An open source, self-hostable music platform will soon allow people on the Fediverse to buy music and support artists. Here’s why it’s a big deal.
An open source, self-hostable music platform will soon allow people on the Fediverse to buy music and support artists. Here’s why it’s a big deal.
Hosting the files is the least of the problems. Accepting payments online is. Dealing with fraud is. Managing exclusive access and features for paying customer is. Getting one place where you can point your fans to go and buy your music or merch is.
How is that free? Even if you are self-hosting, you still need to pay for your server, the electricity to run it and your time that you spend troubleshooting, making sure things are up-to-date, etc. Not to mention that you are also not accounting the labor of the developers of libre projects: FOSS does not grow in trees, they require people working for it as well.
I know plenty of small groups with their own webpage dealing with most of that. It’s not that big of a deal.
I selfhost my own searxng, both labor and electricity cost are so small they are negligible.
My point is that if I am to be in al “alternative” economy is not to make rich a cool San Francisco dude instead of Jeff Bezos, is to not make rich anyone at my expenses. When I ask for something different I do not ask for making rich different people, I ask for a system that does not make rich anyone.
For instance Lemmy. Lemmy does not ask for subscriptions nor have ads. Voluntary donations are more than enough to keep it on float. Other people like Kagi CEO or some other CEOs like that would ask a subscription fee for lemmy and guilt trip people into thinking it’s necessary, when it’s not.
That is the perfect display of crab mentality that is so prevalent in the Fediverse.
We’re talking about one guy that is building a service that is 100% FOSS, and who currently has (according to the article) 300 musicians on the platform. Even if them all become paying subscribers, we are talking about something on the order of $3000/month. No one is going to become a “rich dude in San Francisco” because of that.
Even if he gets 10 times as many people paying, we are still talking about income that is less than what a senior developer would be making by slinging code at Big Tech. And if he got to the point where there that many people using his service, you can bet that would also mean more competition in the space. With the difference that no one would be able to build a monopoly around it because the service is FOSS and built on top of open protocols.
“Keeping it afloat” is not the same as “thriving”. The Lemmy developers have made this their full-time job, but they could be making more money by doing deliveries by bike than what they get by donations. This is pathetically little for all the value that they have produced. There is so much potential in the Fediverse, yet we don’t get to realize 1% of it because people like you keep this silly idea that an “alternative” economy is only fair if everyone is piss-poor broken.