I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.
Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.
I don’t agree, really … that’d limit the Fediverse to hobbyists.
It’s completely legitimate to look for income & exposure as a creator, whether you’re making music, visual art, or document your process making physical objects. Corporate platforms, as crappy as they might be, provide a path to that, and in many ways created viable path for creators to do what they like full-time. Not saying that it’s perfect or easy. But the Fediverse is currently no alternative at all …
Currently, restricting yourself to the Fediverse as an artist unfortunately means that you’re taking quite a hit in terms of exposure you can get. As long as that’s the case, and people even defend it, then we really can’t complain that the Fediverse isn’t attractive for a larger amount of people, and centralized platforms will always have the bigger draw.
I try to avoid corporate platforms as much as I can, but as a consumer I often feel starved of content. I haven’t found any interesting woodworking channels on PeerTube, or guitar repair channels, or whatever else I enjoy watching to wind down.
And as a creator, well … it’s not my source of income, but I sure would like it to be. And if I ever decide to make that step, I’m pretty sure that I’s have to make amends to my “no corporate platforms” approach. The Fediverse doesn’t feed you.
Ok. I can follow this line of reasoning.
If you want to avoid corporate platforms, fediverse doesn’t provide as viable an alternative as one might like.
This is clear, and makes sense. Thanks for the succinct explanation. At least I see some sense here now.
I’m not entirely sure that it matters.
Like, when was it decided that the ‘making money’ bit needed to be imported from YouTube?
I doesn’t “need” to be imported, the question is just, where do we see the future of federated (non-)platforms ? Do we want them to be “small and cozy” with a small and fairly narrow selection of content or do we want a non-corporate alternative that can compete in richness and variety of interesting content of all niches?
A lot of folks only seem to see the crappy part of youtube and other platforms, and don’t see the richness of content that exists ther. There’s still so much interesting stuff to be found. I don’t think there has ever been a bigger archive of, say, documentation about arts, crafts, history, food, than YT, even it its current enshittified form. If that’s an ocean of content, the Fediverse isn’t even a major river (at least that’s my impression).
If you don’t mind that, great. But I do, I’d love a non-corporate version to exist that can compete in terms of richness of content.
And monetary incentive is part of the puzzle, as it incentivizes people to spend time on it, which in terms generates a bigger audience, which in turn has a higher potential to support a wider range of content niches. Plain and simple.
Well, the more of youtube we import … the more of youtube we import. Part of the reason we aren’t flooded with crap on the fediverse is that we are too small to matter. And perhaps we are small enough to effectively police our own. So … why would we want to import youtube at all? Bigger is not better.