Was just thinking how nice it is to be on social media and not be bombarded with ads!
Its amazing how this is the first site in years that I dont need to install blockers or scroll through bs or be so cynical with what I read.
Fellow Australians, rejoice in this little space we have from corporate bombardment
It’s nice, but keep in mind that it’s largely unsustainable without some form of revenue. Reddit didn’t turn evil just because of a bunch of shareholders, it went that way because the money was drying up and they weren’t making any money. They’re still not making money.
As lemmy grows and server costs increase, especially for the larger instances, more will be asked of the community to help foot the bill. This current server has a good breakdown in costs for those curious and while it doesn’t seem like a lot today, it’ll start to jump quite considerably as you hit certain thresholds on database sizes and whatnot. If you like this server, please by the admin a coffee to say thank you :)
(I’m not affiliated in any way with aussie.zone, it’s not even my home instance).
On the point of being unsustainable I disagree. Instances will need to find an equilibrium between cost/expense and retention of old content. The higher the revenue/cost tolerance, the older the content that can be retained. I expect most instances will end up purging non-local content after an amount of time, but retain local content as long as possible. Maybe I’m naive, but I have confidence that people smarter than me will come up with systems to do this. It may result in a usenet style setup where instances boast about their retention periods.
On your second point re: community contributions, I agree entirely. I’ve been very fortunate that there have been some generous donations from aussie.zone users, so I’m not worried about server costs at this point. Server costs will go up as data volumes increase, that is unavoidable. How the community decides to handle this in the future is the real question, based on what I’ve experienced so far I’m confident we’ll be around for a long time to come.
If it ever comes down to that. I’m not adverse to obvious and non-intrusive ads. It’s the fake shit that pretends to be organic that pisses me off. I feel it pollutes the entire social media experience with distrust.
I have no intention of every placing ads on aussie.zone. Should finances ever become an issue, I’ll send up a 🚩 with a stickied post.
For now, finances are fine 🙂
As someone who works with the advertisers, any concessions to them simply starts the process that snowballs into a nightmare scenario. There’s just too much money to be made. Small non-intrusive ads become short skippable ads becomes larger temporarily unskippable ads, becomes multiple short skippable ads becomes dominant intrusive ads and when the well runs dry there it becomes sponsored content and Guerilla advertising. Fuck em all. Cut them off at the neck and never let them in.