately groomed to be.

I think more instances are the answer because this activity can't be cheap. maybe Lemmy.world splits off into 2 or 4 instances. Lemmy1.world etc

This dynamic will have to stabilize in costs. I don't know what that looks like.

Nope. You're the USER. A concept that is as old as computing and yet has gone completely by the wayside recently with the corporate monopolization of the internet.

Good to see it making a comeback.

Lets see what the future brings. As long as the user count is low there isn't much of a problem, but if instances suddenly have millions of users, it will get expensive for admins to run the service. If too few people donate (what is usually the case), admins are forced to search for other ways to finance the infrastructure. The other point is AI, wheter you like it or not, if Lemmy is big enough, the content (conversations etc.) will be used to train LLMs. Also, the content will certainly be interesting for advertisers to learn user preferences. The difficulty comes with scale.

This is open source. We are neither products nor customers - we are all test subjects.

It's like hanging out at a friend's house. Follow their rules.

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.

“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.

I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)

What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”

The second quote often leaves out the rest of it.

The full original quote was.

The customer is always right in matters of taste. Notice how that means something completely different than the quote everyone uses?

That is all I have to add.

It truly does remind me of the wide-spread forum days, but with the bells and whistles that comes from connectivity across the board.

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.

People always forget the last part of the quote: "The customer is always right in matters of taste."

</pedantic> ;-)

I’m actually paying monthly to help with server costs. What am I?

"Do awesome things"

BEANS

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

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!

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.

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.

Let’s make lemmy the best community in the world without corporate greed!

While we're at it, big thanks to the instance owners :) I'm donating an Euro a month, it's not a lot but at least something

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.

The comparison to Wikipedia is a really good one.

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

I'm just here for the spicy memes.

I honestly think more instances should support some sort of donation or explicit customer model. Running such things is expensive, and sourcing money when things are ran for free is hard, so these kinds of platforms tend to be ran out of pocket, which makes them somewhat volatile. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of big platforms and instead should build something sustainable from the get go.

Quick question: I have an account on Lemmy.world and kbin.social.. When trying to post on Lemmy.world it just spins and posts.. so I bopped over to my kbin account and one thing I noticed is that Kbin says it has 39 comments, but Lemmy.world this same post has 139... how do I square this circle?

Extremely well put. Not the customer or product but the citizen. And try paying taxes if you're able. This is a FUBU type of thing.

We are guests.

We’re all guests in an apartment building with an open door policy in a village of apartment buildings.

Help out your building owners with the utility costs if ya can, design some cool apartments for others to experience and visit, but most importantly: take care of your neighbors and commune with each other to grow a stronger community

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.

The positivity is appreciated a lot. Have a nice day.

Actually, this is not necessarily true. Because it is open source doesn't mean it cannot be commercial. I can happily imagine that with the future rise of spam, porn, and other nasties, I would happily pay small amount of money for well moderated, clean experience.

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This is honestly so refreshing. I forgot what it felt like to not be the product or customer online.

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.

so a real question if a one instance decided to setup for advertising and used that money to pay mods would that be acceptable?

If you're not paying for it, directly or through donations, you are the product. If you're not paying for it via donations, someone else is paying for you. Nothing really changes.

Put another way, this is a commons. You share the job of maintaining the commons, or you recognize that someone else is supporting you and you pay it forward when you can. Nothing is free, and we can lose these spaces if we don't take care of them.

People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.

Great post, thanks for taking the time to write up this sentiment

Speak for yourself. I am but a simple upvote salesmen. I sell one upvote for the low price of one uplemmy. Get yours today, limited time only!

There's a reason I've decided to contribute to whatever "primary" Lemmy server I end on.

Infrastructure costs money, and so does the admins time.

The sentence “if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product” might be accurate, but it would make more sense to me to say that if you're not the customer, you're the worker.

Facebook and Twitter run on unpaid labor, mostly made by abuse survivors and especially teenagers. Twitter has been enshittified pretty fast so this has been the case since at least 2012. These aren't just scam, the long-running relationship between the scammer and his victims imply most components that you would find in a standard definition of abuse, including limiting their ability to conceptualize what's happening to them, for example with hard or hidden characters limits.

Edit : I've forgot to mention that, but Mastodon also optimizes for engagement, I believe that we needed that to get attention from the media and thus to gradually build migration waves. There are good reasons to use Mastodon, but there are also forms of abuse there, total institutions as would say Goffman – defined by their inmates' isolation within a differentiated society. So there's a lot of bullshit. If we want to get rid of that, we need people to use software that won't abuse them, such as https://bonfirenetworks.org.

Thank you for clearfy. Good thing to know.

A great post that I wholeheartedly agree with.

Just as with Mastodon / Twitter, the services may look very similar but what many fail to grasp immediately is the culture is different (in a very good way!).

Gary King : We want to be free! We want to be able to do what we want to do! We want to get loaded, and we want to have a good time. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have a good time.

Thanks to everyone who contributes in big or small ways.

Thanks for the reminder! I signed up at sdf.org because I saw that r/bbs had moved over. As soon as I saw SDF's website, which hasn't had its look updated since the mid 90's by my eye, I knew it was the one for me. I can tell they've been struggling a bit under the load but I appreciate so much that they're hosting an instance and I have confidence they'll get it all running smoothly. They're a non-profit and I'll be donating as soon as I'm able.

I do worry, though, that as the fediverse grows many of the instances won't be able to scale up and will drop out. I'm not an admin or sysop and know nothing of how this works on the back end, so hopefully those fears are groundless.

Absolutely. I'm glad that we're cultivating such a great community so far, hopefully it will only continue to grow and improve as time goes on.

That is magnificent 👏👏👏

This is so sweet and wholesome that I might faint from a sugar OD!

“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.

I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)

What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”

I kinda like looking at Lemmy as a sort of Internet Pub on steroids (Activity Pub). Kind of like a busy street with all kinds of pubs, libraries, bookstores etc. But where those places have something to sell like liquor, coffee or books, Lemmy does not really have anything to sell but just offers a place of conversation. It alsof isn't for everyone, anybody can join but each pub had their own rules.

I see a Lemmy admin like a barkeeper of one of the many pubs around. We sit in this one pub with one owner but we meet a lot of people from other pubs around. And if we like, we can walk across the street and visit somewhere else or even move there permanently. We have options, we as users have more power and especially actual alternatives to go to.

Donating is a thing to help the pubs keep existing. Like tipping the waiter. I'm a big fan of OpenCollective and Patreon for how they allow these small groups of people to take back parts of the internet for themselves!

There is no need to commercialize this space, it's largely for conversation. Here there is no need for the waiter tot eastdrop on conversations, to make the pub all smart or to guilt you into a VIP pass tot enter.

I really hope we can find a way to tip the waiters and barkeepers incidentally like we would in a pub. Like a donation, and maybe also a more prominent place like a tip jar for the instance visible in posts or just the website. I think we can make it work, if we really try.

Yeah the big pubs might come knocking, but its up to each of us to decide if we want to visit any of their places.

Well said.

• The Product: the fediverse
• The Consumer: the people who created and maintain the servers
• The Media: you.

You are a patron of the service.

I’ve been on this earth long enough not to trust the “nothing sketchy going on here, just people giving away stuff for free!” never turns out well.

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.

...I'm sorry, but blind positivism won't get you, Lemmy and nothing else to anywhere. Nothing is perfect neither free of "predatory capitalism" -- one day, you will "be the product". And there is nothing you can do about it, because this world ain't a fairy tale where we've got fairies flying around and giving us anything we want -- we need money. And lots of it.

Shout at me, swarm at me with negative downvotes like it's the best thing you can do (which probably is), but this is the real world, giving it to you with a couple words, fair and square.

for now. dont the developers and admins of lemmy run lemmy.ml which stands for marxist Leninism because the admins are marxist?

Damn it’s pretty cool that you get internet so far up your own ass.