Will 2025 be the year that venture capital discovers the Fediverse?
https://lemmy.zip/post/30239853
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Instead of writing the same answer to all sceptics, I’ll just write one answer here:
I believe that you greatly overestimate the rationality of VC at a micro level and greatly underestimate the number of business cases that can be made on top of popular open standards. Developing a fediverse software like Pixelfed is basically free if you’re with the big money. The question is if it will hurt your other investments and strategy. Right now it looks like the answer is “no”. The risk of putting too many eggs in the oligarch basket seems quite high.
Is it not possible to make money of the internet because you don’t own the infrastructure and the standards are open?
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Venture Capital already knows about the Fediverse. The problem is that VCs are actually terrible at taking risks and they will only invest on things once “the market” started paying attention to it.
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I’d have thought VC would want to destroy rather than develop the fediverse?
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No. It’s quite easy to paint venture capitalists as these cartoonish evil entities that are plotting together against anything that might come to disrupt the status quo, but the reality is that the is no single entity out there coordinating their work. “Venture capitalists” are just a disparate number of people, which acting in their own self-interest, and if any of them starting the opportunity for themselves to make money on something, they will do it.
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True that. Moneys money.
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How would you make money if you can’t control the platform? Investing in the fediverse is a terrible investment case.
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You can control the platform, so long as “the platform” means only your own instance. I have tabs open right now to both reddit.com and discuss.tchncs.de and the only difference as far as “control” is concerned is that here I can read posts by users, and from communities, that are registered elsewhere than discuss.tchncs.de too, the operators of the latter still otherwise have the same “control” as those as of reddit.
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Hm, they have control over the instance but not directly (except if they fork etc) over the software? So comparing to reddit they can’t modify the UI to include ads, can’t inject tracking, etc.
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There is a non-negligible amount of companies making money out of services based on email, even though they don’t own email as a standard.
Also, remember when VCs were giving money to every “Uber for X” pitch deck some years ago? If ActivityPub ever manages to cement itself as ubiquitous standard, you can bet that we’ll see investors going anyone saying “LinkedIn, but on ActivityPub”, “Tinder, but on ActivityPub”, “Etsy, but on ActivityPub”, “Patreon, but on ActivityPub”…
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Exactly. And there are countless of popular open source projects which are funded by VC. Many of which I have no idea how they plan to make money. Astral (the creator of ruff and uv) is one recent example.
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Many of which I have no idea how they plan to make money. Astral (the creator of ruff and uv) is one recent example.
We are getting off-topic, but to me it seems clear that they are trying to become to the Python world what npm became to Javascript?
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Yeah, maybe that was a bad example. I believe my point is that if the quality of the product and/or the number of users is large enough, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a viable business plan yet.
The big risk when it comes to the fediverse is that it still is so small that big tech could just highjack the whole thing, and it wouldn’t even be a point on the board agenda. I.e. it’s still pocket money we’re taking about.
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How can you make money of the internet if you don’t own all infrastructure and control all standards? I promise, there are countless businesses cases.
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See all the open source projects that immediately forked off whenever they get bought by a big company. Although it mostly seems to be Oracle that never learns from this.
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In theory there’s no overlap and so it’s immune from VC capture.
Corporate social media is proprietary software (mobile and web apps) piggybacking on open internet standards (DNS, HTTP). Capital investment and financial returns are key.
Federated social media is open-source software and (I certainly hope, one day) newly developed open standards and open protocols. Community participation and state regulation are key.
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As far as I know some German states have started tinkering with the Fediverse and invest money in independant and souvereign solutions. At the same time some funds that were previously allocated to open source project funding have been re-allocated to AI and the future of funds like NLnet is uncertain. I see both demand and people trying things. But not a good and coordinated strategy. And it's been that way for some time now. We've seen efforts to move away from Microsoft, closed solutions... Opposition, technical failures and lobbying from big tech (who got money to advertise for their solutions). It's been a mixed bag. But in some niches it's become better. And things happen. I think in the near future we'll see some payoff from already started smaller projects. I don't really see a big change witing one year, but you never know.
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Facebook’s Threads already exists, so I guess they discovered it last year
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They already know, it’s just fediverse developers are radically anit-VC so reject any offers out of principle.
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That’s great.
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Well, the Pixelfed dev is apparently being pestered by VC funders right now.
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So I was right. Thanks!
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Daniel the developer has received 4 venture capitalist offers for Pixelfed.
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Like Facebook event and marketplace replacements on the fediverse. Or just a Facebook alternative that isn’t Frendica. Or maybe a commercial fork of Frendica.
What? Why? How? What?
There’s no reason monetisation can’t be built into the Fediverse as it is. Ghost is looking like a good replacement for Substack for those that want to monetise their blog/newsletter. Flohmarkt is a Fediverse classified ads service. I don’t think it’ll be long before we see an Fediverse Patreon or eBay, for example, I just suspect the early Fediverse adopters have been so anti-capitalist that they have either rejected such things or overlooked them entirely. However, it’ll be key for getting content creators to move over to the Fediverse as they’ll want to keep their income stream.
In the meantime, more attention on the Fediverse should mean grant money flows in and crowd funding takes off.
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