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Is kbin.social anti-corporation? Should it be? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by shepherd@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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I'm seeing discussions on other instances about how a "federated" corporate instance should be handled, i.e. Meta, or really any major company.

What would kbin.social's stance be towards federating/defederating with a Meta instance?

Or what should that stance be?

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[–] lunar_parking@kbin.social 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly think that social media services should exclusively be nonprofits and run off of a combination of very limited ads and/or donation drives à la Wikipedia. Profit motives destroy things like this, as we've seen time and time again.

[–] Monitor343@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree. I have been thinking the last few days how Kbin can sustainably keep the servers paid for long term. A non-profit, Wikipedia style arrangement is the only thing I keep coming back to that makes sense.

[–] lml@remy.city 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wikipedia is a good example. It is annoying when they ask for the $3 every year, but it's true that a small contribution like that across the many users can keep a free/libre project sustained. Things like Usenet used to be part of your ISP bill anyhow, so a small monthly/annual amount to your instance host makes sense to me. Of course, we pay ridiculous amounts to our ISPs without services like this nowadays, so it does hurt a little

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I made another comment about this previously and I really don't want to end up as the designated "don't donate to Wikipedia" user on the threadiverse, but here we are anyway. Before I continue, I will say I'm not personally involved and I'm not anti-Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but I do think the Wikimedia Foundation is misleading Wikipedia visitors about its funding, or at least that it has in previous donation drives.

It's worth mentioning that "Wikipedia" is itself never asking for money. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation puts those donation drive banners on Wikipedia, and those banners misleadingly suggest that money will go mostly or entirely to Wikipedia (it won't) and that your donations are necessary for Wikipedia to continue running (they're not). The Wikimedia Foundation receives upwards of $150 million dollars a year, which is much more than the upkeep of Wikipedia, ⅔ of which is not from the individual small donors who respond to those banners.

Wikipedia's internal "newspaper", The Signpost, has a couple of pretty thorough articles on the controversy. The short version is that a) The Wikimedia Foundation receives millions in funding via corporate donations from tech giants like Google (more than enough to sustain Wikipedia on their own), while the income from banner ads represents about a third of their yearly finances, and b) they then spend the vast majority of that funding on things that aren't Wikipedia:

Total expenses were $146 million (an increase of $34 million, or 30.5%, over the year prior). Some key expenditure items:

Salaries and wages rose to $88 million (an increase of $20 million, or 30%, over the year prior).

Professional service expenses: $17 million.

Awards and grants: $15 million.

Other operating expenses: $12 million.

Internet hosting: $2.7 million.

(Fingers crossed that Markdown works.)

Before I'm accused of cherrypicking data, I'm literally quoting the Wikimedia Foundation's Consolidated Financial Statements for 2021-2022.

Some of those are a bit nebulous, but even if you're charitable (and we are talking donations!) you can lump in "professional service expenses", "other operating expenses" and "Internet hosting" together as "funding Wikipedia", for a total of $31.7 million, which is about 22% of what they receive in donations. For that matter, it's less than half of what they receive in "large" donations, before we even start factoring in donations from sympathetic Wikipedia visitors. Meanwhile, the Foundation spends $103 million on paying its own staff and giving awards and grants to other people or organizations.

Now, you can certainly make the case that individual donations allow the Wikimedia Foundation to remain independent from corporate or other influence, because they in theory could stop taking those large donations and continue operating Wikipedia, albeit they'd have to slash their staff salaries, grants and other expenses to do so, since, say it with me, the vast bulk of their money is not going toward Wikipedia's upkeep.

I want to be clear that I don't think any of this stuff is evil, just that it's misleading to suggest your donations go any more than a fraction toward the continued operation of Wikipedia. Wikipedia will be fine either way, but the WMF certainly appreciates your donations.

[–] lml@remy.city 2 points 1 year ago

Well said, thanks for this info! I was in the camp of thinking "of course the money goes to Wikipedia's upkeep" but I never examined it closely enough.

[–] lohrun@fediverse.boo 3 points 1 year ago

For now, I’m just paying for my instance out of my pocket because I wanna see this place grow. Maybe I will need donations to keep it going in the future once it reaches a certain size but I can’t imagine trying to ever profit off keeping this running. I think the real value in federated instances and content is going back to the ways of the early internet, the personal pet projects that motivate people. I’m also personally totally done with being advertised, scraped, and sold..I don’t want to ever do that to anyone else.