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.
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 am fully open to people running everything collecting donations. Or even sponsorships are cool. Straight up monetization through making users pay for shit that doesn’t give anything in return is not cool. Let alone the fact that users make all the content to begin with
The Fediverse SHOULD allow monetization and they don’t yet. As per Mark Bayliss:
The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining and have been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.
I’m not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.
If you’re paying to provide a free server, and along comes another server owner who wants to peer with you. Only they’re charging their users for the same thing you’re giving away for free. Why wouldn’t you be a little bit miffed that they want to take your freely-given service and sell it to their users - because that’s what would be happening in that situation.
Monetising something that’s intended to be free is very, very difficult. Not impossible (see open source software and the businesses that grow around that), but it’s a lot harder when it’s a service.
That’s an interesting idea - have a special tier on one or more cloud providers paid for out of that source, or even a flat payment to any server provider based on number of users/activity or something like that?
I don’t think I would have joined my server if it required a fee to join but now that I’m on it and enjoying the experience and administration I’d gladly throw a buck or two a month their way for servers/maintenance.
Subreddits have 10 million subscribers, I haven’t seen a Lemmy group with more than a few thousand people. I don’t know about you but I’d like Lemmy to be as rich in content and discussion as Reddit was. Unless you like social media when it’s empty of users.
I could see a legitimate service being made out of something like an extra private lemmy, or a lemmy with additional features. Sort of like you’ll see these suites of services from Proton or Nord. Yeah, i can set up my own SMTP server, even encrypt my data, but it’s a lot easier to pay a few bucks to have a reliable service do it.
With federated services eventually becoming mainstream, i wouldn’t be surprised to see some companies offering packages that do things like provide additional privacy or larger amounts of storage.
Or like I’d imagine sustainable video hosts will have to monetize somehow just to pay for the storage space.
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.
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.
I wonder how similar Lemmy is to Wikipedia in terms of storage/bandwith requirements? It’s text and pictures in both cases, but there may be nuances that i’m not aware of as a noob
One big difference right now is that it’s a ton of small people donating their time and servers for this. So the costs aren’t as centralized and costs are spread over many people.
I saw a thread of instance owners talking about why they host, and some actually get free server usage through their work or run servers already and Lemmy only uses a small portion of that.
With that said, I’d encourage everyone to sign up to donate a dollar a month to your Mastodon and Lemmy instance. To me, a couple of bucks a month is worth it to not have to fight against a dumb algorithm or deal with ads.
Besides all the discussion of nonprofits and donations, fedi server hosts have way less overhead. They’re not generally trying to profit, so they only need to break even (or run a deficit small enough to deal with out of pocket). A corporation is trying to give 6 or 7 digit salaries to CEOs and/or shareholders. So they need to extract more than the cost of hosting.
But why would you as a user stay on that instance?
If you start seeing ads and you don’t want to, you move to another instance. If all instances start to serve ads and you don’t want to see ads, you have to start your own instance.
I think about this a lot. Lemmy fully deserves to have a lot of users, and a lot of users means a lot of opportunity to profit one way or the other, so the potential for profit-seeking behavior is there. So if we imagine a future where one instance has 500k users, it’s easy to imagine the owners trying to take it beyond the break even point and making it as profitable as possible. Anyone who puts themselves through the trouble of hosting an instance deserves to make a good living, but we don’t want predatory greedy policies.
The question is, how easy is it to migrate your account from one instance to the other? I haven’t tried yet
I’d like to know that too. The solution I’ve seen mentioned is to just create your own instance to host your own account which is… easier said than done, lol.
It would be cool if we could keep offline backups of our accounts and “sync” them to an instance of our choosing. Migrating would be as simple as syncing up the backup to another instance. And importantly, it would be way easier than setting up one’s own linux server, most people wouldn’t even know where to start.
Also, a site like Reddit wants something like 99.9% availability: roughly 8 hours of downtime per year. Lemmy instances are probably satisfied with 99% availability: roughly 3 days of downtime per year. If one instance is down, but the rest of the fediverse is up, it’s a bit annoying, but not devastating. Users of that instance might have to create alt accounts on another fediverse instance, and certain communities would be offline for days. But, as long as the entire fediverse itself doesn’t go down, it’s not the same as a Reddit outage.
Getting that extra “9” of availability means having engineers on call, it means having a technical staff that creates and maintains monitoring systems, does capacity planning, runs disaster preparedness scenarios, etc. It’s expensive.
Some fediverse admins might run monitoring systems, either because they really care about their instance, or because doing it is interesting and fun. The ones that don’t might just have to do reactive maintenance when something breaks. But, because you’re only aiming for 2 nines, it doesn’t have to be a full time job.
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?
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