• Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
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    4 hours ago

    My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.

    Of course it’s not trying to take over Amazon, but that’s probably not a realistic goal anyway.

    Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.

    Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn’t realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that’s where the userbase and money is now.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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      3 hours ago

      My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.

      Bad analogy. A library in isolation can still exist and it does not require the network to have value to its community. An instance in isolation is useful, but the real value comes from its ability to participate in the larger network.

      Libraries also are not the drivers of content generation. The motivation for an author to write a book is not “oh, I really want to get my book in the local library!”. They want to reach an audience. They rely on a whole cottage industry of agents, publishers, marketing, distributors, etc. The same for Hollywood movies.

      To their credit, what tech companies did was to remove a lot of these middlemen. But to their fault, the main reason they were so successful at doing this is that they managed to do that by taking their revenue from their “main business” and running these operations at a loss, forcing their competitors out of existence.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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          3 hours ago

          Which is the wrong focus.

          I can bet that there are kitchen soups that are operated for decades already, but this means shit to me and to most people who don’t want to live in a world where fast food chains and ultra-processed crap is the main source of “cheap, universally available” food.

            • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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              46 minutes ago

              “agree to disagree…” On what, exactly?

              Do you think that the value of the Fediverse is the “community” in itself? Is this why you are participating here and not on Reddit? Is all your effort on the communities and in promoting Lemmy/kbin as alternatives because you are defending some ideal where social media can be run strictly by volunteers?