How much would you be willing to invest in a Fediverse project that was set out to compete with Threads and Bluesky?
"Success" here would mean that this project has at least 50 million active users around the world.
Please boost for reach
@raphael capitalism is profit-maximization -- thus johannes' apt point that people often donate to or overpay for services they trust not to be profit-maximizing from trustful foundation-like groups of people :D
@raphael to put it another way, i actually think fediverse and capitalism don't mix, but i'd still pay 100/yr for an account on a server that reinvents all its excess revenue in open-source contributions, for example.
I'm all for contributing back to projects (E.g, I pledged to give 20% of Communick's profits to the Fediverse projects), but I am not sure if that could be done *without* market dynamics.
Like, how can we define "excess revenue"? Should we account the work of instance admins as expenses? What about moderators?
Who would determine the fair wage for this work, if not via the price discovery mechanism that capitalism can provide?
@raphael you don't have to throw out the entire market baby with the profit-maximizing backwater, was my point. if all labor is paid at rates transparent and public you don't need to pay "market rates", you just need to pay something sustainable and acceptable to all parties, ideally decided transparently and updated over time in a public process. that's not exactly outside of price discovery but it's at least not coupled tightly to it.
@raphael capitalism light, for the degrowth crowd, as someone disparagingly summarized fedi economics on bsky this morning 
> You just need to pay something sustainable and acceptable to all parties
This is quite hand-wavy, no? Who is determining the amount that is "sustainable and acceptable"?
I honestly don't buy this idea that developers should accept less pay because working on FOSS is cool or noble. If we want to compete with Threads and Bluesky, this also means that we need to pay developers well.
@raphael whoever is paying decides whether it's acceptable. I'm fine with buying services from a coop that pays at market rates, but taking a bit of a discount is a time-honored strategy that convinces some people who are harder to get on board. the degree (or presence) of that discount is contextual, all that matters is trust and transparency along the way
@raphael (for the record socialweb.coop DOES pay market rates. which sucks cuz 2/3 of it is in America where they are very high 
)
Normal profit = total revenue – total costs
If the money is reinvested in the operation, there is no profit motive. This can even be enforced in the charter or articles of organization or incorporation.
@scott yes, sounds good. I'm a huge fan of coops, public benefit corps, nonstock corps, anything that can't be bought out and forced to ve profitable. I think most fedi folks who answered "keep capitalism out of fedi" would come around to most of those profit-resistant strategies. most capitalism haters have never even heard of most of them-- it's an education problem as much as an ideological one.
@scott I don't consider wages (even above market ones) profit. profit is what you extract from the wages of others by owning the business
What would you say of startups that go for years paying its employees but never make any revenue? This is the majority of companies funded by VCs, what is the "profit" here?
There was a VC fund that tried to operate like that (https://calmfund.com) They failed spetacularly because they couldn't get LPs and they had to relied on a crazy amount of deal flow to work.