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.
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.
IMO whatever comes next needs to be decentralized from the get go, like a torrent system where the network sort of automatically scales with the user count. The fediverse is pretty cool right now but it’s bound to get shitty real soon as people get tired of fronting the costs purely out of goodwill. Either the cost need to be spread around such that the individuals paying it really don’t mind, or there needs to be an incentive to pay / way to monetize that is aligned with the common goal of a decentralized social network. Otherwise we’ll end up with either a network of insignificant size (arguably what this is now) or a monetized shit hole like what Reddit has become
I keep thinking about how a system like that could work but I’m sure someone smarter than me has already figured out that it can’t
Even with these servers being paid for that’s kind of rough. It’s very hard to decentralize something reliable with solid data retention without paying.
well it kind of works for piracy, but that’s because there are some very based people out there who take a lot of pride in seeding content that they want to keep available. Sort of like how the fediverse currently rests upon the shoulders of a few dedicated people who work hard to keep their instances alive under the onslaught of reddit refugees. I’d much rather have a system that doesn’t depend on people’s goodwill to survive though
In a quest to kill spam, email has become somewhat unhealthy and centralized. Setting up a new email provider is a lot more difficult today than it was years ago. Sending a message to the established providers from a new provider will often end up in spam.
Email has not become centralised at all. You have a clear misunderstanding of what that means in the context technological services.
A centralised service is one provided by a sole or group of providers who decide who and who cannot provide said service.
Email in no way fits that description. You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards.
This is true but if you were to do that most people would simply not receive your emails. The fight against spam has effectively turned email into an oligopoly.
I was replying to the part where you said that “You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards”. While I agree that this is technically possible, it has become increasingly difficult (see this blog post for example).
I have spun up a lot of email servers over the past few years for clients and not had the issue you speak off. Perhaps you need to look either at your implementation or maybe that you are doing it on a VPS provider with a shit record?
I have brand new domains with on-prem email servers spinning up constantly and do not have the issue you described.
If you are using hosted servers then perhaps you need to dump the host.
It’s interesting to hear your take as someone experienced, because on hobbyist forums like /r/selfhosted I used to hear the complaint above all the time. Maybe people aren’t doing things correctly. I’ve never messed with my own email server and have no dog in this fight, but I’ve definitely heard that complaint a ton.
Text-only forums aren’t super expensive to run unless you are doing it on the scale of reddit (or do stupid expensive things like have video hosting)
Another topic, I’ve seen people here are super hardline about keeping Facebook out of the Fediverse, and I just don’t think that’s going to work, Now Lemmy Explain how I think this is all going to go down:
If I were Facebook, I’d pay a bunch of big celebrities, say, a certain very talented Academy Award nominated Australian actress, a lot of money, to use Facebook Threads exclusively for a while, and give them the Checkmark. The most difficult part of getting a new social network started is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting that initial audience, which is the problem that Federation solves. So, although some instances will reject anything Facebook related completely, there will be plenty of instances where the userbase would want to interact with their favorite celebs directly a la Twitter, so there will always be instances that wants to federate with this Facebook instance.
But then, those media companies and talent agencies are going to realize, as they did against Netflix, “Hey, wait a minute, why are we paying these middlemen like Zuck and Musk so much money to host a cheap forum? They don’t own the userbase on the Fediverse, so is it just for a Checkmark?”, and they are going to start their own instances of Mastodon/Lemmy where everyone on their instances is verified celebs, to be used as these celeb’s official account with no shitposting allowed, so they can control everything those celebs posts on their server instead. And THAT would be the downfall of Twitter/Facebook.
So, the best path for Facebook to move forward with is to offer easy cloud hosting of federated social media software for a subscription: Pay them 10 bucks a month, they’ll handle all the server and upgrades, and even moderation, which will become the easiest way to setup “your own server”, and that will be much more resilient to the anti-Facebook pact that is going on right now, because instead of one Facebook instance, now you may have to block hundreds of different Facebook hosted instances instead.
Which is why I’m expecting it to be their playbook if federated social media ever takes off. But there really isn’t a solution I can think of for that.
It's up to the instance owners and the users. I can see some instances running on donations, some will run adverts and everything in between. Users will choose instances they prefer. That's the beauty of federation.
How long until POP, IMAP and SMTP (collectively referred to as 'email') is monetized?
How long before torrents are monetized?
The answer is, quite nearly from the start you could .. but anyone can still do everything you could with those protocols by themselves, for free, without any strings. Still people monetized all those things early.
Because those are all just protocol, or a digitized agreement on rules of communicating fixed sets of information. Sets like an email, or a website, or a collection of files. No one owns any of these rules they just exist and any two computers can agree on them and use that to exchange information.
Fediverse is a protocol. Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, and the others are all just programs talking the same protocols. No one allowed any of them to do so, they just agreed to. All the entities that make up the fediverse agreed to the same thing, so all of them can talk to each other, in theory. In practice each one can choose which others it wants to talk to. Just like you can build an email client that just will not send emails to Gmail. It's not because it can't but because it doesn't want to.
Ah yes, Facebook, where all the users on activity hub are from.
Wait. That's not correct at all.
Just because it happened a once or even twice does not mean it can't succeed despite that. Facebook doesn't have some core of active users using there activity hub protocol that they can unplug and snuff out the protocol for. Also every implementation like Lemmy and kbin and even mastodon have custom implementation allowing additional features beyond just what the protocol itself has.
At this rate mastadon, lemmy and Kbin themselves are more likely to hinder the growth of activity hub as FOSS. They're the ones implementing bunches of features the others have to either keep up with or defederate from. But a hundred walled gardens is still better than the one.
There's also a lot to say about the mindset of the users. Reddit still exists. Twitter does too. So does Facebook, etc etc etc. The users here chose this over those. These are distinct differences that make the argument of the article a bit weightless. The warning isn't weightless, and people need to be adamant that new users use different instances in order to block all this from being effective. But again, the fact that that article is shared over and over here shows the mindset of the users. We can't stop them from federation. Protocols are protocols. That's the point.
I’m not really clear on the way the networking works with federated systems.
Say that an instance decided to charge a subscription fee, would they then have to defederate from free instances on a cost basis alone? To handle server load for requests from those instances?
Or, say that subscription was sustainable, would there be anything stopping someone from making a free instance to give users full access to that subscription-based content? The answer there is defederation right?
Trying to work out in my head how this system could be scalable without communities becoming walled gardens and thus removing part of the appeal of federation.
In part you can see this already - there are a bunch of servers that most lemmy instances have defederated from. In these cases information flow is one way - f.e. lemmmy.world doesn’t get any updates from foo.baz, doesn’t provide search results, communities, etc.
Subscription would make sense when the added value you provide is 1) availability guarantees, 2) performance guarantees, 3) membership guarantees, 4) moderation / content filtering options
Surprised no one else mentioned this... the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.
There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.
Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances...
To answer the second question... I don't know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I'm aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.
The fediverse is not a single database or server. It’s a protocol and standard that’s distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can’t be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they’ve stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.
Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you’re not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it’s a closed source centralized monopoly.
One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that’s something that can happen in the future
A large company absolutely could come in and absorb the majority of lemmy traffic and build proprietary code and features on top of the main protocol, eventually making the open source protocol obsolete and supplanting it as a paid/closed-source service. It has been done repeatedly by tech companies, and it is the main reason many people distrust Meta’s interest in joining the fediverse.
For all the reasons you just mentioned, we should fight tooth and nail against that from happening, but we should at least be aware of the threat.
I think there are benefit of killing twitter, mocking el*n and skirting europe regulation on moderation laws. But the worry is there, I hope the devs stand their ground and rejecting any doubious modification from meta on fediverse protocols.
I’d be surprised if there’s more than one Meta instance, as “multiple instances” tends to make the UX more confusing for those who are unaware of it. So it shouldn’t be hard.
Zuck did an interview talking about how they were looking at doing a spinoff of Instagram, using Fediverse, for text based social media. Basically a competitor to Twitter. Rumor mill says it’s call Thread, or maybe he said that in the interview, I can’t remember.
I deleted the wrong comment, but responding here. I was thinking Thread like the home automation standard all the big companies are doing together. Figured Facebook was in on that. I did hear about the Fediverse entry though, just missed the name (which I bet they won’t use).
Zuck did an interview talking about how they were looking at doing a spinoff of Instagram, using Fediverse, for text based social media. Basically a competitor to Twitter. Rumor mill says it’s call Thread, or maybe he said that in the interview, I can’t remember.
Yeah that’s a great point. I think it would be hard to fully lock other clients out, but you could have an early internet style situation where you had some websites not supporting all browsers.
Incidentally, Google is kinda doing this with email.
If you run your own email server for your business, they will rate limit you under the guise of spam protection, even if your emails are never caught in their spam filters. Some business reported up to 12 hour delays on their emails being delievered. They want everyone to use preferably their own service, or at least another major giant’s, so they can push the smaller players out of the market.
It already is. As soon as something like this is internet facing, you get search companies and now AI companies mining data to use for commercial applications.
In terms of the sites themselves though, it'll vary and depend. As it grows in populatity, there will be monetised content in plain sight (think all those secretly sponsored and advertising posts on reddits used to try and push products subtly - the bigger the user base, the more attractive it is to target users with hidden advertising), and then there will be what the servers do themselves. Some may exist on donations, but others may chose to try to place adverts, others may go for subscriptions.
Ultimately there does need to be money coming in from somewhere to keep the services going. There are many free success stories: Wikipedia continues to be free, without adverts, thanks to donations from users and sponsor organisations. Mozilla continues to produce a free open source browser through a mix of donations, sponsor organisations, and paid search deals. Linux is a huge free open system, with a mix of donations, sponsor organisations and commercialisation of the ecosystem.
There isn't really a reason why social media can't also be "free" for consumers, but we don't know yet how that will play out. On traditional social media, the user is the product - our data is mined, we're marketed at, we're advertised at, our data is sold on. The fediverse breaks alot of these methods - or more accurately it opens up these methods to everyone as anyone can access much of the data, removing the value companies have in monopolising and gate keeping the data. It's a double edged sword, but be in no doubt even in the fediverse companies can and will monetise whatever data they can get their hands on.
I’ve been online since 1990; 10-15 years seems to be the maximum time a community can live without shitting itself over greed or something new and better coming along to scoop up users.
That said, things like Usenet and IRC still technically exist… They’re just niche now. The way this shit works is more like those, so it will likely never fully disappear.
To be fair, there is a line between greed and monetization. Monetization can be simply to fund servers costs and labor. Especially as the community grows, it’s just going to get more and more expensive. I think a donation page or a toggle-able ads option (off by default) would be great ways for users to support the site to fund the costs without it being greedy. Both options could give some sort of donor badge as a thank you, because there’s no features involved with it so people don’t feel forced to donate/support.
I think the key really is transparency. I’m not going to throw money into a black hole and hope it does some good, but if there is some level of transparency showing running costs plus deficit/surplus towards those costs then I wouldn’t mind contributing.
It will be interesting to see to what level the server traffic changes in Reddit. I was looking at a post last night (for was still kinda working if you weren’t logged in) and it was a lot of confused people wondering what all the fuss was about, very few people ppl against reddits actions, and it clicked, the majority of people against spez had just left once the apps stopped working.
I checked the user history of those defending Reddit, all very young accounts so I guess ppl who joined recently and only know the Reddit app are left, but the older users… Gone.
There will probably eventually be some commercial Lemmy sites. I honestly think it would be awesome if large game studios, and software companies, and anyone else who has need for a forum, made their own federated Lemmy instances as their official support forums.
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