pay for digital social spaces

It may be more likely to be pay-to-play. Design takes time and effort. Content creation takes time and effort. Everything that goes into a shiny digital footprint – website design, hosting, platform service subscriptions – costs money. Compare this to a random book club meet-up advertised through a single flyer made by hand and stapled to a few... See more

To have an impact on the world, a system needs to be deployed and funded. Open sourcing the sewage system won’t flush the toilet. Open sourcing a search engine doesn't create a search competitor.

While Meta’s paid messaging tools brought in about $1 billion last year — peanuts compared to the whopping $132 billion the company earned from ads — paid messaging revenue is growing far faster than ad revenue and has more than doubled since early 2023.

Sometimes it can feel like the online spaces you spend time in are working against you, pushing you toward things that their owners value instead of what you value—and harnessing your energy to fuel the very things you hate. Like me, you probably know the feeling of spending too much time gorging on digital junk food, wasting precious moments of... See more

Imagine a geographically-local-oriented digital social space that’s funded by a mix of local city government (tax $$) and local big philanthropy, plus allows for small individual donations too. Like the ‘bricks’ or signage in a local library or museum, the people who contribute would be recognized publicly for their support. The money would go

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