Marcel Mauss's concept of the gift economy — obligatory, non-market exchange that binds communities through reciprocity rather than price — offers a precise lens for understanding how the Fediverse functions. But the instance-centric framing, common in how this space is usually described, quietly implies that once the technical layer works, the community sustains itself — no need for organizational work.

Any durable human community, gift-based economies included, runs on functional division of labor: someone keeps books, someone understands liability, someone manages conflict. Gift-economy language, taken uncritically, can obscure exactly this need — making it look as though accountants, lawyers, and administrators are superfluous to something built on reciprocity.

My own attempt at a small-scale Fediverse dataset — for a Data Analyst (IHK) certification, unpublished — is a cautionary case: legally heterogeneous, opt-in terms of service, and metrics where apparent silence often hid real community depth. The Fediverse is built for people, not for marketing.

The larger argument is institutional: sustaining that exchange is civil society's task — nonprofits, cooperatives, structures with real division of labor — not solved by dissolving the gift logic into corporate ownership. I speak as treasurer of a digital-rights nonprofit and as someone training as a Bilanzbuchhalter (certified accountant) with a sociology background.