something that won’t fall into the same pitfal

What exists that cannot be sold to a high enough bidder? Even Lemmy isn't magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?

The internet is fundamentally a privatized system that exists to generate profit for investors. There is no true public domain. Its all just turf up for sale, some of which hasn't gone to a notable bidder yet. If you do manage to improve a patch of digital real estate to the point where someone will pay you enormous sums to divest, you'd be a fool not to take the money.

What genuinely confuses me is who they're finding to buy this shit to begin with.

I've seen so many of these failed "Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens" schemes over the last ten years. It's like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.

Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.

I don't think Revolt is Fediverse, afaik it's entirely centralized without plans for interop or federation
Please update me if I just didn't find the right reference

What genuinely confuses me is who they're finding to buy this shit to begin with.

I've seen so many of these failed "Join our club to score points to get tokens to buy virtual dongles that you can use to get into our more-elite clubs with better points and color tokens" schemes over the last ten years. It's like everyone wants to be Chuck-E-Cheese, nevermind that the company went bankrupt five years ago.

Even if all you care about is profit, it seems like this is an abysmal means of generating it.

Oh it's undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out

Hopefully Revolt (a Fediverse alternative to Discord) continues to improve and can completely take the place of Discord relatively soon.

Edit: it might only be FOSS, not federated. Still a promising project though.

This has been tried and tried again. The first time I remember seeing this was in the '90's where a "free" dial up ISP was trying this. NetZero maybe? Didn't work then, won't work now. They'll pay out so little it won't be worth it. Don't do it kids!

Happy to have folks on e2ee matrix. It supports calling directly and group voice and video chat rooms quite well IMO.

Even Lemmy isn’t magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?

Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.

Because it's federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.

God, I just wish they'd add a fucking Push to Talk option to a client... Any client

Oh it's undoubtedly going to fail, but it should milk enough money out of their users to keep them going while their investors cash out

Happy to have folks on e2ee matrix. It supports calling directly and group voice and video chat rooms quite well IMO.

Even Lemmy isn’t magically immune. If the admins of .world got handed checks for a couple million dollars in exchange for the rights to operate the servers, what would discourage them from cashing out?

Nothing, but it would be far less disastrous than say some billionaire buying the town square of the internet.

Because it's federated, everyone can just leave. There is nothing stopping people from ditching .world and moving on.

Users on reddit and lemmy always seem to think ad-based stuff is going to fail, and then it turns out people in the real world are depressingly accepting of ads. I would bet that this program is more likely to be expanded than canceled.

It is a bit baffling. I think it's more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn't make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I'm in a position where either I'm paying for the service or ditching it entirely.

Ehhhh I see people with Nitro-included cosmetics but not a lot that have the individually-purchased cosmetics. They exist, sure, but not even close to as many.

I mod a server with 40,000 users and I'm scrolling through the member list as I type this. Majority are either unsubbed accounts or they have the cheap basic Nitro. A lot of the cosmetics I am seeing are the free ones they've given away in recent events. Not many users have full Nitro and have their profiles all decked out with additional cosmetics.

Afaik it's a fork / copy of the actual Discord source code. With all its bugs