Mastodon has a new plan to make money: Hosting and support services for the open social web

[quacksalber@sh.itjust.works]

I think that sounds like a really good idea, if you want to get corporate- and government hosted instances on board. What keeps most of them away from free software is that they can't write a contract with anyone with clear boundaries and guarantees. If Mastodon offers these types of contracts, it would help the adoption rate.

[anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz]

I honestly would've preferred a referral program where you could get a pre-configured vps at your chosen vps provider (where the end user can choose from vps providers such as Hetzner, Glesys and so on), and that the referrer (mastodon, friendica, piefed, lemmy or mbin) gets a small cut out of every monthly payment.
Though I'm not sure how to make that an intriguing deal for the vps providers.

Centralizing the decentralized web at one provider sounds counter productive.

[warmaster@lemmy.world]

I hope they don't go open core.

[kbal@fedia.io]

I remember when I wanted Mozilla to do that, since they had the organizational might, the money, and it fit perfectly with their mission when they created mozilla.social. On the one hand, it seems slightly less ideal to have the same organization that develops mastodon also providing hosting for it. On the other hand, they probably have a better chance of doing it well.

[flamekebab@piefed.social]

I wish government organisations would host their own Mastodon servers. Get off Twitter.

[rglullis@communick.news]

The code is AGPL. They can't do open core.

[rglullis@communick.news]

What keeps most of them away from free software is that they can’t write a contract with anyone with clear boundaries and guarantees.

They can. There are plenty of companies offering Mastodon hosting.

[henfredemars@infosec.pub]

In some countries, corporations and government are basically the same entity. Free countries distinguish between them in a meaningful sense.

[henfredemars@infosec.pub]

TIL GNU Affero General Public License it a flavor that closes loopholes that were used to extend open software without actually open sourcing your contributions.

[flax_vert@feddit.uk]

Even then, would rather my government contract out Mastodon hosting to a company based here in the UK than to use the American Hosted and moderated Elon tool.

[julian@activitypub.space]

It's a good approach, it's exactly how NodeBB operates as well.

We have a FOSS software and we sell managed services for those who don't have the technical know-how.

Win-win.