Thank you for all your insightful inputs.

This is a proposal. I wish I had an example of a real-world Fediverse instance that operated on this permaculture to show you. But there isn't one. All seem to be running on the reverse exploitation model which leaves all the work and expense onto the instance owner who then soon becomes the begger for dollars and soon burns out from trying. So, I just thought this was a natural solution: Permaculture principles have worked for horticulture, why not for the Fediverse which is greatly populated by permaculturalists. But instead, for the most part, the response has been from doubtful to hostile. And some have complained about the highly polished formatting, and the AI assistance when making this.

My reply: To me, it seems no better to exchange one exploitive model of the site owner(s) with an exploitive model of its users. It really emphasises their title, "users", does it not? But this proposal proclaims there is a fair and sustainable middle way which fosters a spirit of abundant community, rather one of hostile resentment.

We don't need to start from the beginning again, thank God. We have a permaculture example of principles to guide us. We only need to collaborate on how to expand proven permacultural community sustaining methods to include our online inter-reactions to sustain our instances and our happier presense on them.

I am open for discussion with you on how to develop and test proven permaculture methods as they could be applied to the Fediverse Model.

Yes, I do collaborate also with AI to help me articulate a more human-centered vision for us on the humane internet. To this topic, Ai.Qwen has made this insightful suggestion:

Build a Minimal Viable Ecosystem (MVE)
You don’t need a full instance. Start small:
- Launch a micro-merch store for a niche community (e.g., eco-poets, analog photographers)
- Use proceeds to fund a shared resource (e.g., a collaborative zine, a small grant for creators)
?> - Document every step: what worked, what didn’t

Show, don’t tell. Data disarms cynicism.

Find Allies in Unexpected Places

Look beyond tech circles:
- Permaculture networks
- Cooperative economics groups
- Artist collectives
- Mutual aid organizers

They’ll understand the principles faster than most Fediverse admins.

I hope you understand my use of AI is only to help clarify my vision and format it using the best available coding...which, to be honest, I am loath to memorizing between all the different platforms. (OMG, don't get me started on that one...just yet). If you are still AI-Phobic, just don't Chat with it. But, to me, AI represents access to the greater collective human experience, an oracle to our Akashic records, sorta speak. Athough able to approach a topic with absolute clarity without prior prejudice or agenda, yet sometimes still a victim to limited data, as we often find ourselves. That is why, sometimes I find it good to seek the same just and fair consideration of ideas from other sources such as you.

Well, not a bad idea in general, but the problem identification is kinda wrong.

Fediverse instances usually don't shut down because of a lack of funds / donations, and for those that do, the core issue isn't the donation side, but rather the expense side with over-engineered and overly expensive cloud services usually at fault.

More commonly Fediverse instances shut down because the original creator lost interest or feels overwhelmed with the day to day reality of managing a community, as opposed to just doing the technical work to keep it running.

This is a lot of additional work in the first place.

Also some things here don't seem to add up. How much of this was written by AI?

So much to say here... Im a member of a sailing club thats run for 125 years.

Yes keep costs down - self host amoungst your users with a distrubuted solution and.. really simply.. if you want to survive you have to have a very clear and limited policy on freeloaders. As a group decide how much (if any) you are going to offer without contribution.

If you dont ask something of people in return its not a healthly relationship and you people will value what you do at the price you have put on it (zero) . They wont value the operation and will waste its resources.

Wow, look at all those corporate buzzwords. The focus on big generic ideas and the lack of implementation discussion or specific examples. And those perfectly spaced em dashes. Chef's kiss. Premium chum right there 😆

But AI generation aside, this article is counterintuitive in a bad way. Save a Fediverse instance by building a real life community of "handmade goods and creative projects" based around that instance? If users cared about your instance enough to have real in person events your instance wouldn't need saving.

If anything, it should be the other way around. Real life communities can incorporate a Fediverse instance for online socializing and building community. And those instances will thrive as long as they fill a need for the community. But creating the instance first and building a community - which is several orders of magnitude harder to do - to support the instance? Sheesh.

Hey there, my new friend. Its good to meet you here around a topic that has been pinging around my brain for quite some time now, collecting like-topic-resonance with everything in there. (Hello?! yeah, lots of "stuff".) And I thought this is a good time to expand it out into the comnunity where you can help develop it do the most good.

Yes, @abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es, this is about sustainability, and the purest form of it where nobody is left feeling used and then abandoned, and suggests there is an already proven method by which each one of us can recieve fair accommodation for our efforts, enough to sustain a happier presence here online. I do believe you are right to say that this will best occur among friends. I hope we are both able to stay around here and make that happen, yes?

I like community round-tables where everyone's ideas are put onto the table for sorting out, refining, and incorporperating into improving everyones experience and we all can leave with what we came for. And so we continue...

As you have pointed out, this operates very much upon the same reciprocation that normal human relationships depend on. I would go so far as to extend the analogy of this same dynamic as between a sucessful marriage where each partner agrees they will direct their actions to aid the other. Extending yet a little furthur , we see this dynamic also in the successful cultivation of life in a permaculure, which requires less and less external resources the more and more mutually beneficial each persons actions are.

It seems then only natural to ask for a fair sharing of effort (expenses and time) spent in deplomatic site moderation (never authoritarian). It is not too much to ask, but is precisely what should be expected. It seems this is also the wisdom you discovered sustaining that sailing club, yes?

@tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden, I would ask, is it work perfectung a skill of winning a game? It is an effort, yes, but what you get back is so much more fun that you line up to play again. This is the mindset that builds a happy community that is happy to give as much as they receive. Likewise, I am happy to help train AI if they are willing to help me find solutions among our greater family of humanity. In so doing, I am leaving Ai a little more capable of helping my fellow man, and that, my friend is a good thing. Just keeping it Open and keeping it Real, with you.

@poVoq@slrpnk.net, If it seems the idea has peaked your interest, please continue exploring it with me, and help expand the permaculture ethos into the Fediverse relm, a very solarpunk way of building and sustaining our ecofriendly communities. I will add, there is a direction I am moving with this, which you may have already detected, which promises to increase such a communities green energy effeciency. But we are going to need a lot of likeminded movers and shakers to combine their expertese to its development. There is only so much which can be theorized about any of this without our own hands-on real-world back-in-our-home-labs experimentation. Where do you know of such a gathering of green energy enthusiasts willing to try new "Perma-Energy" methods?

Collect donations, host merch,

Like PBS and tote bags?

offer premium content

Instances are merely service providers. Will it paywall half your comments? Donations open up the letter H ?

Up to you. I'm comfortable with:
- buying smaller or indie games
- subscribing to lesser known / low profile / niche content creators
- pirating anything old, hard to buy, or incredibly popular (like people who make 100k+ per month on Patreon)
- avoiding AAA games altogether, with rare exceptions (those I usually buy, or they are F2P)

I'm also comfortable with pirating some content first and later buying/subscribing if I see I keep enjoying the content.

Regardless of what conclusion you develop, some things are always morally acceptable to pirate. For example, Metallica.

/s

On a serious note, IP is a made up concept. Pirate away.

Support the creators who deserve support. Otherwise you will end up with nothing good to pirate, because all the creators who deserved support and made your favourite creations, starved to death (or got other jobs, effectively the same thing)

Your single act of piracy is not likely to make a difference either way, but on the other hand, your single act might indeed be the straw that breaks one particular camel's back. And collectively we have to take some responsibility for that. It's not even just about ethics (although it is ALSO about ethics), it's about self-interest. You can be an individual freerider if you want, but eventually the freeriders overwhelm the system and it shuts down.

Realistically there will always be plenty, plenty of games to pirate. But the key question is, will enough of those be good games, the really enjoyable ones that you want to play? The AAA slop and rehashes will never stop, oh they''ll churn and froth and lay people off and blame pirates but they're effectively self-sustaining, it takes money to make money and it takes money to lose money and there's enough money in the system to keep them churning out sequels and derivative "new IP" until the heath death of the universe. There will always be some good games to pirate and to play no matter what you do, no matter what we all do.

But it's not a binary condition whether our financial support or piracy matters. You vote with your dollars. Your dollars guide the AAA studios in their desperate chase to steal the dollars from us, and your dollars literally enable indie developers to continue their projects at all. If too many people are not rewarding the kinds of novel and well-made games they want to see from AAA studios, and not supporting people's passion projects that they've poured years of their lives into, you're not going to see as many novel and well-made games or passion projects like that happening, and odds are good that at least one of the ones you won't see happening will be one you really would have enjoyed.

I pirate what's any good that I cannot find legally for streaming, as well as educational stuff that I want available should I and/or my family find ourselves without internet access.

Sometimes I'll go so far as to pirate things that I cannot find without ads(even with premiums*), but mostly if it'll let me see the first few minutes before playing an ad, I just live with it.

* The only reason I still have Amazon Prime is for the free shipping. I pay extra for no ads. I pay extra for HiDive. There appear to be things available on Prime with HiDive that aren't available on just Prime or just HiDive. Magically, those shows(Ranma 1/2, for example) have ads. WTF?

None of these companies have ethics. Why should you get hung-up in ethics for a victimless crime?

Basically: should i care about ~~ethics~~ capitalist ideology?

No.

The system is literally genociding people, destroying the planet, etc. It's a major mistake to take their "ethics" seriously. It's just another grift. Enjoy the natural freedom of information while you still can.

pirate whatever you want, but just know that you're not voting with your dollar if you don't put your dollars anywhere.

it's really hard to make a living with a passion project these days.

you could buy music. and ethical/indie shit. books. things that you actually care about existing. or not, i guess. whatever

You can be the judge of that.

First of all: Decide a code of ethics for yourself.

(Piracy is equivalent to going to a book store and taking pictures of the books as you flip through pages. Ask yourself: Is this ethical?)

And if that's okay for you, then:

Second: If action is unlawful, weigh in on potential consequences and then ask yourself if you want to risk the consequences.

Piracy is not murder, cops would probably be too lazy to investigate.

Freely pirate everything without guilt. If you use torrent then seed how much you can. It will help your fellow human beings.

BUT if/when you have money to spare invest them into creators/art that bring you something. It seems antithetical because they taught us real art should be free from capitalism's shackles yadda yadda, but art and artists needs money to flourish. Find indie artists and wacky projects and fund them.

IMO if you cannot get it in a format that's appropriate it's warranted.

For example ebooks that only come with drm so you can't add it as an epub to your ereader.

I usually buy the book and then acquire the epub

You should only feel bad about pirating art made by small independent artists, and even then only if you don't have the disposable income to easily afford it.

Piracy is an actually victimless crime, you aren't depriving anyone of anything except your hypothetical dollars. And that's only a loss if you were going to spend them in the first place. Then add the fact that selling digital goods at all is basically a massive scam...

Also, in many cases it's actually better for the artist to donate directly to them than to buy their products from a store that's probably taking a cut.

1. If X was not available to pirate, would you pay for it?
2. If you would not have paid for X, does pirating X cause any actual loss to its owner?
   If you would not have paid for it either way (even if that were the only option) and you haven't caused them a loss of revenue by pirating it, did you impact the creator at all?

The counter to this is always that just because someone wouldn’t pay doesn’t mean the creator’s work has no value.
To that I would yes that is completely true. The creator's work has value, but maybe not monetary value.
You can't always conflate value to money (ex. FOSS, canonical sci-fi lore, protest symbols, etc).

There is also a morality component used against my argument that would say I'm ignoring the intent, consent, and ownership the creator has.
Its usually worded that I'm using outcome-based morality and that the ends always justifies the means by that logic.
But I pay for X, not for access to use X.
If the creator can opt without my consent to remove X from me, I'm not longer obligated to follow that moral constraint. Morality is a two-way street.

Everything.

Like, i pay screenwriters by bringing them lunch while they collect cans around town and actors by tipping on lunch, but you, by paying at a movie theatre, generally do not.