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Comment by Zaskoda | Hacker News Reader

This is why Bitcoin is money. Bitcoin creates an incentive to participate in running the network. Mastodon does not have such an incentive. Mastodon server admins have to either pay out of pocket or come up with a scheme to charge users.

Email is similar and now most people get their e-mail from one of a few providers who exploit their data for advertising purposes. This is exactly the problem we wish to distance ourselves from in regard to centralized social services such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.

If you're not the customer, you become the product.

Mastodon and the Fediverse made decentralized software that people want to use - but they didn't come up with a way to make it sustainable. Web3 has a model of financial sustainability, but they've yet to come up with any other decentralized software that lots of people want to use. These two communities focused on decentralization should really collaborate more.

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I fail to see how bitcoin or another cryptocurrency makes funding good moderation easier. "Running the network" means very different things in those two contexts.

I would argue that in fact, cryptocurrencies famously face similar challenges to the fediverse with the moderation a decentralized community. Fraud, abuse and grift are rampant in the cryptocurrency community and even the good actors in that space seem to struggle to find any way to reduce that. The only limited successes there are from the centralized exchanges.

> Web3 has a model of financial sustainability, but they've yet to come up with any other decentralized software that lots of people want to use

In as much as any vague buzzword can have meaning, Web3's chief innovation seems to be creating a model of software that actively repulses a whole lot of people, e.g. play-to-earn video games where the financial incentive turned a fun and enjoyable leisure activity enjoyed by millions (i.e. video games) into a combination of a joyless job that pays less-than-minimum wage, digital feudalism, and a pyramid scheme.

These kinds of financial incentives have a habit of driving out non-financial incentives, and the latter tend to be what makes online communities any good, so it shouldn't surprise you to learn there's lots of animosity to web3 stuff in a lot of mastodon/fediverse-type communities.

Lightning network already works well for me, I use it on the internet regularly, and I bought a coffee with it on the street a few days ago.

I would happily pay a bit for Mastodon if I needed, but for me Twitter is good enough though for now.

I know it's hard to imagine under Capitalism, but lots of things work without a financial incentive. The early-ish internet was powered by web forums. There are thousands of community run game servers. Wikipedia editors and contributors are unpaid. Volunteers do things because they want to see them happen and they like the community.

Bitcoin has brought out the worst in many people, to the point where coal power plants were coming back online in order to handle the power demand of generating bitcoin, and miners were grabbing up as many video cards as they could, boxing out gamers from reasonable build budgets for years. Bitcoin is how society runs when it only cares about financial incentives. There are plenty of parts of society that run without a financial incentive at all just fine, and I'm hopeful the future of the web is a lot more like Mastodon than it is like web3.

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