PieFed.caWhat are some ideas to help optimize the Piefed software to make it easier for admins to manage?
submitted by
Sunshine (she/her)
When instances get older, they can become harder to maintain due to storage and high usage issues with risks of donations drying up.
At our current scale, meh, whatever. Random donations are fine.
But for anything bigger, we’re going to need serious skills and serious time. That costs money.
Money ideas (other than ads)
- Subscriptions, possibly giving larger storage space, more emoji, etc.
- Merch. T-shirts, etc.
- Support services like what Mastodon has started to offer.
- Buy & sell marketplace (w transaction fee).
Also creators need to get paid.
- Paid communities (ala substack, where the author puts a paywall on some of their content)
- Microtransactions like reddit gold. (Because of federation we might need crypto, ugh)
Some of these would be quite a cultural change and a lot of people would be unhappy with them.
Pretty sure Reddit has wanted to do this for a long time (along with like ‘premium communities’) but it’s universally loathed and gets intense backlash.
But to me, a premium-locked community isn’t worth it for anyone because you’re only going to be able to talk to a small % of the overall userbase there. It would more-or-less just be a worse experience to talking normally on the site. It’s why I’ve never understood other media sites that have a premium tier putting the forum or chat behind it. You want your users to talk to each other normally for free.
This idea would be for creators we don’t currently have, using features we don’t currently have, serving an audience that is not currently on the fediverse. It takes a bit of imagination. A ton of Substack writers absolutely hate sharing a platform with nazis and would jump if there was an alternative.
Substack has $45 million in revenue (and Substack writers earned $450 million), this year. People are willing to pay.
I feel like people usually just premium-lock their content behind patreon and other similar services.
Those don’t federate.
Yeah I know. But I mean people would just post whatever media they have made onto threads here, or whatever the site is, and people would have to subscribe to the Patreon or buy it to see it.
Yep, could be. Thing is we want the payment to happen on PieFed so we can skim 5% off the top (Substack takes 10%). But doing that in a federated way is something I have no idea where to begin with… We can’t trust remote instances when they claim someone has already paid, there needs to be a way to verify the payment. So, a big shared ledger of some kind, but decentralised because fedi, sooo there’s blockchain/crypto again.
If it would automatically delete high res media but replace it with low res, when a post ia older than let’s say a year.
Currently, it deletes all media (after 12 months) and serves the media from the origin instance instead.
I’ve gone about as far as I can with the technical fixes, IMO it’s now more of a question of a ‘business model’ for want of a better term.
In gaming there’s been lots of software tricks to squeeze more graphics out of limited hardware (Uncharted 4 on base ps4) but yes it’s important to motivate folks to donate more since there’s enough money for FOSS projects.
The images would still have to be legible at least.