Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter?
Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.
Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.
Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.
We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.
I’m not willing to use it now, for free… not sure if this plan will incentivize me to join up.
According to Musk and his cronies, it may incentivise you?
I'll tell you next week when I stop laughing.
I'm not opposed to paying for services I enjoy/find value in, and from companies I don't dislike
Twitter does not pass these guidelines
I wasn't even using it when it was free!
I don't use Twitter for free
Me too. But I have no problems with them penalizing the idiots that still remain.
I'd be willing to pay to stop hearing about twitter at this stage.
This is the Way.
At this point, I have to conclude that Musk is actively trying to kill Twitter.
I think he, accurately, determined that it was a sinking ship. He got as many employees to leave as possible and is now trying to get as much money as possible from the service before it dies.
It wasn't sinking before he sunk it. It was losing money, but not that much... then instead of making intelligent, reasonable changes, he stuck them with a ridiculous amount of debt, slashed and burned the work force, and scared off half the advertisers.
I mean it had repeatedly lost money for years, I honestly don't think anything could have said it. I am not at all defending Musk, I just think the platform was doomed with our without him.
Twitter was not in danger of going bankrupt before. They are now due to Musk's actions and financial setup. They did actually make decent profits (over $1B) in 2019 and 2018. The previous organization could have made modest cuts and improved efficiency to become profitable... also they were paying good salaries to over 8,000 people, and more advertisers and users were benefiting from the platform than are now. Musk's destruction of the company was entirely unnecessary.
I suspect the majority of people who would pay for twitter already are.
And it's a laughably low amount.
Someone posted a few weeks ago that it's like 60,000 people who are blue checked and not getting it for free.
That's still a lot of suckers.
I'm not even willing to use it for free 💀
I'd be willing to use it if I get paid though. 10$/month and I'd even post something once in a while.
Can't imagine why.... Nope
Oh yes, certainly. Wow Mr Musk you’re such a genius and good decision maker, please start charging for Twitter. Please don’t listen to the naysayers and go ahead with the brilliant business strategy. I’m definitely not taking delight in your constant series of self-owns.
I'd really love if we could all convince him to make it like $20 a month to make sure no gross poors are still there afterwards either and watch all his sycophants idiot followers realize they are also to poor for that and it end up completely empty.
And while you're at it, screw me In the ass! I bet that 1/2 inch will feel great between my ass cheeks! Fucker.
I wouldn't use twitter if they paid me
I would pay them for a product that suppresses all news about Elon musk so i dont have to read about him every other day. Now that's a growth market.
I’d be willing to pay $100/month for it. Please charge at least that much!
Pay no attention to the fact that I used it once for like a week 15 years ago. That’s only because it was too free!
Hello poor people, it should at least be $1000!
I hate twitter!
Use mastodon.
Twitter has just gotten worse and worse!
Use mastodon.
If only there were some other platform!
...
Here's the thing - you don't need either of them
and you don’t need lemmy/kbin either, but yknow we like it
what’s your point?
Could be they ment
Weirdly, I think you both have excellent points. And yet I'm here. At this point I'm almost not sure why
Whilst I mostly agree with you, what I use Twitter for, and now Mastodon, is to get real-time updates on projects and events. I follow projects like Asahi Linux (where devs post updates from their personal accounts), or various service providers or trending hashtags to get real-time updates on events, such as say an M365 outage, a zero day vulnerability, or a natural disaster (eg: earthquakes). Sure, there are other sites as well that report on events, but these sites mostly get their updates from Twitter (and not having an account on it would exclude you from participating). Thanks to Twitter, I've been able to interact directly with developers, netsec folks, organisations and just randoms from across the world - all of which, has been convenient to do so via a single platform. It's kinda hard to replicate that sort of interaction across other platforms.
I mean... You don't need Lemmy either yet here you are.
Use Firefish too! It's better designed than Mastodon and SO cute.
let's not pretend mastodon is a viable alternative at this time. sure, it's not an ad-algo-hellscape yet (meta will change that tho) but you're at the mercy of whatever powertripping admin you have to deal on the instance you're on. unless you tune into the echo chamber most instances are, you're not going to have interesting conversations. it's very slow, has barebone features and there is a lack of actually interesting oc posting people on the masto side of the fediverse.
I feel like these comments are from folks who haven't really used it. The traffic on your specific instance isn't really the point most of the time. And the fact that you can find another instance easily if the guy in charge of your instance is an asshole is a pretty huge feature. Who runs the other instance of Twitter you can move to?
You can migrate your account and followers/following lists until you find an instance where the admin isn't a "power tripping asshole" - and I'm not convinced that's a widespread problem in any case.
The Mastodon interface is kinda barebones though still not as bad as I think you are describing, but I migrated (gasp) my entire mastodon account to firefish.social, which federates with Mastodon, with a couple of clicks, and the interface and features there are really great. (And there are also multiple firefish instances to choose from in case the admin becomes an power tripping asshole)
But most importantly:
Why wouldn't you be following people from the broader fediverse? The federated feed on firefish (and on most instances I'd think) scrolls by so fast I have to pause it to read anything. There's plenty being posted. Certainly no less comparatively than I see on kbin/lemmy, and it gets better continuously.
I'm all for using what you like and avoiding what you don't, but this is like an infomercial-level criticism of Mastodon, like when they spend 45 secs showing you how hard it is to scramble eggs and cook them without their forty dollar gadget.
i've been on two instances since last fall: one mastodon, one pleroma.
on the mastodon one i found out by accident, that i was "shadowbanned" from it's own public timeline. inquiring why this happend, the mods didn't told me. when i asked then that i would like to know what i did "wrong" and if they could lift this, they said "no". i deleted my account after that.
the pleroma one was even worse because literally on day one i was zerged by some american internet rightwingers because i posted something they didn't agree with. i deleted my account after that.
what do you suggest, how many times should i move/delete my account until i found an instance that at least gives me the twitter treatment instead of just doing random policy?
I mean, I already recommended firefish.social, but you are under no obligation to try it. My point is that your experience is very much not typical I think.
In any case, if you plunk "left leaning mastodon instances" into your search engine of choice that would probably work, but you could also try a popular instance which would address several of your concerns. If firefish doesn't interest you with its various improvements to the UI, why not just go for the original and (I think) biggest - mastodon.social.
https://mastodon.social/auth/sign\_up
I'm not sure that's actually possible for a mod to do on Mastodon. Did you make your posts "unlisted" by default by accident?
mod/admin/whover was behind the support mail address told me, that someone made a complaint about my account (they refused to tell me what the problem was) and that they unlisted/shadowbanned me from the servers public timeline.
The microblogging side of the Fediverse definitely has a cultural problem: people keep thinking that the instance that they join should be an indication of what "tribe" you belong to, and this can be worse that high-school politics. The only way that you can truly avoid issues with power-tripping admins is by running your own instance, but even that doesn't help much when there are some instances around (cough mastodon art cough) that seem to love the drama and play the "everything I don't like is literally hitler" game.
Anyway, if you are still looking for an alternative: I have a small, professionally managed Mastodon instance that has the simple goal of offering a reliable service at an affordable price.
It works "well enough".
I don't get this. I've had many interesting conversations with people on Mastodon. And there are a number of interesting people I follow.
This is a problem solved by more people joining... And from my POV Mastodon is far more stable and mature than Lemmy is. I've had better conversations there without being swarmed by tankies and ultra-partisans as well.
Perhaps you've chosen bad people to follow?
I refused to use this cancerous hellsite long before its 'fall' what makes you think I want to use it now?
I wouldn't be willing to use if I was getting paid.
I don't use fascist websites at all, I'm certainly not going to pay for one. Come now.
We have reached the point where I want answers from any person or organization that is still active on twitter. They are actively legitimizing nazis. If you are on twitter, you are part of the problem. I’m not gonna draw lines around which people on a right wing reactionary platform are the “good ones” any more.
One more wave for Mastodon for sure.
A monthly fee seems idiotic but yes please do it! Please!
That said I think a $5 signup fee on Mastodon or Lemmy that is not refunded if you get banned would seriously help stop bots. They only make pennies per bot and if you make their cost even minimally painful the economics fall apart.
It would also stop most regular users from signing up. This kind of stuff being free has just become the norm.
Even better!
Not that I add much but I would not be here if that was the case.
Blizzard thought that with Overwatch, but despite the game costing money botting was still very much an issue.
He would need to pay me for being there, and not just a little.
No, Twitter/X always been shit. Yes even before Elon Musk became the CTO. It was awful under Jack Dorsey.
It was actually a lot of fun for alt comedy and staying in touch with friends 10-15 years ago. Once Trump won in 2016 it turned into a nonstop tire fire with him pouring kerosene on it daily. It never completely recovered from that, and obviously it’s gotten far far worse under Elon. That’s when I finally had to cut ties, even if it’s been fading for years.
I hope he actually does this. Twitter will die almost immediately and become completely worthless.
Then he can file bankruptcy and not have to pay back the loans he took out to buy Twitter
I think it's all his plan. Naming it X was the big red flag for me
It's almost there already.
It'll be an interesting experiment.
Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder!
If I had to pay to use a social media service, it would have to be something I found utterly necessary. I'm not a fan of the trend toward everything being a subscription, so if any service unexpectedly changes to a subscription based service, I'm far more likely to experiment with cutting it out of my life and routine to see if I really needed it to begin with. So far out of the hundreds of subscription service I've had over the last 15 years, I've resubscribed to only 10 or so, and out of those only 3 where because I genuinely valued the service enough to pay for it, rather then because I had gotten an offer for 3 months free, then terminated the account before I was charged for anything. Why pay a provider to use my data for profit and show me ads I have no interest in or desire to see? If I wanted commercials I would watch cable, instead of using a streaming service I explicit choose for not showing constant ads.
I would treat Lemmy the same way. If I had to pay, I wouldn't play. There are other options for my time, simple as that.
What about the time of the people developing the software and the things that you want to use? Software doesn't grow on trees.
Yeah, plenty of things have become subscriptions because some asshole MBA decided that it is better to try to continue milk consumers instead of offering a quality product once. But on the other hand, there are plenty of services that have an ongoing operational cost and can not be priced fairly if we just charge it once. If it is fair to pay our phone lines or water bill for their monthly cost, why wouldn't it be fair to pay for a digital service that costs every month to host your data, keep it secure and up-to-date?
Before Musk took over, Twitter was profitable. So you know you can make a profit without asking for subscription, and while being honest with ads (they were labeled and vetted properly).
That is not true. Twitter was not profitable and they were never "honest". They engaged in ad tracking and data mining like all Big Tech.
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/TWTR/twitter/gross-profit
And at least they labeled their ads accordingly. People have reported that ads were not labeled in their feed in the last month.
https://www.brex.com/journal/gross-profit-vs-net-profit
Twitter made a small profit in 2018 and 2019. They lost money in every other year.
In fact the year before Musk started ranting about buying it, they reported their biggest loss ever.
The company was a disaster before and after Musk.
When I said there where other options for my time, I meant if I don't like the service's conditions, I can choose to not use it at all and do something else with my time. As an example, I don't like Facebook, mostly due to its privacy violations and seeking disregard for security. So, I don't use it. I spend my time playing games, or visiting a library, or pursuing a hobby. Facebook is unnecessary to my social life or my existence.
There are plenty of things and services that we don't need to have, yet we pay whenever we use them. In this case here, it's Lemmy. Do you support it somehow or you just want to leech off it? It's okay if you don't pay for it, but don't pretend you are not using it and don't be surprised if its development is slow compared with the corporate alternatives.
I've already said I don't pay for anything in Lemmy. If by support you mean, do I contribute code, servers or bandwidth to Lemmy as a project? No, because I don't have those things to contribute in this field. I only know enough code to announce "Hello World", I don't own or operate a server farm or service, and I don't have enough bandwidth to be able to contribute a reasonable amount to a project. However, I think your argument is starting to lose focus. I have not been advocating leaving social media of all kinds, that would be hypocritical since I'm posting this here after all, I have been advocating for avoiding the use of overly monetized platforms. I also noted that I don't have an objection to paying for a service I find desirable. I pay for a streaming service for my household, and occasionally purchase apps that I find important. However, I think the over use of ads and subscriptions have polluted the market of software and services. Of course open-source projects, like Lemmy, are going to develop slower then a corporate alternative. But we wouldn't be here if we all wanted the corporate alternative, would we? I can't speak for your choice, of course, but I for one use Lemmy because I left Reddit. I use Linux because I prefer it over Windows and despise Mac, and I use Raspberry Pi's because I prefer to self-host my photo back ups rather then use Google.
Twitter has become a shit show, not unlike watching Facebook devolve back in the early 2000s. I prefer not to use it because I have better options in life for my time, not because I think I'm better then those who do use it. My original comment was a sufficient explanation of this philosophy, I think. I'm not calling for such extreme measures as cutting all social media from use, I'm reminding with my own example to be cognizant of one's time and use of services that are not under one's own control. That can be Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Lemmy, Mastodon, Twitch, Youtube, or any of the numerous other platforms that are available today. Don't avoid the path if it's really the one you want to walk, but be aware of your choice and know you have one. That's all I'm saying.
If you want a free (in all its meanings) platform to speak on just use Mastodon
Or just avoid social media all together.
Its a plague thats bad for mental health, anyways.
If you want a free platform to speak on, avoid social media all together?
I agree with the social media generally being bad for people, but I'm not sure your reply lines up ha
You would have to pay me, for me to be there
For those that are saying "no" because it's Musk: would you be willing to pay to your account on Lemmy, Mastodon, or any other social network that you happen to use?
Let me be specific: I am not asking if you donate or contribute to any server. I am asking if you'd sign up to a social network that required payment from every user as a measure to avoid spammers and to keep the service running.
No. Not today at any rate. I probably would have supported a subscription for Reddit 5-8 years ago. The community and content was better. Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon hasn’t caught up to that level yet so I don’t see a point in paying for that. Facebook has gone full stupid - they should pay me for all the data mining they use me and my connections for. I rarely use FB for the social aspect anymore, I belong to many hobby and interest groups on it and use it more like a forum than a “highlight reel of my life” thing.
Isn't that a chicken-and-egg problem? If all the other alternatives are crap but can survive because of their deep pockets, how can we ever expect the Fediverse to grow without supporting it regardless of its current size?
That’s above my pay grade. I honestly don’t know. However, I’ll offer that Lemmy instances are somewhat analogous to the hobbyist or special interest forums of yesteryear. A “webring” of sorts. Smaller, cheaper, manageable by dedicated individuals…
They’re not massive and centralized servers requiring all that goes with operating and maintaining them. Ad injection, legal teams, CEOs to pay…the fediverse is a completely different animal compared to big social media. It exists because of lots of little “pockets” and not the deep pockets of centralized social media.
I'd would hope that was the case with Lemmy, but it seems that the majority of people that moved are just going to the largest instances and trying to replicate what they had on Reddit.
For Mastodon, there are indeed a good number of servers run by a small group of friends who simply don't care about its cost, but it's getting pretty clear that any instance with more than 1000 active users is simply not sustainable on donations alone. Every month there is a new instance closing down because the admins realized that the cost per user are growing faster than the donation base.
That’s unfortunate, and doesn’t bode well for the growth of this platform.
Yes, and this is why I've been saying for months already that if we really want to have a viable alternative to shit services we get from Big Tech, we need to start putting our money where our collective mouth is.
That’s a tough hill to climb. The internet grew on the largesse of individuals who contributed time and financial support to smaller endeavors, whether it be software or a website. It’s going to be all but impossible to get people to pay for it when even big services like Facebook are free, that’s the conundrum and why ad revenue and personal profile mining is used to fill the hole. Unfortunately costs have risen sharply alongside bandwidth demands, so one can’t run a basement server without bottlenecking on size or costs long before reaching critical mass for a community - and that’s what you mentioned in regards to lemmy.
Like I said…above my pay grade. I hope there’s some way a distributed network like Lemmy can succeed, I really enjoy what it’s becoming. Maybe a hub-and-spoke system will be the final form…big instances supported by more commercial means and smaller instances run by individuals and private funds.
And to go back to your original response: isn't that at least worth of some appreciation? Do you need to wait for the network to grow to start supporting it now by subscribing to a provider that costs $10/year (less than a dollar per month)?
I'm not into supporting alpha or beta versions, and honestly I don't spend enough time here to justify a subscription fee. If it were more fully fleshed out and had a lot more of the niche communities I enjoy, you bet...$10 or even $20/year would be worth paying to support the servers.
Ok, we will start going in circles already, but isn't that a bit of a "self-defeating prophecy"?
You say you like what it's becoming, but you don't want to support bootstrapping it. At the same time, history is showing us that any attempt to make the fediverse more popular is making the instances to crumble under their own weight because there is not strong backing after a certain size.
It's $10/year that we are talking about here, not a life-changing investment. If everyone keeps expecting high-quality content and an already optimized system that is able to be a home of billions of internet users (because the only realistic way for you get all the niche communities here will be when there are so many people here to the point that makes even the long tail a sizable group), then we will never get it.
I already donate to Mastodon development, and to the Mastodon server I'm on. It's a good reminder to donate to the Lemmy server I'm on too.
Good for you, but I specifically asked if you would join a server that charged from all users.
Also, if you don't mind me asking: how much are you contributing, and what if I told you that it would cost you a lot less to sign up to a professionally managed instance than whatever it is you are giving away each month?
It's tough because we've had "free" for so long of so many services. But I honestly think yes, as long as it was something very low like $5/month at most.
What if I tell you that for $5/month you can have a Mastodon account and bring 9 more of your friends?
I would yes. If it was a reasonable price and guaranteed that my data wouldn't be monetised.
Yes, offering a service completely free of ads and tracking is a irrevocable principle on Communick. Can you let me know what you think of the pricing?
I think I'd pay for Lemmy and Firefish. I like them both a lot. Not like a lot, but a tiny annual subscription fee.
If they had lifetime memberships like Livejournal did that would be cool.
Wouldn't give Elon the lice from my hair though, in the words of the great Maria Callas about her mother.
I don't think either are really active enough to justify a cost and a payment restriction would just worsen that. I do think lemmy should be supported because the whole concept is what reddit and twitter should've been to begin with.
I'm not hosting Firefish (yet), but I do have $10/year plans for Lemmy and Mastodon. Is that within your idea of "tiny fee"?
Absolutely. Thanks for replying, please host Firefish, it's awesome.
To be 100% honest, I think that those that have a very specific server in mind would be better off by running their own instance, which I also do on Communick but still need to add Firefish to the list.
For the "basic" access, what I'd like to have is only one "single" instance that can "speak" Activity Pub, and then just serve different frontends that can provide the different functionality. This would IMNSHO make more sense because then people could have one single account regardless if they want to do microblogging, share pictures or talk on a forum like Lemmy.
A one time fee? Perhaps. But not an ongoing subscription.
Why? This is not a one-off cost. You wouldn't be paying for a product that you bought once and can be used indefinitely. Software needs to be maintained, data needs to be stored, bits need to transported, mods need to be paid for their ongoing work, etc.
Mind you, I am not talking about price levels of a Netflix or Twitter Blue subscription. I am talking about a much lower price point. $10/year would be more than enough for me to make hosting a large instance a sustainable venture, which would even let me keep my pledge of giving 20% of the profits to the development teams of the upstream projects.
I didn't interpret the question as pertaining to ongoing costs.
Well, the discussion was about Twitter charging a subscription so I thought that was implied.
You are right though that having a system where simply paying to signup would already help alleviate some of the problems with spammers and bots.
I effectively pay to use my IRC, XMPP and email, since I rent a VPS. But that payment earns me much more pleasant usage experience (in case of my IRC bouncer) and a lot of cotrol over my servers in case of the latter two. So while paying a subscription feels a bit bad, I think it's worth it.
We can't expect everyone else to self-host. The question is, what would be the most viable solution for a better (ad free, Surveillance Capitalism free) Internet that can work at scale?
small communities of self-hosters that offer the services to those who don't possess the knowledge to do it themselves. These communities would self-host federated protocols (eg XMPP) so people can interact with others no matter which server they use.
Ideally maintained through users donations. If you want to be less idealistic, maybe small co-ops which charge a reasonable monthly/annual fee and provide free services for those who can't really afford to pay.
A bit too vague. Please:
The reason that I am asking you to be specific is that there is a good chance that professional providers can be more efficient than any "community-based" solution. We can have hundreds/thousands of independent professional service providers, each serving around 100-500k people, which would make a sustainable and healthy market. On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that we would be able to serve the 2 billion people on e.g Instagram by having millions of "community based" instances of Pixelfed.
Donations. Wikimedia proves that some people will want to donate if they find something useful.
The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.
Donations only "work" if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don't see a penny out of it.
I don't see that big a difference there tbh. The WMF nowadays also has a paid trust and safety team like a social media platform.
The entirety of the English Wikipedia can be stored in a single commodity hard disk. The entire database (with revisions and all) is less than 1TB. All other wikipedias combined amount to something similar. This is probably less data than what Reddit ingests every day.
Less than 0.05% of the Wikipedia users have done any type of contribution to the content. The absolute majority is just visiting to read it.
The content of an encyclopedia changes way less often than any social network. Any page written can be a resource used for any high-school student doing research for an assignment. How many people bother to revisit week-old memes on Reddit or imgur, let alone something written decades ago? Yet, both Reddit and Wikipedia need to store all their content forever.
The "rule" of social media is that users split 1%/9%/90% on creators (prolific posters), participants (comments and reshares content that might be interesting to them) and lurkers (don't necessarily signup and only visit to read). That means that we have 200 times more "active" (0.05% vs 10%) users on social media relative to wikipedia. The operational costs and the staff required to moderate these sites should follow this proportion as well.
Isn't that the same for Reddit or Lemmy? The content creators and mods don't see a penny either. Operationally, a social network probably requires a lot more compute power and somewhat more bandwidth compared to a site that serves mostly static content. But I don't see why small donations shouldn't cover that. The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.
Yeah, but since when is this considered fair? Facebook has one million faults, but at the very least they pay their moderation and safety teams.
Is there any donation-based instance where the admins can make a living out of their labor? Even mastodon.social with more than 6 million users can only manage to have two developers on payroll, and they pay themselves a ridiculously low salary.
No because it would exclude all the interesting people, I'd much rather donate to keep a door open for all.
Are all "interesting people" so cash strapped that they wouldn't be able to afford a $10/year membership?
Anyway, what if I told you that my instance provides "group-based" billing? You could, e.g, get a 10-account package for $5/month and give access to 9 other people there.
I would still try to come up with some form of vouch or sponsorship-based system, where the paying members get to approve non-paying members if they have a backing sponsor.
Donation-based instances are not sustainable. You can see that already with Mastodon. They used to be able to get enough funds to even support upstream projects, now they are invite-only. Turns out that "keeping the door open for all" makes the operating costs rise faster than the revenue from donations.
Interesting people barely have time to pop onto Twitter every now and then, they're not going to bother if it costs money
And I guess we'll see which system ends up bearing fruit, I think we're already seeing the capitalist walled garden model falter, I suspect your more collectivist model won't have the momentum to replace it but while the commons might trip and start with a dozen different stumbles the sheer force of its ever growing ubiquity will carry it through.
Especially as hardware continues to get cheaper and software more efficient, hosting a few thousand users on a federated server is already fairly trivial, its only going to get easier the more hurdles are removed through innovation and tech creep.
In terms of costs, the predominant factor is storage, which does not go away and is ever increasing. But anyway the problem of instances with thousands of users is not the cost of hardware, but the labor involved with moderation, security, support...
No. With the current model of social media selling advertising space, user data, and now subscription fees. No, I don't think I should have to contribute directly from my pocket to these mega media giants.
I am not talking about the media giants, existing or yet to exist. I am talking about someone providing access to a subscriber-only Lemmy or Mastodon instance, that could be well federated, and professionally managed and moderated.
No, I don't think a subscriber-only based model would work. Seems so simple that somebody would have tried it already, but what I imagine is the exorbitant cost of running a popular site.
Today you are one of the lucky 10 thousand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
I know for a fact that I can run an instance with 15k users and if each one paid $10/year I could make enough to make a living, hire someone to help with moderation and would let me have time to contribute back to the codebase and work on more fediverse projects.
The beauty of this is that I don't need to have a "huge" site or a monopoly in the market. Other developers could do something similar, due to federation there could be space even for collaboration and/or expansion into other segments.
All we need is to get more people to understand that paying $10/year for something they used to have "for free" is a lot better than having your data exploited.
The only thing that would get me to do it is for sports. It would have to have the games, shows, commentary nonsense and be able to live chat with other fans /players. A full experience of sports. Outside of that not a chance.
In my dream world, every basketball or football team (american or the real one) would have its own Mastodon/Peertube instance and fans would sign up to a monthly subscription which would give them exclusive benefits, guaranteed prices for tickets (to kill the secondary market) and maybe even voting rights for larger decisions.
In my crazy dream world, sport teams would cut the middlemen and stop selling broadcast rights and broadcast everything direct to viewer. The tech already lets us have that, it's just that the whole thing is already quite profitable for the top execs so they don't really care about making it more accessible.
I think this marks the true end of twitter. Undoubtedly, some people will literally pay to have ol' muskys thoughts shoved in their face and get their data collected, see garbage alt-right memes but if he fails, if he can't even make it a premium-feeling cult experience now... (which obviously his vision, but let's be real it's a longshot- he's only gonna be a clown) I don't see it lasting much longer.
Absolutely. People can talk about the Musk fanatics and grifters and actual addicts who can't leave but... they aren't who keeps the place alive. The crowds of people who just browse it casually are who keep social media alive. There's no show without an audience.
They won't get regular Joes and Timmies to shell out actual money to keep seeing posts when they could get the same in some other place for free.
lol. He is just stirring the pot. It’s what he does. I recommend ignoring him and just using something else. It is either going to sink or not.
Ex-twitter seems to me to be going in a disjointed “by the seat of the pants” direction. It’s like a kid playing with his new toy. “My toy, I make the rules and I don’t care what you think.”
The thing is, it technically is his toy. It is not a global square. It is a private company. I take issue with what has been going on, but my opinions are irrelevant to the situation.
Urgh why is this "technology"
It all sounds like "Dude is thinking about maybe making changes on some thing ..."
But yeah from now on I'll just downvote.
The real question is how much would I accept in payment to use Twitter. It's probably not a lot, but it surely is not negative.
I hate Musk because as an artist there are many artist on twitter (X) that I really like. One of it is Naoki Saito & Mika Pikazo and then some useful things likes pose maniac to help out artist to get pose ideas. A lot of Japanese makes oneshot or it's continuous story manga on twitter. The reason why I stay a little longer because of the artist of twitter but now I will slowly drift away on twitter.
They should at least be double posting to Twitter and Mastodon.
You don't lose reach by posting to more places.
You could check out Misskey, another mastodon-like fediverse app with a large Japanese userbase and lots of artists
Thank you for telling me this and I will try it out.
I am so tired of seeing this goon on my feed
YES, I will absolutely pay for X every month! Greatest idea he’s ever had.
Yes to the polls, but no chance in hell
I wouldn't use Twitter even if it was the one paying ME
I would sooner chew on glass than pay for Twitter.
Hell. No.
He went from saying he was going to build an 'everything app' to charging for something that does nothing and is shit at it.
The correct answer is no.
Hell no, and that's why I love the idea and definitely encourage them to do so.
I'd happily pay a monthly fee for twitter to stop existing
As I understand, even when paying you would still see ads and not get any benefits over what Twitter is at the moment whatsoever. I honestly cannot imagine the platform retaining many users after such a drastic step.
IIRC current twitter blue subscribers see 50% fewer ads than free users.
You couldn't even pay me to use Twitter
no I'm not willing to play for using twitter, I'll just delete my account.
as for the "it's the only way to combat the army of bots" comment - how is that the army of bots only became a problem after twitter became x? i never had a problem before but now my every tweet is liked by a kinsley, madeline, josephine, mia or layla. it's crazy.
oh, maybe that's one of the microservices they shut down
You couldn't pay me to use that cracker platform. I thought reddit was bad after they fucked over all the moderators, then comes xhitter with open pedo-nazis being boosted to the front page. Both are shit for the same reason and i'm never going back to either.
I would pay to not use it.
$0.
Twitter like so many other social media companies came into being with users as the product. As that fails (both because Elon is an idiot and because consumer knowledge has improved), these companies are finding that they never really had a sustainable business model.
Let the market work it out, as the overlords are so fond of.
Looking forward to the influx of users to Bluesky and Mastodon, keep it up lemonsuk
Maybe I will finally go delete my old account.
Oh god, please do this.
Sorry Jovan Musk, from Calvin Klein! The answer is nooooOOOOOoooo. Old Twitter is dead. You killed it, and now you're trying to sell me its smelly corpse.
I left already. I'm certainly not paying to use something so terrible
I won’t even use it for free, so paying seems unlikely.
I’ll just leave these here
Why would you leave this trash here?
Nah, I'll definitely get that latte instead.
Stop using it already. If you are still there you are part of the problem.
I just want to comment on this part, if that’s ok. Town squares are inherently not free. Sure, everyone is free to come to it. But it’s still paid for by someone. Usually by people who stand to gain the most value out of it. This has always been my problem with Twitter and Facebook and their ilk.
There are wonderful examples of people trying different payment models and yes, most of them have failed. But let’s look at them for a minute.
App.net came out swinging at one point, with the idea of a (what was it?) fifty dollars a year payment model. It was a great idea. But it lagged because of a few reasons. Instead of keeping the $50 price point and using the extra money to allow for free accounts, the founders first dropped the price to $36 a year and then quietly raised VC funding, which went against everything they talked about and thus the community turned. Needless to say, the service was dead a few years after it came.
Before that there was WhatsApp. WhatsApp would randomly charge people $1 to $3 for download or subscription. Their experiment was wildly successful. If you could do MMS with just $1 a year from everyone on your network (or, heck, some random number of people on your network), what’s better than that? WhatsApp’s Achilles? Selling to Facebook. Now it’s unmoored from its founding principles. It’s growing. But for every one bespoke feature added, two features are added that push your data to Facebook.
Then there’s micro.blog. The pricing is simple - $5 a month and you get a blog and a social media handle. Right now, the founder hasn’t cracked down on accounts that paid once and are only using the social features of the network without being able to blog on it. It’s surprisingly successful, though niche. Will it fail? Seems like there’s enough runway since the founder is strict about no free signups. That town square isn’t free to join.
The fediverse is blowing up and so are standalone companies with their homegrown social networks like posts.cv and whatever Substack calls their social network. Also egalitarian European countries are launching their own mastodon sites to host a digital town square for their citizens. It’s a great time to be on social media.
But none of the real digital town squares are free. Nor should they be. Yes, a small monthly fee seems unnecessary. But Twitter isn’t a public good. It isn’t infrastructure. It isn’t paid for with our taxes. If the US Government launches their own mastodon site then you can absolutely comment on how important it is for this country to value freedoms. Till then, stop expecting private companies to not experiment with pricing models.
Also, Elon is an idiot and Twitter is dead. But that’s besides the point.
Bla bla bla. Muh Adam Smith, muh invisible hand. If there are ads, it should be free. Dumbass.
Either pay or get off the Shitter
-Elon Musk
Even if it was free, I wouldn't use it. I'd rather not waste hours of my time in there. And yes, I had that opinion before Musk bought Twitter and renamed it to X (I actually left the platform exactly 24 days before the renaming, the same day that I left Reddit).
Hell nar we got mastadon
Naw.
I've never used it. This doesn't make me want to start
It was trash before he bought it. I quit before then and nothing I've seen makes me wanna go back
I'm not willing to use it even while it's still free, so no. Mastodon FTW
Anytime there is a pole, I will vote yes.
But I am totally not going to do it.
Charging for the platform is a sure fire way to make it disappear. I hope Twitter disappears.
lol
this is never going to happen unless musk looks for a reason to shut xitter down. like so many times before he's talking out loud what he's thinking right now, creating a massive migrane among the guys still running the site and everyone who is financially invested in it.
I suspect this will backfire, as usual.
Considering I won't use Twitter now and it's free...
Why do I have to see the face of this idiot almost daily? I don't use that shit X and never will. What's the appeal? I even could understand TikTok somehow, but X/Twitter? Where's the informational value in these completely useless posts there?
Absolutely not.
I can't imagine there's many people who even like twitter on the fediverse, much less would like it enough to pay for it.
He just does the "all publicity is good publicity" trick. He isn't so stupid to actually do it.
Given I don't use it now and it's free, I don't think making it paid is suddenly going to incentivise me to do so
I dont even want it, now.. lol
Lol this saga just keeps getting better