this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Decentralization is expensive too judging by some of the sentiment I've seen around running Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin instances.
Right? People simply expect someone else to pay the bills.
And why wouldn't they? 90% of the software people use daily is free (as in beer), so of course being told that's going to change is going to cause upset. It takes a lot for people to want to pay money for something that, to those who don't value free (as in freedom) software, is no different than the costless alternative.
At some point society needs to figure out how we can subsidize the costs of data storage, remote servers, and provision of internet to people for free.
The only real way to do that is government subsidized servers, but that will fall in the same category as literally every other government service: right wing political entities try to privatize it and make it as shitty and parasitic as possible.
Self-hosting.
We just need ISPs to allow it.
You pay for these things with your data. If the government is paying for privacy-respecting storage or safe internet access, then so are you with your taxes. I'd vote for that, but I'd guess the majority of people would not.
There's nothing to figure out, if the question is how "society" does it then the answer is literally taxes.
Yup, it has a cost, but there's perhaps a one or two orders of magnitude cost difference between hosting instant messaging + calls with something like XMPP, and hosting mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin (or why I do the former but not the later, and why I'm ok to pay for the service, esp. considering that my instance's business model isn't, unlike Reddit, to re-sell influence and data).
How does does decentralization avoid the costs that Signal laid out in the blog posts?