While Twitter is busy limiting the number of readable tweets and breaking its Tweetdeck app, open source Twitter alternative Mastodon is celebrating the launch of a significant refresh of its Android app. The new app, released over the weekend, features a complete Material You redesign — Google’s design language for Android — as well as […]
I wouldn’t consider another VC money backed app/service anymore no matter how good the tech might be. I hope we all remember the hard lessons from the fiascos from the recent months.
This brings up my main questions with mastodon and lemmy… who is going to pay the server costs at scale?
It would be nice if those mechanisms began sooner than later.
I’m tossing $10 to both a month. Many of us are doing that to avoid being the product.
It will need to be by donation and/or sponsorship, systems for which are currently in place for most of the larger instances.
My hope is to see academia, web hosts, and non-profits involved at some point too. I think the software is just too immature at this early stage to expect much in this regard. Once more advanced safeguards are in place (content filters, admin tools, etc.), it may become more viable from a liability perspective.
We will, I imagine subscription models offering maybe premium features will appear over time.
That’s why Mastodon is my choice.