This is a very interesting article about the long-term sustainability of the Fediverse for moderators, administrators, and developers. We’ve already had two of our lovely Beehaw admins take breaks to take care of themselves as they experience the burnout associated with maintaining a community, and I think for a lot of use we already know how exhausting it can be to take a center stage position in an online community.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any great starting points for what to do, but at least talking about it is a start.
I am calling for the professionalization of the fediverse since December of last year. The donation-based and “pay-what-you-want” systems that the most popular instances are adopting are not sustainable and they are not fair.
Paying for servers is the least of the problems. Dealing with hundreds of thousands of users who are freeriding on the donations from some generous minority is. The income from an instance might grow linearly with the number of users, but the amount of issues grows exponentially because of the potential number of interactions.
Instead of these handful of servers who are concentrating the majority of users, we should be aiming at having an explosion of smaller instances who have a well defined, limited size and where every members contributes, no matter how little. When everyone contributes, then everyone feels responsible and the burden gets to be shared among all. When a handful of people give and the majority does not reciprocate, we get these cases of people feeling burn out and isolated.
I agree with your assessment that the Fediverse would be healthier encouraging small to mid-sized servers to populate with each having active groups of members contributing a fair share of money or time.
I’m just confused by the other parts of your comment. Donation-based financing appear to work for some instances like Beehaw at least for hosting and backup costs, but how do you determine what is a fair contribution and who is freeloading? Should the admins be taking a minimum wage salary from the fund as fair compensation of their work? Are the free-loaders the prolific posters or commenters, the chronic lurker who only votes, or the people that only visit the website once in a while?
A slush fund non-profit to help get small and mid-sized servers up, running and maintained as suggested in the article is a good idea.
Also I’ve long been telling the admins since 2 months ago to take breaks as needed and forgive themselves for mistakes they might make. It’s a lot of work, and burnout shouldn’t be normalized. Instead, taking breaks for the purpose of mental health before it reaches a breaking point should be normalized.
About the first part of your comment, some of the ideas around “professionalization” imo would make Beehaw lose a part of it that I love. How in my experience it’s a little rough around the edges but friendlier in a deeper way than most social media, relying on common sense and mutual understanding to keep arguments from getting too heated, and a strict but well-defined and equitable approach to moderation. I get why it might work better in many aspects, but the raw conversation I was able to have even with people I vehemently disagreed with on Beehaw has been an amazing experience.