Nah, they’ll just fix the excess inventory with another contest! It worked really well last time!

Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you’re not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what’s the point?

Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that’s your whole motivation it’s going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.

There’s a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.

I’d say it’s more that we’ve been paying out the nose in the form of offering up our data and digital autonomy, and by allowing not only the Internet but our societies at large to degrade and polarize. We’ve paid dearly for our ‘free’ services, in the case of the US with everything from our reproductive rights to our connections with our own families and communities.

I’d much rather pay the price of an extra latte now and then for real internet communities than deal with actual Nazis and orbital Teslas for some shitty undermoderated ad feeds infested with trolls, AI, and literal societal saboteurs on the payrolls of Putin and Winnie the Pooh.

I could see a legitimate service being made out of something like an extra private lemmy, or a lemmy with additional features. Sort of like you’ll see these suites of services from Proton or Nord. Yeah, i can set up my own SMTP server, even encrypt my data, but it’s a lot easier to pay a few bucks to have a reliable service do it.

With federated services eventually becoming mainstream, i wouldn’t be surprised to see some companies offering packages that do things like provide additional privacy or larger amounts of storage.

Or like I’d imagine sustainable video hosts will have to monetize somehow just to pay for the storage space.

This is a big part of the shift in mentality that needs to happen. Something doesn’t have to be the biggest to be better. We don’t need millions of concurrent users per server to enjoy connecting with other people and sharing ideas and art.

Like, a local cafe doesn’t need to beat the profit margins of a Starbucks, it just needs to make ends meet. And it’s probably a lot better experience in the process.

It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it’s a pretty foreign concept for some folks who’ve bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.

Seems like the system is working just fine!

Doing that on Jerboa right now. It’s great!

Choice is the point of federation.

Being able to create spaces according to your needs without having your hand forced by anyone is kind of the point of the Fediverse. Beehaw can cultivate a community that fits what they want, just like Lemmy.world. That’s what it’s for.

There’s nothing stopping you from registering on Beehaw if you want to post there and contribute to that community. But without being able to detach themselves from instances that have open registration, there’s no way to even slow trolls down. Banning would be meaningless, because you can register as many accounts as you could want.

The point of the Fediverse is decentralization and choice where the default options have been a bland toxic mess.

Personally, I enjoy both the more cultivated environment of Beehaw and the bigger community feeling of Lemmy.world, so I registered with both Beehaw and Lemmy.blahaj.zone so that i can post and read whatever.

It’s not about what’s better, it’s about choice.

I completely forgot about web rings, and that’s honestly a great example. It really does feel like we’re getting a little piece of the old Internet back; spreading out and bringing back that individualized experience. And yet the connectivity of the fediverse has the potential to give us some of the good parts of the modern Internet.

A few years down the road this will probably be looked at as a transformative time for the Internet, for better or for worse. Given the negative impact of so called ‘web 2.0’ social media, I’d say getting away from it could have as far reaching positive impacts as getting tied into it had toxic results.