As a rule of thumb, you are more likely to be satisfied by a service that you pay for directly. This is because paying money makes you a customer of the business, and the business is thereby directly motivated to keep you satisfied.

If you want to find a service that will satisfy you for a long time, paying a subscription is your best bet.

Here are some facts:

1. In general, a business aims to please its customers.
2. A business’s customers are those who pay it money.
3. If you do not pay money to a business, you are not its customer.

A user of a service who does not pay is, strictly speaking, not a customer. In most cases, the needs of the user and the needs of the customer are not too far apart, so many non-paying users are generally satisfied. But on average, in the long run, the needs of the non-user customer and the needs of the non-customer users will drift apart.

Users will feel a gradual, vague dissatisfaction with the service that grows over time. Certain things that used to be easy to accomplish may become less straight-forward. New offerings may be uninteresting, or even undesired.

The case of venture-backed companies

For a venture-backed company that provides a free service to its users, its customers are its investors, not its users. Of course, the investors want the company to become successful (whatever that means today), and a service’s success usually depends on having satisfied users, so the goals aren’t too detached. But when push comes to shove, the direct motivation placed on the company will be to satisfy its customers over its users. As long as users are kept minimally satisfied, efforts that generate measurable value for the company will be given priority.

For example, Facebook used to provide excellent ways for people to share information about their personal lives and keep up to date with their friends and family. Now, it is focused more on increasing engagement for its users — which is what its customers (investors) value — and no longer has any focus on keeping people connected.

The case of one-time cost applications

You are paying for the application, so you are the customer. Right? Well, almost. At least, you are at first.

As a business, the developer needs to continue generating revenue. Who are the customers it needs to please this month? Those people who are buying the app for the first time this month. The developer needs to understand what needs are going unmet now, and deliver a solution for those needs. If the needs of potential customers shifts significantly over time, so too may the offerings of the application shift.

For example, popular to-do tracking apps used to just focus on personal task management. Later, the industry as a whole shifted towards offering solutions for collaborative team management. More recently, everybody wants AIs to do smart things for them, so many apps are placing AI functionality front and center. The app that you loved and bought 5 years ago may be a very different app today.

Of course, a lot of apps have pretty static use-cases and don’t change that dramatically. But you see what I mean.

The case of subscription-based services

The users are always the customers. If a user ever becomes too displeased, they will just stop paying for it. The business is always directly motivated to keep its users happy — especially the most loyal ones who have been using the service for a long time.

For example, Kagi Search asks its customers to pay a monthly fee to use its search engine. This is pretty shocking for anybody who is used to having search as a free feature of the internet, but —

There always seem to be people lamenting that Google’s search results are not as good as they used to be. It’s hard to qualify how true this actually is, but it’s definitely plausible. Deep down, the most important thing for Google is not how easy it is for users to find the things they’re looking for. The most important thing for Google is that Google generates money from its advertisers. Of course, Google needs a consistent, very large number of satisfied users in order for that to happen, and so the two needs are not too disconnected. But they are not the same, and it’s possible — likely, even — for priorities to have noticeably drifted apart.

But in the case of Kagi, if a user feels that search quality has declined, they will just stop paying. Because search quality declined, Kagi will make less money. In order for Kagi to make more money, they have to make search quality better. By adopting a subscription model, Kagi has fundamentally aligned the goal of the service with providing excellent search.

This is why a subscription-based service is the most likely to keep its users satisfied over time, and why — if you care, and if you have the choice — you should choose to use a subscription-based service over other offerings.

Internet-in-a-Box “learning hotspots” are used in dozens of countries, to give everyone a chance, e.g. in remote mountain villages in India.
It works without internet — like a community fountain, but for the mind — wirelessly serving anyone nearby with a smartphone, tablet or laptop.

I love everything about this project. It acts as a Wi-Fi hotspot with preloaded data that can serve the community. Wikipedia, eBooks, online courses, medical reference material, the possibilities are endless.

Will it also let people connect with each other through this central hub? Assuming you could supply people with devices, how would a digital messaging utility transform a community? (There is a cynic in me that announces, “Bringing the Worst Parts of Nextdoor to the World!” but I choose to be optimistic today.)

The Fediverse, a network of interconnected social media services, requires users to choose a service for their account, tying their identity to that community. This can be problematic if the community experiences issues like spam, moderation problems, or shutdown. If we could decouple identity from community, like Reddit did with subreddits, users could more freely participate in multiple communities — and the network overall would be more accessible and resilient.

The way things work

The Fediverse allows anyone to create their own social networking service — their own mini-X or mini-Instagram, if you will. There are many of these services now, each usually centered around a common interest.

Additionally, all of these separate services are built to communicate with each other, so that you can interact with users and their posts on any compliant service. Instead of having a few, huge, separate services, there are now many, small, interconnected services.

You do need to choose a service at which to initially create an account, but after you have, you are free to interact with anyone who is a part of this federated network.

Anything you post online is saved to your chosen service, and is then broadcasted to the broader network. If you decide to move your account to a different service, there is a system to notify your contacts so that they will automatically be connected to your new account. However, your posts saved to the previous service will not come with you — you will have a fresh, new account.

The problem with choosing a service

When I first tried to join the Fediverse, I hated the idea of needing to choose a service. Yes, you can connect and interact with anyone regardless of which service their account belongs to, so it seems like your choice of a service matters little. But consider the following hypothetical scenario:

Making a choice

I look for a service at which to create my account. Several of my friends have accounts at <tootsosaurus.rex> and it seems to have a fun vibe, so I choose it.

Things are good. In additional to the members of <tootsosaurus.rex>, I also make some friends at <happyfun.house>, another casual and pleasant service. In <woordworking.club> I find a small community of very helpful people who give me tips on my DIY projects. I also love browsing everyone’s finished photos.

Then, bad things happen.

Overrun by spam

First, <tootsosaurus.rex> becomes more popular and explodes with spam accounts. The admins are not able to handle the spam well, and other instances begin blocking access from <tootsosaurus.rex> to protect their users from the spam. I can no longer talk to my friends at <happyfun.house>. This is a huge bummer, but since most of my friends are on <tootsosaurus.rex> there is not much I can do.

A Nazi is uncovered

Then, it turns out that one of the moderators of <tootsosaurus.rex> is a Nazi. This is a huge bummer, and I seriously consider leaving the service for another. Ultimately though, it would be a lot of work to set up a new account — inertia wins, and I stay.

Burn-out and shut-down

Then, the owner of <tootsosaurus.rex>, facing wide criticism for their actions (and lack of), declares that it is no longer worth the trouble and that they will shut down the service. After a brief grace period, my account will disappear. This is a huge bummer.

I need to find a new service. The easy option is <happyfun.house>, but they have been growing very quickly too, and I’m afraid of a similar thing happening again. I could go to <woordworking.club>, but I’m definitely not enough of a woodworker to tie that label to my online identity.

There seems to be no good choice.

Creating your own service

That was a hypothetical scenario, but all of those things can — and have — happen. These are the things that I needed to consider when choosing a service, and it was paralyzing. Ultimately, I ended up side-stepping the decision by creating my own server.

This is fine, and everything works as expected. But, it is really hard to find and join communities when I’m starting with a home server of Population: One.

Or, maybe it isn’t too much harder than one should expect, but it would be so much easier to join communities if I could just click join somewhere and be included on their list.

The root of the problem

I think the main issue is that currently identity and community are tied together. If I want an identity on the Fediverse, I need to create an account with a service somewhere, which becomes my defacto community. If I have only one account, I will only officially be a member of one community.

If that community disappears, so does my identity.

I can, of course, create a new account and switch my contacts to the new one, but none of my posts will come with me. It’s like moving to a new house and filing a change of address, but having to leave all of your things behind and starting with an empty house. Or like moving to a new boat after my old boat sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

The Reddit model

There should be a way to de-couple identity and community. Reddit’s subreddits are actually a very resilient model that might work here.

On Reddit, anybody can create a subreddit — a discussion board centered on any common interest. After creating a Reddit account, you are free to join any subreddits that interest you. Each subreddit will have its own moderation and be relatively self-governed, outside of extreme situations.

Some subreddits will inevitably have drama, and in the worst cases they may shut down or become unusable. Motivated users would then create a replacement subreddit with new leadership and move over. Since user accounts are tied to Reddit as a whole and not to any particular subreddit, this is easy to do. The collapse of one subreddit does not have any impact on your personal account, or on your activity on other subreddits.

A better solution?

Imagine if the Fediverse treated identities and communities as separate concerns.

First you will create an identify, which will feel a lot like an email address. Most people will sign up at an identity provider, much like Gmail or Yahoo, but it would be moderately straightforward to set one up for yourself if desired.

Once you have an identity, you are then free to join any of the many communities on the Fediverse. These communities can be created by anybody, and are often centered around a common interest. You can join any number of communities and be listed as a member there. You can also follow individual users directly.

When you post something online, you can choose where to publish it:

1. To your own profile, viewable at your personal feed
2. To a particular community, viewable at its community feed
3. Both 1 and 2

With this framework, lets consider the hypothetical huge bummers from before:

1. My identity provider becomes spammy, and is blocked

Spam is rampant and various communities begin blocking access from accounts created with this provider — I need to create a new account. The posts that I had been posting to my personal feed probably will not come with me.

But all of the posts that I had posted to various communities will remain there. By notifying my change of identity, my old posts and membership status will be updated to point to my new identity. All in all, this is not too disruptive.

2. A moderator of my favorite community was a Nazi

I no longer want to be associated to that community, and I will stop posting there. It may or may not be easy to delete my old posts.

But my identity is not tied to that community, so this is not a big deal. My friends and I will decide where our next online hangout will be.

3. My favorite community is shut down

The service will disappear, along with all of the posts that I had made to that community.

This is essentially the same as #2 above. My account will be intact, and I can continue to participate in other communities.

This feels like a good idea!

I can’t be the first person to have thought of this, so maybe there is a good reason why things haven’t been architected in this way. I’m curious to learn why!

Some uplifting news from Japan:

On April 13th in Shibata City of Niigata prefecture (Japan), the popular idol group Momoiro Clover Z had been planning a large music festival in cooperation with a large number of other artists, as well as local police, schools, and city government. However, on the day of festival the weather took a turn for the worse, and warnings were issued for strong winds, flash floods, and avalanches.

Although more than 10,000 people had arrived in the city already, the group made the decision to cancel the event and quickly organized an online broadcast of the artists’ musical performances in its place.

Among this, the group’s fans have received wide attention for their excellent reaction to the bad news. Making endless reassurances online that “the group made the correct decision” and that “safety is more important than anything,” they then turned their attention to the impact this would have on the local community and businesses. Fans called upon each other to buy food prepared at food stands to prevent excess waste, and to spend money at local businesses before returning home to support the community as much as possible.

There was no backlash, and no hard feelings. Just praise and compassion from everyone involved.