Is there a good way to support the overall universe as well as individual servers? I know lemmy.world has a donation site but curious if I can support the overall universe with maybe the proceeds split among key lemmy cost areas. I really don’t want ads, data selling, sponsored posts etc.
My partner’s been studying the concept of habitus as part of her graduate research, and it’s been interesting discussing it and how it’s used in social research while also watching this same basic discussion happen over and over again as people leave a centralized, for-profit internet and stumble into a distributed, socially-supported one.
We’re shaped by our social environment, and for multiple generations now that social environment has been dominated anti-social economic values. Especially in the US and the UK, where neoliberal politicians managed to rise to prominence early. So, we’ve seen a lot of questions in the last few weeks about how the Fediverse can be “profitable”, without any distinction between profitability and sustainability. Literally, people have come up in a world that has taught them that everything needs to be profitable, or it won’t survive, or it isn’t worth doing.
This is similar, except instead of “profitable”, it’s “centralized”. For an entire generation of internet users, the internet is 4 big websites and a search monopoly. It’s going to take a while before people acclimate to this new habitat, and develop a new habitus in order to relate to it. Especially because so much of the UX is trying to reproduce what already was. It’s all made to look and feel like a centralized website, and not just “a” centralized website, but a handful of specific ones. Mastodon and Calckey look very similar to Twitter. PeerTube looks very similar to YouTube. PixelFed looks very similar to Instagram.
And Lemmy and (especially) kbin look very similar to Reddit. There isn’t a whole lot here really shoving the very different environment into peoples’ faces. And on the one hand, that’s why they’re gaining their audiences, but on the other, it’s why people keep trying to treat them as if they’re something they’re not, and why discussing their true nature makes people very confused. It’s not like the ideas themselves are that difficult to understand, but none of this looks like those ideas.
It looks like ideas around engagement monetization, walled gardens, and corporate branding.