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.
This is so sweet and wholesome that I might faint from a sugar OD!
People always forget the last part of the quote: “The customer is always right in matters of taste.”
</pedantic> ;-)
I like this but I cannot find a reputable source to back this quote. Do you have one by any chance?
I’ve heard: “the customer is always right, until you get their money.”
If you’re not paying for it, directly or through donations, you are the product. If you’re not paying for it via donations, someone else is paying for you. Nothing really changes.
Put another way, this is a commons. You share the job of maintaining the commons, or you recognize that someone else is supporting you and you pay it forward when you can. Nothing is free, and we can lose these spaces if we don’t take care of them.
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!
Thank you for the reminder, it’s a breeze of fresh air with all transparency on this platform that’s we’re not used to - coming from Reddit. I can only hope that this “movement” persists and that lemmy or any similar fediverse app will eventually become the norm. It certainly feels inevitable to me, having seen that the grass is greener on this side
The comparison to Wikipedia is a really good one.
yeah i still think we are the product, we are providing all the content, the moderation, just our words can be used for future LLMs, our usernames can still be profiled by analyzing the content we post, search engines can index and link to content on instances
our particular instance is not doing these things for profit but someone else still can
It’s always better to assume that any public content you upload or download from the internet is being used for profit by someone
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.
Beehaw has a periodic financial update. It would be great if each instance had a similar kind of update so that we can understand what is needed and where to help.
That gives me an idea!
I like it, and it represents the spirit of the fediverse well, but power does cost money. It seems like you want to run a small hands off instance, which is great, but if it starts to grow you might want to keep that in mind.
One nice thing about using parts scavenged from roadside signs is they’re incredibly power efficient. If everything was pulling its full power, I think I’d be pulling 100W maximum, and they don’t run like that.
Fair enough! What exactly did you find on the side of the road that actually worked? It’s a fun idea for lots of servers.
Fanless commercial grade sign PCs are fairly available on the second hand market, relatively inexpensive, and they’re not super high powered, but they’re good enough for small instances of stuff.
Cool stuff! Thanks.
I’m dirt poor but I’ve donated to Wikipedia at least three times now. I use that website so often, it’s changed my life.
I gave them some money after I graduated college. I had used them so much it felt right to give back a bit.
Good for you. I like to think that every little helps.
They’re not a perfect org bit they’re very much an org I’d prefer to continue to exist
You’ve inspired me to be honest. I really didn’t use much of Wikipedia in high school or university but I’ve definitely fallen down the wiki-hole very many times and leanred things that there’s no way I’d have learned if not for the convenience. Gonna donate them a fiver now; it ain’t much, but it’s honest work.
I’m glad to hear that! I’m the same, I don’t recall using it for school or uni, but I can’t begin to imagine how many random pages I’ve looked up as an adult. If it disappeared tomorrow I’d be gutted.
Couldn’t agree more, we need to continue to attract the kind of people who would really be able to help grow this kind of community, so if you have friends you think would like this, try talking to them.
Drop a couple bucks into support the admins and servers - think about streaming services you pay for and use less. $5-10/month to donate to a service you are using daily is pretty cheap considering.
I said I’d be willing to pay up to 5/mo for baconreader, this should be no different… Once I figure out the instance that really matters to me.
Yeah, I used to pay $3/month for Apollo - would be very happy to donate that to lemmy server admins instead. My issue is that I don’t know what instance(s) to donate to given that I’m absorbing content from quite a few different instances at the moment. One of the issues with decentralisation is that I don’t really know who deserves my financial support the most! Maybe I’ll just donate to my home instance.
I see a lot of people willing to support the servers, but little conversation on how to support the admins. I support a living (and competitive) wage for folks, and don’t think instance admins should be doing this work for free. If you set up your own tiny instance for your family, sure, I bet you won’t be charging your family for it, but a huge instance with constant needs and a bunch of strangers is a totally different thing. Just donating toward server costs does not allow admins to pay their personal bills, while they put in hours of work to keep this place going. So, I appreciate you for including “admins” in the support needs!
Not another subscription /s
Hey! at least we have unlimited reads and writes, LOL
I know a lot of people hate it but I wonder if crypto/digital donation would work. All you would need is a separate wallet setup to pay the host every month. Maybe even have a graph/chart showing how much is in the wallet vs how much the monthly bill is.
I like this for the transparency but crypto is an open ledger, anyone can see the balance of any address at any time as well as see where the addresses where money was sent. Plenty of hosts now take crypto and most larger exchanges are tagged on explorers for btc, ltc, etc. That makes it easier for the public to keep an audit on what’s going on.
I know you can see how much is in a wallet, I would prefer a visualization of amount in the wallet vs how much the server costs.
I agree and said exactly that. It would show intent to be transparent if that was setup. My point is that even without that we can still keep an eye on things.
One problem with cryptocurrency is that instead of being coupled with mainstream banks (where workers get their pay deposited) it is instead coupled with speculative assets employed by criminals. As such, choosing to work on accepting cryptocurrency instead of working on accepting real-money donations ties the service to a crime economy instead of a mainstream economy.
To add. USD hasn’t been backed by a real asset in nearly a century. It was once backed by gold but now the only thing backing it is full faith in the USA. At the moment that means something, it might not always.
You need to educate yourself on this stuff because you sound like a moron.
The difference is that the entire world economy would need to collapse for the US dollar to be worthless. Crypto can become worthless because some 22-year-old video game addict steals everyone’s deposit.
The USD, just like any other fiat currency, is backed by the trustworthiness of its central bank and the economic base of the currency area.
In other words: Euros are backed by the fact that if you’re in Italy and have a Euro, you can exchange it for an espresso. You can trust the ECB that it will do its darnest to keep prices stable, and you can trust Italians to continue making espresso, which means that the Euro indeed is a hard currency.
So you are saying that HSBC getting caught helping launder cartel money at the teller is fake news?
USD Is still the preferred currency of criminals across the world and even more so they use assets like paintings to facilitate non traceable payment and smuggle extremely large dollar amounts. They also use art work to launder money.
I’d suggest you pull your head out of your ass and get on the crypto train because it’s leaving you behind. Look at btc, ltc, dash and others.
Good thing criminals never use cash, otherwise you could call the world economy criminal.
HSBC helping to launder money at the teller window with custom boxes must have been a fever dream.
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Eh, I like free software the same way I like free beer - I don’t ever have to pay for it, and no one can compel me to. The beauty of community projects and free software. I enjoy being a freeloader, thanks very much. I will contribute by making this an active project with my posts.
Eh, I like free software the same way I like free beer - I don’t ever have to pay for it, and no one can compel me to.
Right, and no one is even attempting to compel you to. In my opinion, this is one of those “within your means” kind of thing. If you went to your friends house, hung out, and drank his beer every weekend, month after month, his reaction might depend on your ability to contribute. If he knew you struggled to make ends meet, he might be just fine with it, especially if you tried to help out in other ways. He you make more money than he does, and he was the one scraping by, he might get resentful. Either way, he can’t compel you, but one is kind of shitty.
Some of us have more ability to financially support than others, and that’s fine. Last night I made a donation to the developers and another to my instance admins. I’m thinking about making that automatic monthly, but we’ll see. The point is, I think it’s fine if this is a bit socialistic, with some paying a lot, some paying a little, and others not paying at all, as long as the community is able to thrive. By the same token, some instance owners will likely consider it a hobby and not need/want any donations, while some others won’t be able to support growth without them.
Well, I will sound immensely selfish, and maybe it’s because I’ve been so used to “free everything” on the Internet, but I will never pay for an online service ever. I pirate all my books, all my TV shows, and use scripts and archive.is to read online newspapers and magazines for free. Life costs so much money already, I will never ever feel bothered to actually donate to an online service or free software.
If Lemmy.world goes down due to lack of funds, no problem from me. I’ll join a different instance and carry on. Or go back to Reddit.
I’ll happily admit to being a loafer on the Internet. I expect little from my services so long as I don’t have to pay shit for it.
I understand this position - I used to be of the “it’s the internet, steal anything that isn’t nailed down” mentality too.
And I still have a lot of that, to be fair. But COVID taught me a general lesson that I’ve been trying to take to heart: if you want nice things that cost money to function to keep existing, at some point people are going to need to chip in. My town lost a ton of good local businesses to the pandemic, and many others got dangerously close to closing. I don’t go out and support every local business, but shit I care about (my local independent movie theatre, live music venues, etc.) gets the amount of money I’m willing to contribute.
If people don’t do this, nice things either disappear or become less nice in an effort to secure funding by alternate means.
You’re welcome not to - the means exist where you don’t have to - but think about the declining quality of some of the stuff you enjoy and why that might be the case.
At least you have the self awareness that you are a selfish asshole, so that’s something I guess?
Rent and food come first for me. Online services are fungible. Like if it’s free to use or free to take, I’ll take advantage. We all have to eat first and some of us don’t earn enough money to donate to a free project. Donations are a luxury to me.
Don’t judge, 99% of the people using Lemmy and its various instances will never donate. We contribute happily through our posts.
I don’t think you know what fungible means.
I will never pay for an online service ever
I disagree with this attitude, but you’re for sure not alone. If everyone was like that, we just wouldn’t have a lot of things we do now.
When our boys were young and torrents and ad blockers were new, I tried to get them to understand that, while not everything is about money, people generally don’t invest huge amounts of their own time and money into things that they aren’t getting paid for. If everyone started using ad blockers, sites would close down or move to a subscription model because ads are what paid for content. If everyone stole their music, some bands might just hang it up or put less focus on making new music, etc.
And here we are: lots of publications have moved behind paywalls because they weren’t getting much ad revenue anymore, many have started putting out content that’s just regurgitated crap from Twitter and Reddit because they can’t afford journalists, and some have just gone under. Bands spend a lot more time touring because it’s harder to steal a concert so they make more money doing that than putting out albums (though the Spotify model has changed some things). People are all about stealing content and thinking they should get everything for free, but it really is selfish and unrealistic.
Here’s the thing: the rest of life (rent, food, retirement etc.) cost so much already that anything I can get for free or don’t have to pay for in some way I will make that choice to pirate or not pay. If capitalism wasn’t breathing down my neck with all this crazy inflation in food costs, rent increases, student loan repayments, etc., perhaps I would be more amenable to paying for newspapers and online services and all that nice to have stuff. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
I will sound immensely selfish
You do sound immensely selfish.
Why comment this
To boost active user count on Lemmy.
This might not compel you to, but the only way to keep Lemmy from turning into Reddit 2 is by donating so they don’t have to seek out investors. We all have to do what we can to help out - that said, by posting you are creating content for the website. That’s not nothing.
contributing to open source projects
You need to be careful with this point, because it becomes addictive.
It’s 4AM and I just submitted a PR to the Liftoff app repo.
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.
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I’m not sure I understand your concern. Are you generally opposed to people building good things, or is your objection more specific than that?
I’m just saying that people intentionally trying to sound poignant and profound often do not.
And you’re trying to embody living proof of that, I assume.
What you’ve written sounds clunky and weird. It’s like, you can embody something, and you can be living proof of something, but saying someone is “trying to embody living proof of [something]” is a mistake an alien pretending to be human would make. 😉
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And that’s where I’m just loving it. All dope apps and services without a single person being greedy. I still haven’t seen a dev ask for money for any apps and the crazy part is I would pay for Memmy in a heart beat.
Thanks a lot for the post! Super nice to hear. Would also like to point out that “the customer is always right” was originally meant for sales. I.e. if they want a meat themed car, sell it to them, dont tell them its in bad taste. So for more ways than one treat those that serve you with respect. Theyre serving the community, not your servants.
Extremely well put. Not the customer or product but the citizen. And try paying taxes if you’re able. This is a FUBU type of thing.
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!).
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.
The second quote often leaves out the rest of it.
The full original quote was.
The customer is always right in matters of taste. Notice how that means something completely different than the quote everyone uses?
That is all I have to add.
I’ve never heard the full quote before, I guess. Where does it come from?
This has been commonly spread around Reddit for a while, and is completely made up.
The full original quote was “The customer is always right.” This was pushed by some retailers as a way of setting the standard of how to treat customers.
Like most oversimplified phrases, it can’t be used as a blanket policy, because customers take advantage of it. “in matters of taste” is a nice way to try to correct the phrase in response, but it was never the “original” and it does no favors to revise history to cover up the blunder.
I think I remember reading that, and the author provided clarification a year later, correcting that it doesn’t hold true with dishonest customers!
So many boomers think “the customer is always right” means the service provider is required to give you white glove treatment when the real meaning is that the service provider is not allowed to tell the customer theyre wrong to like plaid and paisley together
Not even not allowed really, it’s just a dumb thing to do if you want to make a sale in most instances
