There is no corporation and no business model, and that's by design. Each instance can do what it wants regarding covering the cost of running the server. I plan to set up my own instance on my modest homelab for family and friends, and will not charge anything. Some bigger instances might choose to offer a certain amount of free storage before requiring to pitch in to cover the costs. My guess is that a big majority of instances will be populated by 10-200 users, give or take, which would be feasible to keep running with minimal cost and a modest amount of administration.
Regarding moderation; I'll keep my family and friends under control and bigger instances will have to delegate moderation rights to trusted members of that community – much like on any forum. It's a far more sustainable model compared to the nightmare Facebook and Twitter, which is relying heavily on algorithms and outsourcing.
Moderation is important in today's world, compare the massive work twitter, instagram et al have had to do as a result of the Christchurch massacre.
How does this scenario work with pixelfed? I take it that the content is hosted on a specific server and that the pixelfed app is just a frontend that knows how to find that server. Is abuse reporting built in to the app somehow? How does the end user know that action is being taken? How can law enforcement close down pages?
Note that legal liability for hosting illegal content may be huge. There is one 18-year old in NZ who is being charged and threatened with 14 years jailtime for sharing the terrorist video from the mosque massacre. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
The content is stored on servers run independently from each other and they usually operate with slightly (and sometimes wildly) different rules.
Users can report posts which then has to be looked at by the mods on that specific instance/server. Since most servers have a modest amount of users, and a relatively high moderator to user ratio, moderation becomes quite manageable.
- If an instance is going to shut down for any reason, how you can handle your account and your content? Do you lose all your follower base and/or content? Can you transfer your account to another instance?
Questions about the whole federated ecosystem that I never saw answered completely.
A couple of questions:
- What is the business model? If millions of people are on this and there's no ads/monetization -- how is the service covering costs?
- If people had to pay, then it might limit adoption, how are you going to handle that?
- How are you guys thinking about support, monitoring content (removing illegal/copyrighted content)