The Anti-Software Software Club rediscovering the primary motivation for federated social media by paying themselves 90k a year in loans reminds me a lot of anarcho-capitalists reinventing the century-old state-insured global financial system in a decade

@anova oh boy whats going on now

@oct2pus In case you haven't already seen it, by far the most entertaining, albeit depressing financial statement I've ever read:

https://cohost.org/staff/post/1690393-h1-2023-financial-up

The people at ASSC seem super cool, but like, this is why we run our social media websites on shitty laptops over residential internet

@anova I haven't. Taking a read now.

Honestly I just saw that they were a for profit company selling themselves as a not-for-profit (literal legal entity) and I stopped listening, I did a look and saw they were taking loans from an unknown entity and I stopped listening even more.

I do at least admire the open financials. Even if bleak.

@oct2pus Yeah, I feel like I remember there being some kind of drama about them claiming to want to be a coop and then not, but I can't find anything on that so maybe I'm misremembering. Either way, there are paths to success for non-profit, community-orientated software projects, and it feels a lot like they're acting like a community and behaving like a company.

@anova yeah I assumed they were saying something about federation. No they're just admitting this is fundamentally unprofitable.

Social media being fundamentally unprofitable is just a very recent thing everyone realized or at least, threw in the towel on. Watching tumblr staff members who work on social media for a living say social media is not profitable and we cannot expect it to exist forever is just, a thing I could not conceive of 5 years ago.

Part of me wonders if there is something self-serving with this narrative (at least out of their mouths) but im not smart enough to put together the pieces here.

@oct2pus Profitable? Definite no. Sustainable? maybe in the context of virtually free energy and money, both of which are fundamentally unsustainable in their own right…

Definitely the saddest/most off-putting part of that post to me was the admonition that they kinda could still make this work, assuming they were able to sextuple their user count. Especially coming from a culture that I always found to be more adverse to the notion of infinite growth.

Fediverse-style small, interconnected communities seems to be the answer, and I feel like in spite of the challenges over the years, we have repeatedly demonstrated that, and god damn it really feels like nobody wants to hear us out lol. Not even many notable instance admins these days

@anova they are a co-op legally AFAIK. They're just a for profit co-op of like 4 people. Cool but ultimately whatever. Marketing themselves like they're a not for profit is incredibly, incredibly misleading.

I think my big complaint is they seem incompetent, people seem to vouch for them on a "just trust me" basis and they've basically created the same sort of trust issue as Every Other Platform.

@anova as frustrating as I find parts of the fediverse experience we just fundamentally have compromises we have to accept in favor of community run social media that is sustainable (perhaps not as much at the individual instance level but at a fediverse level? Resistant to being fully taken down.)

@anova also ill be honest any fediverse is the future of social media moment will not actually be sexy or cool since the fediverses grow is just slow but constant. It could stop but that doesn't actually mean. Its dead. We aren't required to play by the same rules as corporate players nor required to accept the metrics they value as valuable.

@anova
> The Anti-Software Software Club rediscovering the primary motivation for federated social media

Got a link for this? The recent Reddit drama isn't quite satisfying my need for schadenfreude ; )

@anova
@oct2pus
oh *no*. I feel bad for them, that sounds like a lot to handle.

also how does it cost $4.8k/mo for 10TB of traffic and denying 3.2m requests per month, what have we done to the internet

@jonny @oct2pus yeah, I always find it really shocking hearing about how much companies pay to run their internet services. Like obviously I've never trafficked over a hundred thousand users but whenever I do run services their cost is basically negligible

@oct2pus Yeah, there's a lot of problems with the fediverse and while it's good to be aware of them, this shit manages to just work without being abjectly evil and that's a pretty big accomplishment in social media

@strypey In case you haven't already seen it, I'm referring to their latest financial update, which is a sad but entertaining read: https://cohost.org/staff/post/1690393-h1-2023-financial-up