I've had three glasses of wine after a long day at work, and I've began thinking about the slow shift towards federalization/decentralization.
I find myself concerned about the question of incentives. What motivates the owners and maintainers of federated services to continue their efforts over the years? Donations alone are unlikely to cover the costs of servers, let alone the time required for code/infra maintenance, along with community moderation.
It is evident that most successful open source projects have found alternative avenues to sustain Incentivisation. One common approach is offering enterprise packages or services, which generate revenue to support ongoing development and maintenance. Additionally, some projects find support as subsets of larger corporations, such as Canonical, HashiCorp, Apache, MongoDB, k8s, Chromium, Android, Red Hat, and many more.
I am sure that many of us have witnessed many donation-based or entirely free and open-source (FOSS) projects lose traction over time. In my observations, this can be attributed to core maintainers losing interest or facing limitations in dedicating themselves to the project in the long run. The absence of financial incentives can make it challenging to sustain motivation, as maintaining and developing projects require significant time and expertise, and a genuine interest in the product.
What can be done to address these problems? Is it something like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)?
DAOs provide token-based incentives, allowing contributors to earn tokens representing ownership or value in the project. These tokens can be exchanged or redeemed for various benefits within the decentralized ecosystem. By aligning the interests of contributors with the success of the project, DAOs offer a sustainable incentive structure, while maintaining their decentralized nature.
Although incentives pose a valid concern for a decentralized future, it is important to acknowledge that sustainable models exist. Through the exploration of alternative mechanisms such as DAOs and hybrid models, we can create incentive structures that attract and retain contributors over the long term. I strongly believe that for decentralized projects to thrive and maintain momentum, it is crucial for them to embrace alternative models that effectively retain talented individuals. As these projects continue to innovate and adapt, exploring diverse incentive structures becomes essential to ensure their long-term success.
Thoughts?
I've noticed that as technology has progressed over the last few decades, it has gotten progressively cheaper - like, it used to cost some serious $$$ to host your own website/community back in the day, but now you can easily get away with it for less than ~$100/yr.
people that like to create things have a vested interest in maintaining their creations - presumably they'd pay some small amount in order to have their creations (or a digitally archived copy) preserved for posterity.
not familiar with DAOs, but it sounds sort of like a form of currency. if everyone adopts it, or recognizes its value (much as American currency is valued in countries with weak economies), and the tokens are redeemable across multiple platforms (or have a real world value), then that, along with other sources of remuneration (crowdfunding, donations, etc) could easily pay for the cost of hosting content long term.
Sure, at a small scale. But if you want to run a highly available, horizontally scalable platform that will cost $$$.
I agree with your other points!
There's no need to be large though. There can be many many small servers.
Small servers also tend to disappear, though. As far as I know, federated content simply goes away when the server does.
I think some of the content, like comments on other instances, remains. Overall, a small server disappearing shouldn't have a major impact on the network as a whole.
Until enough small instances fail/disappear. It’s kind of like with users, if you have a bunch of users that only comment twice a year..if one leaves, meh not a big deal. As more and more of them leave that is 2^n less comments you are getting. At first the drain isn’t noticeable but by the time it is it’s likely too late, too many people are gone and your website is a shell of what it used to be.
People keep saying to push people into a bunch of smaller servers but the same thing will happen. Especially since the person that started the server will be likely footing the bill from their own income. If they lose interest or don’t feel like paying for it anymore, poof there goes their server and users. (Yes their users can make new accounts on new instances but how many times do you think people are going to put up with losing their account)
"How to fund fedi" is an important, valid question.
"Use DAOs/cryptocurrencies to fund fedi" is a completely wrong answer.