Stoat
Replies: 4 comments 8 replies
|
Honestly, I would not be opposed to seeing a "premium" subscription for additional funding, as long as it's ethical enough, since I doubt a platform like this can scale with just donations By ethical I mean features that don't create a class divide in the userbase like character counts or such would, and don't meaningfully impact the actual functionality of the platform, for example visual effects for your profile card or voice chat entry sounds etc. Basically something that's enough to entice people with disposable income to pay, but not significant enough to ostracise those who don't Especially if payment can be bypassed by hosting your own instance (thus not adding to Stoat's running costs), I think they'd be a relatively small and acceptable compromise for keeping the platform alive |
I would echo this. So long as Stoat stays true to its core principles and doesn't get greedy, having a long term way to generate funding in the form of a product would be a great idea. My only worry about selling cosmetics would be the slippery slope of then blocking certain contributions that could otherwise be monetized. Money is required for the platform to run, but as they say, it corrupts everything it touches |
|
Strongly disagree ! This is an open-source project, not a profit seeking project. Most of the devs are volunteering (if not all of them in fact). Having a set of features that are monetized would then encourage investing more in developping those specific features to get more funds. If things are to be monetized, it should be :
To be honest, just some transparency about their funds and their needs would be enough I think, no need to incentivize feature-based subscription. Remember that if you need features to subscribe, you have been conditionned by capitalism, and you're forgetting you're donating to support a tool you like and use. If you need rewards to pay, you haven't understood that the reward is stoat itself. |
|
Stoat already has a Premium model Planned out, you can see so here: https://op.stoatinternal.com/projects/all-of-revolt/work_packages/251/activity This is already concerning as they haven't clarified anything about their plans and it's named "Premium Model" which is very likely to be a direct copy of discord's freemium model. Like you said, only monetization should be for things that directly support their operating costs like fees for hosting a server via their services to actually incentivize ppl to self host. That and just support. It seems like they may have backed on it because the end date was oct. 31st 25 though |
|
Just to copy paste our FAQ:
I'll add that to the OP task as well since people are looking there I guess. |
|
@insertish thanks for clarifying it here as well. Personnally I wasn't expressing a disagreement with the Stoat team and their plan. I read your faq. I just felt like this whole discussion is about a potential future that might happen if scale becomes too big, and I just expressed my disagreement with other community members (and my reasons as well). Also, as it has been mentionned later in this discussion that Stoat (or more likely Revolt Platforms Ltd) is a company. Any plan on making it a non-profit so people can benefit from tax reductions for donations ? I don't know how it makes things different on your side (and I have an almost inexistent knowledge about UK laws), if it complicates things or not etc. Specifically, usually in EU, you even have the rights to give some advantages to donators in most country, with conditions like these advantages should be disinterested, should not be disproportionate in regards of the donation etc. So basically, you could make your whole subscription scheme under the concept of donations, which is a good incentive to donate. I mean, if I'm going to loose money because my government is taking it from me no matter why, I might as well escape that to feed projects that I think benefit the world. My cost for it is reduced as I only redirect bound-to-be-lost money for the main part. |
|
I would immediately quit stoat if i see a Freemium model, It only incentivizes greed and i don't want to end up with another Discord. If they want monetization they should monetize the things that impact their datastores directly like Servers or opt for a federated model like Matrix so they can leave the monetization at the discretion of different instances. We can all keep saying things like "as long as they stick to their principles" or whatever but that is a slippery slope, if they have something on their platform that incentivizes greed it's going to happen and they'll just end up saying they are sticking to their principles anyways. |
|
A couple thoughts:
Anything that encourages self-hosting would absolutely reduce costs, and the idea of being able to toggle off certain premium paywalls by simply hosting it myself sounds amazing. However, this would only see any major benefit if self-hosting is made much more viable than it already is. It should be easy for the average person to follow a basic tutorial and set everything up in a day or so if they know even a little about computers, and it should be easy for clients to connect to multiple instances without issue. Not to mention, able to actually move their communities to a self-hosted instance without issue. Otherwise, people are just gonna cough up the money or deal with it, which is probably more expensive for Stoat than if they left to self-host.
One of the biggest factors for getting me to open my wallet is knowing what the current financial status is in clear terms. If I see that a service I like needs $1,000 to last through the year, and they're 57% of the way there, then contributing feels more tangible and meaningful because then I can then feel more involved in help keeping it afloat in a very concrete and identifiable way. I'm also more likely to pay money to help keep an instance afloat if it's easier to see how not contributing would lead to its shutdown, or lack of feature implementation, since that's a clear deadline/goal that I know I can contribute towards instead of it going to some nebulous pocket dimension never to be seen again for all I know. In any case, this is just my personal experience as a consumer, for what would make me more likely to support Stoat or be inclined to self-host. |
|
I agree, especially if some form of interop or federation between self-hosted instances is implemented; even just in the form of an identity provider as discussed in that one other thread on federation For hosting viability I also think just a pre-made Docker container or Compose config is enough; that is within the skillset of anyone who is going to even consider self-hosting. As long as it's not the only way, that is, there's not many things more infuriating than a program distributed exclusively as a container Also agreed on openness being crucial, for example I'm never too eager to spend extra on services which may or may not actually need the money; but if a service I like has a funding goal for implementing a new thing or staying running or similar I'm a lot more eager to give money, be that as a donation or for some freemium fluff |
|
I'm surprised nobody mentionned the concept of a foundation. It is, in the world we live in, the most common way non-profit-seeking open-source projects are surviving. So... yeah, mentions to Nobel Foundation, Linux Foundation, Rust Foundation, Python Software Foundation etc. Behind most open source project is a foundation, and with time and scale, I wouldn't be surprised to find a Stoat Foundation (hope they will have a stoat garden ! Joking, it's probably just super costly... But I'd definitely pay to go see the stoat garden and play with the stoats). EDIT : Adding that having a foundation behind it (or other non-profit structures) often allows for tax reduction for donators, which is also in itself a good reason to donate |
|
I did, two weeks ago, over raising concerns about Stoat following the path of Discord : https://github.com/orgs/stoatchat/discussions/1271#discussioncomment-15847747 |
Please note, at the time I said that I had no affiliation with the project, and even now I'm just a GitHub maintainer with no real say on these matters. It's still the direction I'd like to see things go, but those are my personal beliefs and not representative of the project as a whole |
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
I'm looking into stoat as a D*sc*rd replacement and I had a few questions about its scalability. Obviously right now with a large influx of users from this platform, Stoat is running into some performance bottlenecks. Some of these bottlenecks are more technical and can be remedied by volunteering clever engineering, but some of them are resource limited and require money to fix.
Right now, from my understanding, Stoat servers are primarily funded through Ko-Fi donations, which is awesome that the community can come together and make this happen, but it seems like it would be hard to scale based on those funds alone.
The hard bottlenecks I see that effectively require throwing more money at the problem are bandwidth and storage capacity. Assuming the problem of sharding/scaling a database across many different servers/load balancing isn't an issue for now, with millions of active users, storage space will very quickly become an issue if it isn't already. What plans does Stoat have to scale in terms of storage of images/videos? Does Stoat plan to eventually charge users for storing above a certain amount of data for their account?
Bandwidth is another issue. If Stoat wishes to provide video calling/screensharing functionality in a non peer-to-peer way (such as using WebRTC), then a quite a significant amount of bandwidth will need to be used even for just a small number of users streaming a 720p video. I'm not sure what Stoat does for this, so if a p2p protocol is currently used, then this is less of an issue. Regardless of video streaming, it seems that Stoat is currently hitting bandwidth limits for general API endpoints, and bandwidth typically isn't free. Does Stoat have a way of scaling bandwidth for millions of active users even once the current bandwidth issues are solved? Can Stoat scale bandwidth given the current funds available (or projected funds assuming a growth in user base corresponds with an equivalent increase in funds available)?
Additionally, if an investor or some other party with a large amount of capital decides they want to purchase Stoat, is there anything that would stop them from doing so? Guilded was bought out by Roblox and fairly recently shut down -- what's stopping the same from happening to Stoat?
Finally, is Stoat trying in the first place to replace a service like D*sc*rd where any user can join, create servers, send messages, upload videos, stream their camera/screen all for free, or are Stoat-operated servers meant to provide a minimal experience, and to get more features (greater amount of storage, higher video call resolution, larger file size upload, etc.) users must pay some amount or operate their own server. I don't see a way Stoat can operate for free for an unlimited(-ish) number of users in the same way as D*sc*rd can given the storage and bandwidth limitations of operating a messaging app like this.
All reactions