You are the one who brought the size of the platform as a reason for costs not being an issue here compared to Mastodon, so I assumed you meant that having more users would mean more costs for the admins?
Or do you mean that with more instances, there is a higher chance of some admin having issues covering the costs?
Also, it wasn’t exactly just leftists, but also my leftist friends who were always asking for “friend prices” when I drove them around when I drove a taxi. Like… you guys are getting special service, and I’m your friend, you get to skip the hour of waiting and fighting other drunks in the taxi queue.
Seems like bad friends, whatever the political preferences are
Again, paying out to cover hardware costs is not the same as supporting the admins.
That's your opinion. Do you really believe that if admins were unhappy with the current situation, they would keep "working for free" instead of shutting down the instances and moving on with their lives? What is stopping an admin unwilling to "give away their labor for free" from doing so?
I’m not asking what you think is “realistic”. I’m asking whether you think admins should be compensated for their work.
The realism is the part you are missing? Do I think that everyone here should be paid for their work? Yes, of course. Sysadmins, developers, moderators, Fediverse advocates, active posters, even commenters deserve something, as every of those roles make the platform alive.
And you know that well as you are usually complaining no one posts on your communities or instances.
But stating that doesn't bring us anywhere. Where is this money we supposedly all deserve going to come from? Nowhere, because there is none. Or actually there is, but just enough to cover the server costs.
acknowledge the value of the work done by admins and developers.
Do you see the Photon, Voyager, Mbin, Piefed developers going around like you treating the whole platform as crabs? Of all of the instance admins, you're the only one having this discourse.
It’s not the employees of tech companies who complain about poor pay. Quite the opposite.
How much money can a 50k community can provide?
And the reason that Lemmy can not grow past 50k users is because the Fediverse is stuck on a horrible culture where they refuse to even acknowledge that the work of admins and developers is valuable, so those with the skills that could take the Fediverse to the next level are not going to be sacrificing themselves to serve a bunch of people who think they are entitled to free work from others just because they themselves are not able to do it.
If the Fediverse is such a horrible culture, why are you still here? Why don't you just create a startup, get some venture capital investments, create your superior social media platform, and then share it with us?
I prefer !fediverse@lemmy.zip , just for the non delay with aussie.zone https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40460535