I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
I could see someone trying to sell ads on their instance. But ya I can’t imagine many people would join unless they had some other features that are better than other instances.
Open-source projects have always been sustainable by donations. Just look at Wikipedia; it’s been around for 22 years. Linux has been around for even longer.
Especially how Lemmy is right now, only a small portion of users would be needed to sustainable keep an instance running. Maybe from every 1.000 users, only 1 would be willing to pay 10$ a month and it should be more than enough.
Shit changes quickly when somebody thinks it would be a good way to start allowing video-uploads. It can get expensive fast with that amount of storage and bandwidth needed. I can see instances selling small "premium" subscriptions for videouploads. You could still host your own instance and get videouploads completely free for yourself, but if you don't wanna go that route, it would make sense (and would be totally fair)
I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Imagine inge a stable commercial service with high quality moderation (hopefully paid for by the operators) but with an option to follow other instances and transfer your data to another instance. That could be pretty good for drawing in people who just want something that works and refuse to leave reddit.
Since I see the future (independently wealthy because of my gift I have won numerous lotteries and bets on horse racing), the Fediverse will be monetized in the year 2035,. So we have 12 good years ahead of us. Satisfied now?
All those things could happen. Some people could run a site that has ads. Some people could run a site that charges a membership. Some sites could have a Patreon membership. Some sites could do subscriptions….
And some sites could be completely free.
The funny thing is, because of the federation, no one will be harmed. Let’s say I startup a site and all I do is pass through the cost of the site to each user. No profit, just what it costs to maintain the server is shared among the members.
It IS monetized - right now by donations/crowdfunding.
What we need is for people to be more open to supporting what they want via micro-payments, regular donations, because that’s the way to say NO to advertising which brings in virtually no income for the amount of time and bandwidth it consumes.
The Fediverse will never be monetized. It’s open by nature, instances are maintained by donations and out of the administrator’s pocket. Why? Because they have a passion for it.
Even if someone chooses to monetize one instance, people will move to another that isn’t monetized. It’s free and open by design, and will always be that way.
I do have a question about how the instances and federation would work. If you are in an instance like lemmy.world, and it is federating with any other instance, then the content is being loaded from some other server, right? so if there is a large server with millions of users, could that server federate with a small server that isn’t ready to handle the traffic of millions of users and basically kill it? or the server has a way to prevent being federated into another instance?
I think the small instance can temporarily defederate to reduce the load. kbin.social had to do this during the first reddit exodus because they grew too much too fast and couldn’t handle the load.
Tiny federates with huge - nothing happens, they just exchange metadata. Dancer@tiny subs to something on huge - now you have one community, with a lot of updates, coming at tiny. Maybe it drops some. Still not an issue
Hugo@huge subs to something on tiny - now something@tiny is cached on huge, still not a problem.
Now something@tiny is in the feed on huge. A million people comment. This is a problem… For huge mostly. Over at little, people are commenting on something@tiny. They might see doubled up comments or orphaned comments, but mostly they just don’t see most of the stuff from huge
So generally, it’s not an issue. In certain situations, there will be hiccups, but it will keep chugging along
I’ll bet money that multiple people will successfully monetize parts of it.
At the very least, my guess is some small shops will build businesses around apps that offer enhanced users experiences, but for fees. I’d be willing to pay for premium experiences that were well maintained.
And if they somehow manage to do that, people will download their data and move to another instance or spin up their own, and they’ll get the exact same content. It’s the open nature of the Fediverse, it’s impossible or at least incredibly difficult to monetize.
Time will tell. People seem to be pretty down to support devs and studios that are using the money to enhance the user experience and pay the developers fairly. Apollo, Twitterific, Tweetbot, etc. lots of good examples of this.
That depends on how the admins decide to run their instances. After several crises and dramas, etc., I can say that those who decide to monetize eventually will; but so far people have been supporting their admins through crowdfunding.
The really big instances are deciding to be open to Facebook in exchange for big money. A lot of folks in other instances don’t like it, and some instances have already decided to defederate from them in advance (search for the hashtag #FediPact). Yes, there’s lot of drama involved.
The fediverse is the coolest thing that could happened, freedom is what all people should seek for, creating their own spaces and not supporting corporations that only want to make money out of people’s lives, data, attention, mental health, etc …
It’s better to support the instance you are in with donations for sure.
I think there should be some monetization. Otherwise how will people pay for the server costs. Maybe small ads placed in the platform across the fediverse?
There will be a point when the cost of running the server (non-donating users, operating, and overhead costs) can not be covered by donating users alone.
Maybe not hosting media, especially videos can reduce the costs more.
The admins will need something more steady and certain than donations when a server hits that point.
Maybe awards? Just like old reddit with only 1 golden award that you have to buy, perhaps with customizable icons, so no more community awards or free ones.
Or promoted posts? Have to pay for promoting your post and limit it to just 1 promoted post per page
Or API fee? charge for API access with much more reasonable price, but free for open source apps, and more expensive for corporations
Or a percentage of income from subscription? Some apps may introduce a subscription model like Sync Ultra or Apollo Ultra, and some of those money can go into the supported servers.
Anyway, it won’t be a popular decision when they implement a monetization model for sure, but I just hope the admins learn from reddit and twitter
It needs to have some kind of monetization. More like voluntary buy-in. Maybe the web 3.0 could fix some of the money problem here. NFT as skin or avatar, some coin or medal to give others. A portion of the sale could go towards maintenance cost and whatnot
Think of the Fediverse much more like Wikipedia than anything else. It is run in donations and volunteers. It is not for profit and for the benefit of all people.
That’s very concerning! Sounds eerily similar to how Google killed XMPP back in the day. Honestly we probably shouldn’t allow any federation with them to stay safe.
There was a really good writeup I saw recently either here in Lemmy or on Hacker News somewhere, can’t seem to find it. In short though, Google adopted the decentralized standard, built it into Gmail so everyone uses their client, then eventually dropped support for talking with other XMPP clients.
No insult intended but as you say, new here, rtfm a while before complaining.
Yeah, it is a good idea for you to pay. How’s two bucks a month sound? Donate! No ads, no tracking, no personal data theft, the ability to change instances if the one you’re on goes fascist/corporate/whatever you dislike. Code you could actually modify.
No CEO whims, no need for “growth” I’m that ever increasing destruction mode.
It’s different than corporate media. Those of us old enough remember the early internet and beyond, bbsing. This fedi shit is the good shit. Adapt! It’s pretty fkn great.
Lol it’s sucks now! Lol from the hyuuge influx of new people, new code, changes and a taste of chaos. I love this.
No insult intended but as you say, new here, rtfm a while before complaining.
Yeah, it is a good idea for you to pay. How’s two bucks s month sound? No ads, no tracking, no personal data theft, the ability to change instances if the one you’re on goes fascist/corporate/whatever you dislike. Code you could actually modify.
No CEO whims, no need for “growth” I’m that ever increasing destruction mode.
It’s different than corporate media. Those of us old enough remember the early internet and beyond, bbsing. This fedi shit is the good shit. Adapt! It’s pretty fkn great.
Lol it’s sucks now! Lol from the hyuuge influx of new people, new code, changes and a taste of chaos. I love this.
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