I've found myself in an argument with some people on Lemmy last week who were genuinely trying to make the case that contributing $1-2 dollars per year should be more than enough to make an open social web sustainable.
It started on a thread asking how much it costs to run an instance per user. Because most admins runs things as a hobby, all answers were like "oh, my instance has a few hundred users and I run it on $20/month VPS, so it's just a few cents per user per month"
No one even considered factoring the cost of the developers, the hours put in by admin, the value of the work done by moderators. Nothing. The only thing that has an actual price is the stupid VPS, so this is all that they think should be chipping in for.
For completely unknown reasons, there is a big overlap between the people that make this type of argument and the people that are mystified about the fact so many smart people end up using their talents to optimize the amount of ads being pushed to people online.
This just came up a couple days ago with a thread about a programming education app with 2MM users that was shutting down, with the thread dominated by discussion of their hosting costs and how they could have cut it in half by moving off AWS; if they had managed to get those costs down to zero they still couldn't have afforded a single software developer, probably not even in Tulsa or Little Rock.
Everyone here has hosted something and has a take on how to golf those costs, but comparatively few have ever made payroll. So that's the discussion we get.
This is similar to people who discuss how little it costs to make a drug pill instead of the costs to bring it to market. Like this pill takes 3 cents raw ingredients in it.
OT: Don't get me on my diatribe about reducing drug costs by ending direct to consumer advertising.
Most pharm a companies spend more on marketing than research. If I were king for a day, I would ban direct to consumer marketing like it was banned before Ronald Reagan. Pharma companies could preserve their profit margins and reduce drug prices if none were allowed to market. If one doesn't market and all the others do, they'll lose market share.
They'd still spend more on marketing than research; it just wouldn't be direct to consumer. The real solution there may be more government funded research.
> No one even considering factoring the cost of the developers, the hours put in by admin, the value of the work done by moderators. Nothing, the only thing that has an actual price is the stupid VPS, so this is all that they think should be chipping in for.
This is why I make it a point to pay for software that I find useful/enjoyable.
One of the most obnoxious side-effects of the VC startup mill's use of "free" services to fuel growth (loss leaders) is that they tricked people into thinking that software was cheap or free to produce.
Now people feel entitled to your efforts for as little as possible and, in some cases, get absolutely indignant that you'd ever try to run a real business and profit from your efforts.
For that reason it's why I try to keep all stacks as ruthlessly simple as possible, because the complexity will come from the market and flexibility will be invaluable then.
Premature over-engineering, or optimization costs a lot more developers, administration and hardware.
At times it reminds me of when someone is using AI to do sometimes a SQL query might be able to.
So much effort avoiding SQL, to the point of using non-relational databases... only to relate them.
This is a common argument, especially with tech products. The most recurring one that I hear is that “phone X can be made with Y hundreds of dollars in china”. Like, have you ever considered the amount of software and hardware development/research that’s needed to turn that thing on?
Yeah, I think it’s probably wrong to focus on the hosting costs instead of development costs. But I think it’s also the case that companies like meta or pre-Elon Twitter had more developers than necessary for the ‘core’ of the site – lots of the work is downstream of selling ads, like collecting lots of data and developing targeting systems and developing the site where advertisers can buy ad space and analyze their results. There’s some middle ground where you don’t need as many developers-per-user-observed-functionality as an ad-supported site, though I suspect it still dominates hosting costs.
Absolutely, no one would argue that the only way to be profitable without ads is by charging $8/month like Twitter or the €11.99/month that Zuckerberg wants in the EU. This might be true for closed companies who need to deal with all their overhead, but (e.g) Lemmy has the equivalent of 3.5 FTE and said that €15k/month would be enough for all of them to continue working on it. Even with this ridiculously low threshold, they are still not able to hit the target.
Now, imagine if these sites worked in a system where everyone would have to pay a little bit (or have someone else paying for them) so that every user is contributing to development/hosting/etc. Get people paying $9/year ($0.75/month) and I can bet you that you'd be a lot more than 3.5 FTE, we would be getting a viable alternative to Reddit and without all the enshittification and Surveillance Capitalism associated with Big Tech.
I would have been more interested in Cohost if they weren't actively hostile to federation. Their eventual shutdown always seemed inevitable to me, and without federation + account portability, there would be no easy offramp when they failed.
You could say the same of almost all corporate social media, and I am phasing them all out too.
It could have helped their revenue problems indirectly if it meant being able to access more users and content, not only the people who use and enjoy Cohost. People love to talk about network effects, and something like the fediverse means you can start with however many users there are on the fediverse on day one of turning on federation.
For me, lack of federation meant they were dead on arrival, just like every Google product can't be trusted to keep existing (and I would never start using a new Google product). Any individual fediverse project could shut down, but the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point, even if it's not as widely used as one might like.
Narrator: It could not have helped, it would have mostly just made them even more burnt out, because they (as they said in the post) were already on call effectively 7 days a week and have been since the site started.
> the fediverse continues and is probably unkillable like IRC or RSS at this point
Who cares? When an IRC channel, or phpbb forum I use closes down, or an RSS feed I used to read goes dark -- I do not think about the wonderful IRC protocol and how ossified it is or about the sanctity of DNS. And these things happen regardless of what the underlying technology stack are. I think "It really sucks that my community and the people on it are gone now." A domain that doesn't resolve and an empty mastodon instance are effectively the same.
The users who use the platform are why the platform is valuable, not because it uses some dumb particular tech stack.
This comes down to a question of what kind of service you want.
If you want a way to "access more users and content", you can already make an account on a Fediverse instance and access those users and content there. What does Cohost offer by being yet another instance with custom software?
If the vast majority of the content I'm accessing is from other instances/services, why would I pay Cohost money for the privilege of having them act as an intermediary?
One specific problem with federation/decentralization is that you've now decentralized moderation and given up control over your service's culture entirely. This has some upsides and some downsides, but it again puts you into a weird position: If your moderation and culture position are identical to Mastodon's, why do you need to exist? If you're just another Mastodon instance, why would anyone give you money?
When I post on HN or Twitter or Tumblr or Cohost, I at least have a good sense of how the service is moderated, what the rules are, etc. When I post on decentralized services, at any point I can discover that oh, this random instance defederated the one I was unlucky enough to sign up on, so half of my mutuals can't see my posts anymore. Don't worry, you can just migrate your account to a different instance with different rules, and hope IT doesn't get defederated! And because each instance has different rules and culture, you get to look forward to people from other instances complaining that you aren't complying with their rules. It's messy! It's not fun!
Of course the rules on those services I mentioned aren't necessarily going to suit everyone's tastes. But I think that's good - a social media service doesn't need to be For Everyone to be successful, and being For Nobody is a horrible outcome.
At the end of the day I see the appeal of defederation but it simply doesn't make sense as a way to spend your engineering dollars if your goal is to be profitable. It Doesn't Make You Money.
I am an admin / mod for a Mastodon server that is supported by donations from the community. I have not put my own money in the pot for a while, because I'm donating a lot of time to run it.
But I would pay if I had to, and I am considering paying for a GoToSocial server to experiment with an allowlist network:
I'm sure we would lose some people if we switched to mandatory payments. Since this is already a pretty small community (dashboard currently says 171 active users), I wouldn't care to experiment, since we'd risk losing the critical mass necessary to have an active local timeline, which for me is a major reason to run your own server. I'd also hazard a guess that many people go inactive for a while, and then check in again randomly when they need more social media in their life for whatever reason, and mandatory payments might interfere with that movement in and out of inactivity.
Finally, I think pay what you want is better so long as it works, since it doesn't exclude people who don't have money, but do contribute to the community in other ways. The only real reason to move away from pay what you want is if it doesn't pay the bills, and our finances are fine for now.
I can see a place for mandatory payments if you're providing extra services at a steeper price, such as paid moderation, but I think the number of people willing to pay what moderation at a living wage actually costs... is rather small. Perhaps if we made moderation more efficient, e.g. sharing moderation decisions between servers, paid moderation could become more affordable by splitting the cost between more users, but there are several problems with that approach... one being that moderation by members of your community is always going to be more clueful than moderation from outside your community.
Do you think it's a fair assessment to say then you are making the same argument I mentioned in the other thread: very few people think that the service of a social media account is actually worth anything, and that this should only be treated as a hobby?
Follow up question: if everyone treats social media alternatives as a hobby, do you think that it has a chance of being a viable alternative to the Big Tech platforms?
I think the profit motive is literally destroying the world given the climate crisis, as well as destroying everything good or useful about the Internet. So I think figuring out how to do things without the profit motive is the only way forward, as impossible as that might seem. Surviving capitalism with that attitude may be challenging, but we don't have a future under capitalism anyway.
I think that if the value of social media comes from the network effects, then it's not a question of whether you can find some core of users who consider it more than a hobby. (Ugh, you want a network for professionals for whom it's their job?!) For social media to reach its maximum value, it has to reach literally everyone, and at that point you're talking about something that ought to be a government service, like the postal service. For smaller networks that are less focused on reach, maybe hobbyists are the ideal providers.
It's amazing how we can get two people to accidentally take the same action while fundamentally disagreeing on everything else.
Short version:
- Capitalism is not the problem. Corporations that can take their profits in one department and use their vast resources to drive loss leaders is the problem. Break down big corporations into smaller ones that need to compete, and I can bet that we wouldn't see pointless growth and needless consumption.
- "do you want a network for professionals for whom it's their job?" No, I want the service to be run by professionals who can make a living out of it. The people running the service need not to participate in it. Like email or phone service, you don't expect to be free and you don't expect to be talking with the service provider daily. It should be a simple utility.
- "Public funding" is magical thinking repeated by people who don't understand basic economics: specially if you are "against growth" (like your comment about the climate crisis seem to suggest) then where is the Government going to get the resources to pay for developers?
It's improbably hilarious how you basically don't deviate from personal attacks and strawmen at any point in your post.
You don't provide a foundation for the counters to the arguments the GP makes (f.e. you propose smaller corporations wouldn't have "pointless growth and consumption", without substantiating how you feel such a thing is possible with capitalism as described and commonly understood).
You call "public funding" magical thinking, but in the point right before that you mention something should be "a simple utility". Those are publically funded.
And of course we should not forget these are strawmen and/or personal attacks. This is not a respectable post that adds to the discussion, it's one that distracts and makes everything categorically worse.
Where do you live that your electricity is public funded? Your water? Your phone/internet? Heating for your home?
Even on places where these things are run by public companies, they are not public funded. It's not like Governments give these for free and and/or come out of any government budget.
You might be surprised to learn that many people do donate money to their instance of choice. Enough to cover server and admin costs? Probably not. But it shows some willingness to pay.
I was actually searching for a commercial Mastodon host around a year ago. I would have been interested in your service but it did not come up in any search results. I remember checking out Librem One, but the signup process for that was very buggy. Other services were targeted towards people who wanted to host instances themselves, not just have an account.
Even now I can’t find your service in the first page of my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon.
Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it is very hard to discover even for people who are willing to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a useful experience report.
Yeah, in my case it gets specially hard because Mastodon's project page does not point to commercial providers, only hosting services.
To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. I am more inclined to pivot into a multi-protocol client (like Pidgin) and offering ancillary services than trying to pick a champion and invest into promoting it.
> To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web.
Interesting, this was my layman's read too after a while of trying to get into it. To me it felt like it was opinionated but in ways that I disagreed with.
For example, instead of a separate UI for private messages, they just add another option to the visibility selector. From a technical perspective I suppose this is somewhat elegant, but from a UX perspective it felt wrong. I saw a thread where people disagreed with it and the maintainers told them to pound sand. Similarly with quote tweets.
I know you mentioned not trying to pick champions, but are there any alternatives that you thought were particularly interesting? I'm willing to put in a little time to try things out.
The other thing I want to note is I just tried to use the "Set up Auto-Pay" button on Communick and got the error "Could not set up auto pay. Please contact support". I'd love to sign up though.
Hey thanks so much for trying! Sorry about the issues, I will take a better look tomorrow (1am now in Germany), but a quick look in my admin panel and I don't see any new user sign up. Did you get to the "set up auto pay" page without logging in?
No rush! The crazy thing is it looks like I already had an account (!) but hadn’t signed up for anything. So I actually must have found your site in my search somehow, then maybe I hit the same payment issue? My username on your site is jyc.
I don't really understand why anyone would use an "alternative" microblogging platform / social network that doesn't offer decentralization or federation. If you are okay with centralized, just go to the cesspool of Twitter or X or Facebook or whatever else has the most network effects in your circle. If you want to control your data, go to something like Mastodon or Bluesky, where the offramp is self-hosting of the old version forever, even if they cease development on the system.
I guess I just don't understand what problem Cohost solved that other solutions didn't solve better and cheaper.
> I don't really understand why anyone would use an "alternative" microblogging platform
> just go to the cesspool of
Cohost didn't feel like a cesspool to me. That's a pretty darn strong differentiator.
There are other UX differentiators for me, but it's all subjective. Cohost didn't feel as "cramped" as the others. The others really put the focus on the "micro" in "microblogging", even if technically they (now) allow for longer-form posts. The culture just isn't there for it.
> Cohost didn't feel like a cesspool to me. That's a pretty darn strong differentiator.
Was this due to something specific they did?
Or was this just like how small subreddits can/could be the best place on earth, but then soon after they reach around 10,000 subscribers the quality of the content on the subreddit quickly drops significantly.
Something like the Eternal September effect:
> The periodic flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms.
On Cohost the feed is chronological, so I felt like I was seeing everything my friends were sharing, but not much else. There's no like/repost/follow counts, so engagement baiting is discouraged. It's not addicting, I can check it once a day, or once a week, and feel caught up — I didn't get the urge to keep scrolling.
Oh and most importantly for me, it allows html/css in posts, which enables so much cool stuff and creativity generally reserved for personal websites.
I don't really know -- I'm a user, not an analyst. But the two things that drew me in were:
1. There's no global firehose that your posts automatically get dropped into. I'm a generally shy person, and one of my particularities is that I don't want my content (or, well, existence) to be pushed at somebody who didn't specifically ask for it. The number of social media platforms that meet this criterion is vanishingly small, because everybody and their uncle wants an Algorithm (tm). Mastodon instances also have a default instance firehose; I'm told people don't really look at that, but the fact that it's there at all makes me overthink posting, and I end up not posting at all.
Instead of a global firehose, you can add free-form tags to your post that act like much, much more localized streams of posts. You don't have to use tags at all; and you can also use completely nonsense tags that are more like footnotes, in a very Tumblr style that I enjoy.
2. The UI is wider than Twitter, or Facebook, or Mastodon. It feels like it's more inviting to longer-form content, and while there's plenty of short blurbs and memes to be found, there's just a much higher proportion of blog-style content.
Also, the way reposting and commenting interact is just way better IMO. If you repost something, the comments on the original post are visible above the comments on your repost, and that makes the whole chain of interactions feel more cohesive. In contrast, quote-retweeting on Twitter creates entirely separate bubbles of discussion (often at odds with each other). And on Cohost, while you can create a repost chain to make a kind of "thread" equivalent, the UI naturally discourages it in favor of just making a single long-form post.
It had a pleasant UI and I liked their moderation policies and ethical business model. I don't like Twitter or Facebook's moderation policies or business models. I don't care about de/centralization.
No fediverse instance I've run across provides high-fidelity posting like Cohost and Tumblr. Out of the two, the Cohost experience was generally much nicer. I have accounts on Mastodon, Twitter and Bluesky along with the other two and Cohost was easily my preference for sharing long-form content.
In addition to Mastodon and Bluesky, Threads now supports the ActivityPub protocol that the fediverse (incl Mastodon) is built upon. There's also been talks about eventual interop between bsky's protocol and activitypub's. For now at least a bridge exists
> Threads now supports the ActivityPub protocol that the fediverse (incl Mastodon) is built upon.
Given the recent issues with Twitter, my country's president started posting on an official account on both Bluesky and Threads. Knowing about that ActivityPub support from Threads, I decided to try following him from my Mastodon account, which is in a server which does not block Threads (it can follow the USA president's and vice-president's official Threads accounts just fine), but that didn't work. What I found out after a quick web search, was that this feature is only available for users from the USA, and even then, it has to be manually enabled on each Threads account.
Meta is moving very, very slowly on federated development, but they seem committed to doing right by it. While obviously antitrust regulators are likely to be thrilled on the federated approach, Meta seems concerned about all of the other particular legal risks with federation... risks which small servers run by individuals can generally ignore.
mastodon.social is the largest, one of the most tech/HN-crowd focused ones is hachyderm.io, universeodon.com and mstdn.social are both pretty big. I don't think any of the above block Threads.
I had never heard of cohost until today but I would have considered using it.
I don't particularly like any of the current centralized options but I also don't particularly care about federation and as such don't want to deal with the added friction that it brings.
> We are unable to make cohost open source. the source code for cohost was the collateral used for the loan from our funder.
I never really understood this—what is their anonymous and secret funder going to use the source code for Cohost for? They've been very closed lipped about that part. Oh well, I guess we'll find out soon.
Venture debt. Though, unless you have no other options, I wouldn't do it; angel investors are better in almost every way, and they can't forcefully liquidate your company when they feel like you've been underperforming.
Angel investors generally make equity investments, not loans. Cohost in the past has been very specific about the fact that their funding was the latter.
Well it sounds like a lot of work to turn a readable and correct article (since it still "is" all of those things) into a very tortuous if somewhat slightly more technically-correct version... so I assume there are already half a dozen bots and obsessive Wikipedia users devoted to doing just that.
> Cohost (stylized in all lowercase letters as cohost or cohost!) is a social media website publicly launched in June 2022[1] that is currently in beta, and will be discontinued at the end of 2024[2].
If that was the case wouldn't the same be true for basically any physical thing?
> The universe was (and perhaps was not), is, will be for the foreseeable future (of which the timespan is indeterminate) and might become (with perhaps a period of not being) all of space and time and their contents.
Seeing this outcome definitely makes me wonder what the long-term futures of Bluesky, Fediverse, Tumblr etc are. Cohost's revenue per subscriber was really healthy, their subscriber numbers were pretty stable, etc. Sure, they weren't on a skyrocketing growth trajectory, but they also weren't spending aggressively on advertising.
Their costs were super reasonable as an ongoing concern too compared with my experience at various startups. Losses that small are practically pocket change. If they weren't able to win investors over with their service's relatively strong performance since launch, what hope do these other services have when the investor money dries up? Do they have secret sauce that isn't "sell customer data to OpenAI" and "run more ads"? The former works right now but its days seem numbered as a realistic revenue source, and advertising becomes a worse revenue source with every passing day.
i.e. from the sources I've seen, Bluesky is operating on something like $20m in total investment. That's a good amount of money, but what happens when it dries up? What's their revenue plan? Whatever it is, I hope it's more compelling than Twitter's answer for keeping the lights on, more successful than Cohost's model, and more substantial than the Fediverse's.
From what I can tell the nail in the coffin to Cohost was having their big revenue feature unceremoniously killed by Stripe, which is sobering. Always sucks to have to put your fate in the hands of payment processors, since they have a long track record of being capricious.
The more relevant post is the the one from the cohost maintainers linked in that post’s first comment: https://cohost.org/staff/post/6403911-may-2024-financial-u. In summary, at that time Stripe forbade use of their service to pay for tips or subscriptions that do not result in access to exclusive content.
Looking around the website I couldn’t help but notice this attitude: “we hate the software industry and we hate social media”… so they decided to start a social media company? I’m curious what their vision of success looked like.
To me, the fact that they burned out feels like the logical conclusion from where they started from.
only if you're super literal-minded. "Y for people who hate Y" is a perfectly fine shorthand for "if you like the idea of Y, or some aspects of Y, but hate what it has become today, here's a product for you"
I think they were very successful in their goal, they just lacked resources and funding. Their site was a joy to use, it certainly accomplished the vision.
What baffles me is how they have $41k in expenses monthly for so few users. I'd love to see a breakdown of what in their infrastructure is eating up so much money.
Pure speculation, but AFAIK they provided benefits like health insurance to their staff, so even if they weren't offering high salaries I bet a sizable % of that monthly cost is personnel and associated costs.
They put their money (and investors' money) where their mouth was and actually ran a co-op instead of relying heavily on freelancers or cheap outsourced labor. It's unfortunate that doing that hampers sustainability, though.
(Roughly $94k annually per employee as detailed in the 2023 financial update—low for Silicon Valley but high for co-ops / small community sites / "small tech")
I think that's the pretax salary number? (they said "pay", and it was CoL adjusted from their starting $80k target salary in ~2021). They estimated their fully loaded cost in the same update as around $108k per employee (gave total payroll expenses as $36k monthly for four full-time employees). They said in a different update they were using a QSEHRA, which seems to have a cap of $11k per employee, so presumably that covers most of the difference? But maybe I'm just interpreting that completely wrong. I remember they posted about their healthcare coverage woes at one point but I don't remember the details.
That all being said, I don't think this is a huge indictment of Cohost—they had a solid 4 years, and in all likelihood they'd have had to close up sooner if their personal financial situations were more precarious. But a situation where making less than $94k is "precarious" is a very tough one to be trying to starta new social media company in.
It turns out that when you actually pay money to people for their work, it is expensive. That is because the value provided by the labor of humans is, in fact, valuable. However, if you instead just exploit people and take advantage of them, lots of things can be really, really cheap. In fact, they can be so cheap it'd be insane not to take advantage of, some might say...
They’re actually bringing in a lot of money each month with a high % of users supporting as paid members. But their expenses are really high for the kind of site it is.
Anyway this is what happens to a community that builds itself on closed source centralized platforms. When the maintainers decide to give up the users and community have no say.
Alternative social media is discovering what hard problems centralized media has cracked. Problems we don't even see or know about, things we take for granted. Things not appreciated because we almost exclusively pay negative attention to social media, for understandable reasons.
Storage, as an example. It balloons. With video even more. Ever growing costs not necessarily on par with income. Hate FB as much as you like, but my photo posted 16 years ago is still there.
Depending on the software, social media can be compute intense. Not cheap.
Compliance. The legal headache of complying with every jurisdiction
And of course the worst: moderation. Deleting clearly illegal content, gore, scammers, spammers, impersonators followed by the large gray zone realm of the culture wars. A 24/7 operation that you can't ever walk away from and hollows you out over time.
All of that for what? A little carved out box for "your" people? Just open a normal forum, Reddit, Discord and piggy back on another platform.
You're carrying a disproportional burden for questionable benefits. You're never going to rebuild social media at scale from scratch. You're effectively creating a small chat group for like-minded individuals.
Mastodon is the biggest attempt at alternative social media. It's 8 years old and has 800K MAU and that MAU is perpetually tanking. It carved out a little corner for misfits. Good for them, but the entire "fediverse" is unlikely to account for more than that.
I didn't vibe with it, but a lot of people I like went there when the shitposters came for Snouts.online and killed it. I'd like to see them come to Bluesky, but I know it's a different kind of experience.
If there's any good to come out of this sadness, selfishly, I think it'll be more people I used to follow who had been solely on Cohost coming to either Bluesky or (less likely, I think) back to Mastodon.
Their hosting costs are crazy for such low usage (I assume since they say no one is being paid that the entirety of their expenses is marketing and tech and 25% of that is infra specifically, but it’s hard to tell since its last months and it’s possible that today they’re not being paid).
Regardless, too much expense for too little revenue.
They say "As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor" -- I take that to mean they were drawing a salary previously, but aren't any more. Assuming the expenses include fully burdened salaries, I'd say the overall costs were understandable.
What is "ethical" when it comes to a social media network?
That either means "moderates so that everyone posting agrees with what I mean by ethics to a satisfying degree" (and folks do not agree on this)
or just "I have fewer complaints about the moderation of this social network than the other popular ones".
To boil this down to what I actually mean with an example: What are the "ethical" allowed things to post about climate change on your social network? (please don't actually fall into the trap of actually discussing climate change here). I can think of about three or four different answers to this question that large blocks of people would passionately defend.
And so either "ethical" social networks don't exist or there is only one true ethical way to do things and that way is people have to agree with my position and lots of people who don't agree with me are very wrong about ethics.
You can do this for a lot of topics and you'll find that contrary to US politics, there are not actually only two ways of thinking about the world and one of them awful.
I think in this respect they mean ethical to users - no ads, no charging money, features that are built to serve the user instead of optimizing for engagement, etc.
I think "ethical" in the context of social media means not doing surveillance capitalism. ie: don't cash on user data. Moderation is a orthogonal topic.
> What is "ethical" when it comes to a social media network?
For me, primarily one does not use a business model that profits from outrage, clickbait, misinformation, etc. Business models that use view-based ad revenue are unethical, for example.
Beyond that, it should make an effort to stifle the spread of harmful content. Where that line is drawn is of course hard to define. Twitter and Facebook largely ignore their responsibilities here, which is one reason I don't use them.
If it can not be made profitably, it can not be made into any large scale activity and it will never reach mainstream.
So, if your idea of "can work" is "it works for me and my niche group who all treat it as a hobby" it is already working.
But if your idea of "can work" is "gets us rid of all social network that makes money by selling eyeballs", then the only way to work will be though finding a valid alternative business model.
Oh, this is so sad... Cohost helped us immensely as a system, and it helped us find so many new friends, and we've felt bad for not checking on it recently, just to hear that they're shutting down. I'm actually really sad that this is happening. :(
I came across a few blog posts hosted on the site, but I always just assumed it was a blog hosting site. I suppose from a marketing angle, it didn't make an impression on me as to why I would use it over anything else.
https://archive.ph/1Oonr