I use Bluesky and Mastodon. Mastodon better hits where I want the fediverse to go but Bluesky is so much easier to use. Signup, UI, flagship app, feeds, and content is just so much less of a headache. But it feels like it’s a matter of time before it’s enshittified.
I was thinking about how much I hate big tech but there’s a lot of small and mid-size companies that I have neutral to positive views on. Canonical, Mozilla, 37 Signals, Odoo are the ones that come to mind. All of those have a revenue model but also actively support open source initiatives and developers. None are perfect but better than “big tech” and get more done than just donation based development.
It feels like there needs to be some for-profit companies (without ads and maintaining privacy) that can help support the development around ActivityPub and maintain apps and servers that are easier to onboard and easier to use. Does this exist?
What could be some non-evil revenue models? I pay $20/month for a blogging platform for my business website. Maybe have a service to host AP servers for businesses or journalists? Personal private encrypted cloud services like photo backups that are integrated with AP?
The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.
IOW, I’m not arguing that “coops” can not exist. What I am arguing is we will never get rid of Big Tech if we keep forcing the idea that only community-owned services are acceptable models of governance.
When it comes to hosting instances, yes, I do believe we have to universally keep investors/a for-profit structure out.
Putting these two in the same bag, this is what OP and I are saying.
Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend “on profit”, the methods that and incentives are wildly different.