You don't see admins "asking for money" to help because there are not that many admins that are willing to put up all the work that is required to run an instance upfront. Let's normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.

Of course it's not trying to take over Amazon, but that's probably not a realistic goal anyway.

Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.

Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn't realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that's where the userbase and money is now.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.

Bad analogy. A library in isolation can still exist and it does not require the network to have value to its community. An instance in isolation is useful, but the real value comes from its ability to participate in the larger network.

Libraries also are not the drivers of content generation. The motivation for an author to write a book is not "oh, I really want to get my book in the local library!". They want to reach an audience. They rely on a whole cottage industry of agents, publishers, marketing, distributors, etc. The same for Hollywood movies.

To their credit, what tech companies did was to remove a lot of these middlemen. But to their fault, the main reason they were so successful at doing this is that they managed to do that by taking their revenue from their "main business" and running these operations at a loss, forcing their competitors out of existence.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

The focus was on volunteering projects lasting a long time.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Which is the wrong focus.

I can bet that there are kitchen soups that are operated for decades already, but this means shit to me and to most people who don't want to live in a world where fast food chains and ultra-processed crap is the main source of "cheap, universally available" food.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 0 points 56 minutes ago

As usual, agree to disagree