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.
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.
And just to add to my previous reply - creation of Lemmy IS an act of capitalism! The author of Lemmy decided he didn’t like Reddit. So he made the most capitalist decision in their life - to create a competition. Lemmy is an actual flagship of capitalism and free market: when even people who dislike capitalism turn to capitalist tools to improve their lives.
I’m sorry, but Lemmy would not exist without capitalism. And you won’t be typing angry comments on your phone in the loo without it. You would, most likely, work in some mines right now and a slice of bread for lunch would be your best achievement in life.
Wow, news flash, you must participate in capitalism while living in a capitalist society. Though I fail to see how creating a free open-source distributed alternative could be construed as a “capitalist” move. Maybe look into the lemmy developers and their personal politics before assigning motivations to their actions.
Capitalism is relatively good, gives performance & frugality incentives. Unrestrained late-stage capitalism… not so much. Think of it like oxygen. At 21% you’re great (and need it to live), at 90%+ you spontaneously combust.
I may be a minority. But I would gladly join a server that is paid and I get stability, but also a better stronger fight against the inevitable onslaught of shit - in return.
I doubt we'll see ads in the form we know them from places like Twitter and Reddit. We may start seeing instances being sponsored by (or even operated by) businesses, and people can federate with them or not as they choose.
I also think paid subs will be a growth area and honestly this is the model I'd be most comfortable with, although I acknowledge the risk of excluding people who don't have disposable money to spend on such things.
I could see both ads and subscriptions work (although, the former might be “useless” for those using adblockers, after all, so I’d see persistent/static sponsorship ads similar to how some FOSS projects do it to be more likely).
Especially the latter, for certain services that focus on providing value. A friend of mine mentioned Misskey for example, apparently being used by some Japanese artists. Considering Twitter’s on its way out by being harmful to commission artists, I could see someone spin up such instance and ask X amount for providing a marketplace for commissioned goods.
Wikipedia is probably the most important thing on the internet fight now. It also needs some amount of servers, many crawlers scan it daily, I assume its a shitton of users and logins and API hits and what not. And still it survives on donations alone.
Eventually lemmy is not a streaming services with videos and and a lot of bandwidth. Its just text and people connecting. So I assume you dont need massive servers and shit.
This is a great question. To add to this, what happens if/when/eventually there’s enough users to warrant big players (celebs/fortune 500) wanting to dip their toes into Lemmyverse? I don’t see this happening soon, but with enough growth, SOMEONE is going to want to reach this audience right? It’ll start slow but if the trend continues, it’s inevitable. Which is ok I think. The way I imagine it, celebs might have their own preferred curated/verified Lemmy instance. Maybe they’ll use affiliate links for merch and promos?
I think that Lemmy Gold, Silver & Bronze are inevitable, with say a 90/10 cut to instance/lemmy-devs.
It would be best if the developers and the biggest instances agree on a standard payment system to implement into the Lemmy UI.
I’ve already donated to my instance as it’s a regional one, I didn’t buy Reddit Gold, but Lemmy Gold/Silver/Bronze is appealing to me given the money goes to a much smaller local group.
I would be up for these kinds of things as long as it doesn’t restrict functionality behind paid tiers. if it only provides cosmetic enhancements like badges or whatever else that’d be cool
Why? If you need to pay money to have a badge so that you can feel superior to others, maybe you should stick to reddit instead of polluting the Fediverse.
didn’t mean it like that just that if we start restricting functionality behind paid tiers it could get to the point where Reddit had that weird turbo thing like discord nitro that you could only post embedded GIFs and stuff if you had it
The big difference with Lemmy is that it’s not really a service, it’s a open protocol and standard, like email, or http. The service itself is provided by distributed instances that adhere to the protocol. Like those protocols, no one company has been able to get a monopoly on it. Some have taken over a lot of it, like Google with Gmail, or cloudflare, but if you don’t want to work with them there are a ton of other options you can go with, and you will not be locked out of the system if you do.
Reddit was a centralized closed source system so if you don’t have a Reddit account then you are locked out of the system completely.
Lemmy is decentralized so no one instance has or can gain a monopoly. If you want to break ties with one instance you can just switch to another one and still participate with it and the rest of the fediverse.
Not only does that give you choice in a worst case scenario, it also keeps all the instances on their toes because they don’t have dictatorial control over their users.
Spez’s fatal miscalculation was that he thought he had user lock in, but unlike other social networks where it’s your only option to keep in contact with your real life friends, or it’s the only platform your favorite creator posts on, they had neither. Almost all accounts were not connected to your real life and posts were mostly links to other platforms. Very few creators had Reddit as their sole posting platform. The interactions were ephemeral and superficial. Dropping Reddit was the easiest service I ever had to drop.
Add comment