this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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You Should Know

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YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

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Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you've been invited into.


It has been said that "if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product."

It has also been said that "the customer is always right".

Right here and now, you're neither the customer nor the product.

You're a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.

You're using a service that you aren't being charged for; but that service isn't part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you're participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.

You've probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it's one of the most popular websites in the world, but it's not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don't imperil the service itself.

The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They're not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they're also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.

Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.

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[–] WheeGeetheCat@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

Great post, thanks for taking the time to write up this sentiment

[–] Spzi@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

Ideally, we are participants. This can have many forms like donating, voting, commenting, reporting, posting, helping and explaining.

The whole thing also lives off substantial support, mostly to the codebase, but also the wiki, the various tools people use to search and monitor, apps and pages like https://join-lemmy.org/. Consider contributing what you can, and what feels right for you.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

Speak for yourself. I am but a simple upvote salesmen. I sell one upvote for the low price of one uplemmy. Get yours today, limited time only!

[–] FartSmarter@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.

[–] oceane@jlai.lu 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The sentence “if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product” might be accurate, but it would make more sense to me to say that if you're not the customer, you're the worker.

Facebook and Twitter run on unpaid labor, mostly made by abuse survivors and especially teenagers. Twitter has been enshittified pretty fast so this has been the case since at least 2012. These aren't just scam, the long-running relationship between the scammer and his victims imply most components that you would find in a standard definition of abuse, including limiting their ability to conceptualize what's happening to them, for example with hard or hidden characters limits.

Edit : I've forgot to mention that, but Mastodon also optimizes for engagement, I believe that we needed that to get attention from the media and thus to gradually build migration waves. There are good reasons to use Mastodon, but there are also forms of abuse there, total institutions as would say Goffman – defined by their inmates' isolation within a differentiated society. So there's a lot of bullshit. If we want to get rid of that, we need people to use software that won't abuse them, such as https://bonfirenetworks.org.

[–] zombuey@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

so a real question if a one instance decided to setup for advertising and used that money to pay mods would that be acceptable?

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[–] Zenith25@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

A great post that I wholeheartedly agree with.

Just as with Mastodon / Twitter, the services may look very similar but what many fail to grasp immediately is the culture is different (in a very good way!).

[–] 70ms@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the reminder! I signed up at sdf.org because I saw that r/bbs had moved over. As soon as I saw SDF's website, which hasn't had its look updated since the mid 90's by my eye, I knew it was the one for me. I can tell they've been struggling a bit under the load but I appreciate so much that they're hosting an instance and I have confidence they'll get it all running smoothly. They're a non-profit and I'll be donating as soon as I'm able.

I do worry, though, that as the fediverse grows many of the instances won't be able to scale up and will drop out. I'm not an admin or sysop and know nothing of how this works on the back end, so hopefully those fears are groundless.

[–] thesanewriter@vlemmy.net 3 points 1 year ago

Absolutely. I'm glad that we're cultivating such a great community so far, hopefully it will only continue to grow and improve as time goes on.

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