Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
Why does everything have to be for profit?
This is the real question we have to ask ourselves. We really need to move away from looking at the internet as just a resource to extract money from, and instead see it through a social lense again. Look what late stage capitalism has done to our digital, social gathering places. Almost everything has become a product that needs to be profitable, to compete for attention and to extract as much data from users as possible and discourse has suffered greatly from it. I mean billions are donated to content creators simply because people want to contribute. Why stop there? We can shape the internet the way we want if we simply contribute and put our heads together. We don’t have to make a profit. That’s our strength.
I like this take.
Due to life circumstances, I basically live on the internet, and have since the late 90s. My first comment on here was about how I support socialized social media.
I want to go back to a time when I could actually talk to random people, and have meaningful discourse, even if it isn’t as big of a community or as content-filled. I want my social space to be interactive, not passive.
Profit-seeking models push for passive consumption rather than actual meaningful engagement. I’d much rather have a non-profitable platform that people keep alive because they want the same thing I do. I’ll donate to it, as long as it stays that way.
I think they are asking “how are things paid for” not necessarily “are they making tons of excese profit”
Profit is the money leftover after everything has been paid for, though. All profit is, by definition, excess.
You’re probably right and the OP is just confusing terms, but I think it’s an important distinction to make.