It’s what drives most billionaire mentalities: elite projection.

They think that what they want must be what everyone wants. They believe that what’s best for them is best for everyone as long as they believe it to be morally okay for their own interests.

For a billionaire that regularly isolates himself from not just society, but also his own company’s employees, having fake profiles where computers do the communication instead of a human, go along and agree with whatever you say, remain eternally unoffensive, and exist solely to increase engagement doesn’t seem like a bad idea, since it seems almost like what he’d want for himself.

All requests are proxied through DuckDuckGo, and all personalized user metadata is removed. (e.g. IPs, any sort of user/session ID, etc)

They have direct agreements to not train on or store user data, (the training part is specifically relevant to OpenAI & Anthropic) with a requirement they delete all information once no longer necessary (specifically for providing responses) within 30 days.

For the Llama & Mixtral models, they host them on together.ai (an LLM-focused cloud platform) but that has the same data privacy requirements as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Recent chats that are saved for later are stored locally (instead of on their servers) and after 30 conversations, the last chat before that is automatically purged from your device.

Obviously there’s less technical privacy guarantees than a local model, but for when it’s not practical or possible, I’ve found it’s a good option.

And there are also free, online hosted instances of those same LLMs in a (relatively speaking) privacy-protecting format from DuckDuckGo, for anyone who doesn’t have a powerful GPU :)

Please explain how having ads or subscriptions in any way requires you to have a marketing department and c-suite executives that get to siphon money from operational budgets.

It’s possible, but funding changes at scale.

For example, more people using federated protocols like Mastodon or Lemmy are going to be early adopters that care more about underlying technology and have stronger ideological views about online platforms, compared to, say, your average Facebook mom.

So of course, they’re going to be more likely to donate. Once you scale outside of those groups into groups of people who don’t care as much, and are less invested in the technology, you get less donations.

Sites can work on donation models (again, see Wikipedia) but it’s much more difficult to have such a system stay afloat than one where monetization is much more heavily required, and thus generates more revenue.

It’s not ideal, but it’s also difficult to have such a system work otherwise in many cases.

and do not have to deal with the added tasks of ads and trackers commercial sites use.

They use these things because it makes them more money than it costs. If ads and trackers costed more to implement than not having them, then they wouldn’t use them in the first place.

You could pretty easily build a youtube like site around it.

PeerTube exists if you’re interested, by the way.

Sites can be distributed, the technology to do that has existed since the mid 90’s.

Certain aspects of sites can be distributed, but others can’t as easily be. For instance, you could have a P2P federated network where every user of, say, Mastodon, helps host and redistribute content from posts, but that’s not how these systems are built right now, and they’d have difficulties with things like maintaining accurate like counts.

It would be ideal if they could be built in a way that removes the need for a central platform in the first place, and can run on general-purpose devices, and thus doesn’t carry costs that require monetization, but because they aren’t built like that, they will eventually need to monetize as they scale up. Unless they change the entire underlying technological model of these federated platforms, they will inevitably need to monetize if they gain enough users outside the (relatively speaking) small bubble of dedicated users that can easily fund a platform through hobby money and donations.

There is no larger site the internet wouldn’t be better without.

You’re targeting the larger sites as they exist, not the concepts and underlying functionality.

If you want social media, no matter if it’s Lemmy or Reddit, it costs a hell of a lot of money to host that. If you wanted social media, even a federated model like Lemmy or Mastodon to actually scale to all the people that are otherwise using other sites like Meta’s, you have to fund it somehow, and those funding models change at scale.

I’m not saying needing money like this is good, but it’s simply objectively difficult to fund any platform, for any purpose, when handling so many users. The only reason Lemmy and other federated platforms are funded so well right now is because they can be done at a hobbyist level, for a hobbyist cost, in most cases.

Once you scale up to the whole world, your funding model simply has to change. Donations can work, but they’re much more difficult to get working than either ads or subscriptions in terms of securing long-term funding at scale.

Because most mastodon instances are running off donations, and have a relatively small user base.

The kind of people who use Mastodon are substantially more likely to be heavily invested in the technology and the vision, and thus more likely to donate.

Expand that out to the billions of people who use social media, and you have a funding problem.

Not to mention the much lesser need for moderation due to more homogeneous and well-intentioned micro communities and substantially lower rate of bots, which all means less “staff” you have to pay too.

It’s not a matter of minimum viability, it’s a matter of scale.

The early internet also couldn’t provide most of the larger sites and platforms we now use. As it grew, it had to monetize in order to actually operate. If you want something outside the scope of a passion project, you need funding outside the scope of a passion project. The early internet did so well with people who actually cared because they didn’t have to operate platforms that couldn’t just care. They were operating things like personal sites and chatrooms, not social networks, document editors, or newsrooms.

Federated servers with donation-based models can function as of now, but you’d have a hard time covering hosting costs if every normal social media user began using federated platforms. There’s simply too many of them.

I’m not saying ads improve content, I’m not saying they’re the best model, and if you refuse to accept ads anywhere, that’s fine, but sites simply can’t all provide services for free, and if we want sites with the same functionality we have today, they need to monetize somehow.

Donations are definitely an option (I mean, hey, look at Wikipedia) but it isn’t necessarily viable for every online venture. For a lot of platforms, monetization must be compelled in some way, whether it’s by pushing ads, or paywalling with a subscription. The best option a platform can offer if it’s not capable of just running off donations alone is to let users choose the monetization they prefer to deal with.

This isn’t really much of an issue, practically speaking. The likelihood of someone buying a subscription is different than buying a product from an ad.

For instance, while I’m highly likely to pay for a subscription to a streaming service that lets me watch videos from creators (in my case, Nebula) I’m not likely to buy any products from a sponsorship or YouTube ad. (and haven’t, thus far)

My likelihood of paying for a product in an ad is entirely separate from paying for the service those ads are on, and this is commonly true for many people.

If there’s an independent news outlet I want to support, I’m going to feel more inclined to pay them than I am to buy a product in an ad, just because each carries different incentives for me. I want to support the news outlet, I don’t want to buy a product somewhere else.

This is anecdotal, and I understand that, but as someone else had also mentioned before, even companies like Netflix are promoting their revenue from the ad tier, and having both is a good mechanism to keep the business afloat and allow it to acquire customers who don’t want to spend too much.

True, but that’s a matter of technical implementation that I believe should be changed along with any proposed change to monetization models like I’d previously mentioned.

For instance, the site should delay ad loading until you pick “yes, I want to see ads,” or if you pick “I have a subscription” and sign in, it shouldn’t load them at all.

This isn’t impossible to do, it’s just something they haven’t made as an easy implementation yet, since things like Google’s ad services auto-load when a page is loaded, since no site really has a mechanism to manually enable or disable the core requests to Google based on user input.

While a lot of us hate ads and subscriptions, I have the unpopular opinion that they are generally still viable considering the state of how we use the internet today.

The thing is, I think that if there are ads, there should be the ability to pay to remove them, and if there is a subscription, there should be an ad-based tier as an alternative.

Let your users choose, respect their preference for funding model, and allow them to choose if they want to support a given monetization policy.

Of course, seeing as how they raised $15m from VCs, I doubt this will be nothing but what will inevitably devolve into a pay-for-reach scheme similar to Twitter Blue (or, sorry “X Premium”) that just leads to those with wealth getting more engagement, and a louder voice.

It was early yesterday, before filters had been updated, 30 seconds after a full purge and re-selecting of all relevant filter lists, done within the span of 2 minutes, so I doubt it was those.

Fun fact, it seems this ban is IP based. (they’re still testing in waves with a subset of overall users)

I switched to a new IP with my VPN, and while still signed in to the same YouTube account on the same video without ever clearing my cache or cookies, the block disappeared.

Genius work from the developers over at YouTube.

Gotta love how they saved the literal slot machine for a minute in to the video so it wouldn’t be too obvious.

An online ecommerce platform.

It’s similar to Etsy. Targets smaller creators, values individual-made goods, but focuses on digital content, like soundtracks, 3D assets, etc.

This is the danger of elite projection. What his life is like must be how other people’s lives are like.

He was successful. If he wanted to get a job, he could. If he did work, he got paid.

If these people aren’t doing that, it must be their fault, and they need “treatment” (via institutionalization) in his mind. It couldn’t possibly be because to get a job, you often need existing housing, but to get housing, you need money from a job. Or the fact that people like him don’t pay enough.

It’s always their fault. Individual responsibility, meritocracy and all that jazz.

I wholeheartedly reject the notion that they don’t care about the economy.

To add more proof to this, according to the Pew Research Center, the economy made up a massive swath of the top issue for voters in this last election.

The difference is that, in this case “anything” for these merch sellers is selling merchandise with words printed on them for money, whereas “anything” for healthcare insurance CEOs is denying care for people and allowing them to suffer and die.

Sure, they’re both doing it to turn a profit, but the motive and rationale is entirely different.

Just as someone already mentioned in this thread, I can vouch for Immich as well. I self host it (currently via Umbrel on a Pi 5 purely for simplicity) and the duplicate detection feature is very handy.

Oh, and the AI face detection feature is great for finding all the photos you have of a given person, but it sometimes screws up and thinks the same person is two different people, but it allows you to merge them anyways, so it’s fine.

The interface is great, there’s no paywalled features (although they do have a “license,” which is purely a donation) and it generally feels pretty slick.

I would warn to anyone considering trying it that it is still in heavy development, and that means it could break and lose all your photos. Keep backups, 3-2-1 rule, all that jazz.

Which also has the additional benefit for homeowners of local backup power in the case of a blackout :)