Okay, I assume I'm more or less preaching to the choir by crossposting this here, but I wrote it and I'd be upset if it disappeared forever into tumblr's abyss, so here it is for posterity:
nightpool:
[A tumblr post about Pillowfort's technical issues which concludes with] writing for-profit social media and selling it as “by fans for fans” in 2018 is still evil, and making it closed source is just stupid.
deusvulture:
how do you feel about dreamwidth?
nightpool:
open source and nominally for profit, which means, I suppose, that they’re evil and not stupid. in practice my understanding is that they’re reasonably transparent about Money stuff and they’ve earned a lot of trust from the community. (but i’m not very close to the situation, maybe someone else can speak in their defense)
pillowfort … has not particularly earned anyone’s trust money wise, over the past 5 years
And, of course, open source here means (like it did with livejournal) that “leave and go somewhere else” is a much more viable option then it would be otherwise.
me:
*raises hand* Okay, I’ll speak in their defense, since you’re throwing the word “evil” around so casually.
“writing for-profit social media and selling it as ‘by fans for fans’ in 2018 is still evil” I must be missing a lot of background here. But as someone who was around for Strikethrough and the formation of OTW and Dreamwidth that came out of it, wow, NO. Fanworks should be not-for-profit because it’s important to the legal definition of Fair Use. A social media website is not a fanwork. Disney is not going to try to take down all of Dreamwidth, the social media blogging platform, for being a copyright-infringing Thing.
Point two: social media websites cost money to run. Everything with massive amounts of use costs massive amounts of money. We’ve been using Google to search the web for ‘free’ since the 90s, and they make money. They just don’t make money because we pay them to run a search. They make money off of selling ads and collecting our data and figuring out clever money-making things they can do with it. There are lots and lots of companies that run off this model, and what it results in is that at the end of the day, their customers are the companies who want to sell ads and buy data. You, the person, the userbase, are the product. Google wants to keep you reasonably happy so you aren’t too inspired to leap the fence and go use somebody else’s search engine, but when the ad companies say ‘jump,’ say ‘we don’t want our ads next to that icky unpopular stuff,’ they get listened to.
But wait, there’s another source of money so we can use fancy internet sites for free: venture capital. Venture capital is people with lots of money going out and putting money into small start-ups that they think can make it big. Sometimes lots and lots of money. So the site gets built, the services get offered for free, and somewhere down the line the venture capitalists come back and say, okay, you’ve got a big site now, how can you turn it into profit for our shareholders? And the guys who had a cool idea for a site and took the venture capitalists’ money so they could make it big have to listen. So then it’s ads everywhere, it’s costly, cool, but not core services getting chopped off, and when it turns out that the big cool free site isn’t as good at making money as the suits wanted it to be, it can get sold off for whatever they can get for it, to people who may or may not just shut it down, or deliberately drive off most of the userbase so they can still afford the server costs while making everybody who stays pay.
This pattern is everywhere. Photobucket, Del.ic.ious, LiveJournal, you name it. Tech in general has been seriously bubbled for the last couple decades due to all these venture capitalists thinking everything’s going to be the next Amazon or Ebay.
The people who created Dreamwidth were very, very aware of it. They made decisions at every step that they were never going to take money from ads or venture capitalism for their business, and they’ve stuck to it. But at the same time, they recognized that erecting a paywall around fandom would be antithetical to everything fandom stands for. So they’re entirely user-funded, but at the same time, everybody can use their site for free. This is a careful balance, and what it works out to is that when you buy a paid account, you get extra but nonessential features, and you’re not just supporting Dreamwidth-the-company. The amount you pay ($3 a month) works out to your share of the server-costs you’re using, the extra features that are mostly on the extra features list because they require extra processing power, and the server costs for about nine other users with free accounts.
We’re subsidizing each other as a fandom when we pay for Dreamwidth to run, and they worked it out this way very, very deliberately. And that’s just one aspect of the philosophy behind Dreamwidth: when Paypal wanted them to establish stricter content guidelines so that Paypal would continue to take payments for them, Dreamwidth said go screw yourself (publicly) and spent three months without taking any electronic payments until they could find a new processor who wouldn’t try to make them censor content (or charge through the roof on those $3 payments).
So yeah. Your lunch isn’t free. Given the fact that we live in a world where things cost money, I’d rather have people who sat down and thought really damn hard about how things should run. Yeah, the fundraising/crowdfunding/nonprofit model is another one, and that works really well for OTW because they’re providing public resources that are otherwise non-monetizable, specifically fanfic and academic scholarship and legal resources for a wide pool of people without a lot of money. But your cat pictures and discourse don’t have the same need for nonprofit protection as fanworks do, and frankly even if they did, people distributing fanzines in ages of yore still charged printing and mailing costs even if they weren’t making a profit.
And Dreamwidth isn’t just “reasonably transparent about Money stuff,” they’re transparent about as much as they possibly can be across the board. What’s bannable and why and if the site might or might not do a thing in the future and why or why not. It’s night and day from the way other sites roll out changes and then shrug at you because they can’t just come out and say, “Our corporate overlords want us to make more money off you.”
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