Either you are a generous person who is paying out of his pocket to host a platform, or you require people to pay for usage (or your platform it truly p2p but good luck with people having the means to self-host nodes).
Fact is, most people are freeloaders so this is not sustainable either way.
Let's just say it like it is: most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat. If I had $20 to spend I'd rather buy a bunch of books instead of 4 months of whatever mastodon server would ask me to pay for.
Usenet days, in which you paid a single amount to a single provider and all the boards were populated by technical people, are over. There is absolutely no single place on the web where you can interact with knowledgeable people in every field all clumped together (except sci-hub + email heh)
> most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat
Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a problem with the type of app or our expectation of it.
99% of what I view on the web doesn't have to be absolutely up to date. I can tolerate some latency. If we dropped the whole request-response thing in favor of pub-sub, and just had the servers wake up for one minute every hour to propagate state changes, we'd only need to pay for 1/60th of the uptime that we currently are--the cicada approach.
I realize that this would be very inconvenient for advertisers who are trying to create a controlled experience re: which material I see when. They would absolutely hate it if the default mode of consumption happened in an offline-friendly way. But given that I don't give a damn about what they want, I think it would be ok.
I would. Especially if the switching costs between paying those pennies and running my own node on a raspberry pi were low. And as the situation re: the normal approach continues to deteriorate, others might too.
If you really need something larger, the text could be an IPFS CID. Sure, you have to pin the data, so maybe that's a few more pennies, but IPFS has nice scalability features that would keep this overhead fairly low.
Yeah, I guess that reiterates the "who would join" point. I've tried to get my friends to join me on SSB. No luck.
We may have to wait for the solar flare that knocks out the internet. Then point-to-point stuff like SSB will be the only thing that's working... between the seventeen people that were using it in the first place.
Gotta make a Pied Piper type thing that uses the indexedDB and some light blockchain to store data on all devices, maybe while tricking Cloudflare to do the bulk of the caching and serving lol.
Perhaps you could host on twitter while stenographically hiding from twitter. Let them collect ad revenue for rendering ads in a headless browser to nonexistent users.
Either you are a generous person who is paying out of his pocket to host a platform, or you require people to pay for usage (or your platform it truly p2p but good luck with people having the means to self-host nodes).
Fact is, most people are freeloaders so this is not sustainable either way.
Let's just say it like it is: most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat. If I had $20 to spend I'd rather buy a bunch of books instead of 4 months of whatever mastodon server would ask me to pay for.
Usenet days, in which you paid a single amount to a single provider and all the boards were populated by technical people, are over. There is absolutely no single place on the web where you can interact with knowledgeable people in every field all clumped together (except sci-hub + email heh)