zlacker

Has anyone ever considered that social networking is just a bad business model? It's something that everyone wants to use, expensive to run but nobody wants to pay for.

>>d0gsg0+(OP)
Mastodon and ActivityPub prove another funding model can work even up to millions of active users. There are plenty of criticisms people have for them, but they're beside the point: it works.

>>d0gsg0+(OP)
> social networking is just a bad business model

I think Meta is doing pretty well...

>>Kye+t
Who is funding Mastodon servers?

>>Kye+t
Right. This thread should be talking about Mastodon FAR earlier. I do not care AT ALL that VCs can't figure out how to make money from social media directly; if anything, I expect that. It shows that there's nothing particularly intelligent (and maybe perhaps even useful) about VC money.

There are other models. Lots of them. We've seen a ton of them work to various degrees.

Now, Mastodon is probably the right model for social media. I wish folks here could get their collective heads out of VC-money-land and realize this (presuming one thinks that there is utility in social media, which I do.)

And much like the internet itself, there's even money here as well.

Ask Eli Lilly. If they had signed on to something like Mastodon, where they could be their OWN source of truth, perhaps they wouldn't have had their "Insulin is free" moment.

>>d0gsg0+(OP)
Except that a lot of these companies have multi-billion dollar valuations currently...

>>warkda+Id
The people who use them. Some are funded in part or whole by the person running it, but most still have a Patreon or something like it.