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 ads, no tracking, just donations. The model proved itself when twitter went to shit and a big influx of users came to mastodon, it all worked out.
Many mastodon instances shut down. There’s always a risk that at some point the donations are not enough to sustain an instance. It could be very problematic if mods lose their communities when an instance shutdown.
Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.
Yeah, especially with Lemmy which is a lot more permanent than Mastodon is. You can screenshot your old toots but you can’t screenshot a userbase. There should be a way to migrate a community to another instance while keeping the subscriptions.
Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.
I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.
Hopefully it ends up like wikipedia
Removed by mod
I wonder if the mod who deleted my comment is in denial, or trying to cover their ass.
You mean promotion. Not all promotion is bad. When a game developper posts a content update about their game, that’s promotion. And I think most subscribers of that community will be pretty happy to see that kind of promotion. It’s opt in.
No, I mean ads. “Hey Kbinlets, what’s your favorite fast food? I just love how crispy KFC is!”
You’re just not noticing that the ads are ads.
I’ve been on Mastodon for months and haven’t noticed any ads. Just people letting me know about some product they like. Wait…
Nonsense. This place is refreshing, like the bold taste of New Coke.
I just got thirsty all of a sudden.
Cuke?!
I love Cuke!
[ smiles with brown teeth ]
It’s heaven in a can!
That’s been always the case on other platforms on top of the official ads. Damn every now and then you’d see what’s clearly an guerilla ad campaign hitting the front page of reddit.
Oh shit was I the ad the whole time??
Course not, if you were, i’d be able to tell, since i’m using the new Rayban® Aviators© Digital edition, now with poser ID embeded and polarized lenses with Spez protection.
Dude! They looked so sick when I saw them in your profile pic while eating my Magic Spoon
laughably expensivesuper duper healthy cereal!I would have paid for spez protection. But it wasn’t available so I came to Lemmy lol
We call that a condom, but it’s too late for spez.
Maybe we are all ads on this disgraced day
Speak for yourself
The real ads were the friends we made along the way.
Reddit got WAY worse in the last 5-7 years though. I think corporations got more ok with it after best practices were both cemented and more publicized after the 2016 presidential election. Previously astroturfing was there for political campaigns and state actors, but more shady. Then Russia went off the rails with agitprop, Cambridge Analytical was all in the news, and everyone realized how pervasive and easy it was. Now everyone does it, and often.
Nonsense, “No, Stupid Questions!” is actually sponsored by “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
There are no ads, just as there are no added flavours in McDoubleBeef 100% flavour and 200% beef!!!
If you have real evidence of this then you have a duty to share 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.
This is a great analogy. It would be like asking what happens when someone tries to monetize email.
All the users would jump ship to another one immediately.
Most email providers are monetized. For most providers you either pay a subscription or they inject ads. The important thing is if they get too greedy and start providing a bad service you can switch providers.
Email services are monetizable, but email itself cannot because it’s not a tangible thing, it’s an idea and agreement to follow that idea.
Oh, I guess I’ve never noticed lol. Does Gmail have ads?
Yup! But they put them in the promotions tab so they kinda blend in with promotional emails and they’re presented very natively. The only way you can tell the difference is a little ad symbol.
They can’t over exploit their users because users have choice. Back when Gmail first came out there was a rush between companies to provide the most storage and features and that’s because email being an open standard inherently encourages competition!
I’m fairly certain ads in google search are affected by email content.
The Android app does, at least in some sections (“Social”, f.e.)
The concept of the Fediverse is horizontal rather than vertical growth - i.e. More smaller instances rather than increasing the capacity of the larger ones. We’re also seeing that Lemmy currently only scales to a certain degree. Right now, most instances are either covered by their admin because they’re so small that the cost is manageable or instances are setting up donations.
It’s conceivable that a business would set up an instance and charge for it - but I think it unlikely. A year town the road, though, who knows?
Hadn’t occurred to me before - I guess instances/mods can limit the number of new users they take in so it doesn’t impact performance too much.
Yup - as the admin of a small instance, I plan to keep it small. I want to contribute the Fediverse but not have this become more than a hobby.
Doesn’t really make sense, if they’re federated then you wouldn’t need to pay them to access their content. If they’re not federated then what are you paying for?
You’re paying for reliability, continuity, possibly a domain name which may give a sense of exclusivity. By joining a “free” server, you don’t actually have a contract or terms of service.
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.
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.
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 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.
And if we ever want to post videos, I imagine PeerTube links would be a good way to go?
undefined> PeerTube
This is honestly a good idea.
Link to undefined?
That was added to my post when I replied lol. Must’ve been a glitch 🤷♂️.
Wikipedia’s page serves simple. The documents get edited and processed into html when submitted.
Lemmy dynamically builds the html for every single http get.
That’s a very different cost for a server.
Umm, no? Lemmy UI is a PWA/SPA and all the html “building” happens in your browser.
This is the only way to monetize and the best way
The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.
Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.
As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it’s very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.
Yep. I don’t get why it is so hard for people to understand that non-profits CAN sustain themselves from donations. There’s so much brainwashing and gaslighting by corporations going on that people start to question everything outside of the ultra-capitalist system, even the most basic and genuinely nice human interactions are doubted
Yeah it’s weird, there’s plenty of examples of what people would consider “profitable” non-profits: For example Mozilla Thunderbird pulled US$6 million last year in donations alone, with the average donation being US$21, I think.
Mastodon, another non-profit, while not quite as lucrative, pulls in around £24,000 a month on Patreon donations alone, not counting any outside sponsors or Open Collective donations, and so on.
Build value, and people will happily support you.
However if reddit decided they want to plug the leak, if they offered $1 million to the admins of sh.it.just.works and lemmy.world and beehaw, if they accepted, reddit could then defederate the three largest instances from everywhere and Lemmy would basically have to start from the ground up again. A lot of users would probably not bother making an account elsewhere as they may feel it not worth it since it could happen again.
Lemmy wouldn’t have to start from the ground up. They would already have all the source code and instances, a potential userbase who was already convinced not to let these people control their social networks, who already have the frontend installed on their devices, is already used to the interface and features of the app. Even if Spez were to do this, other instances would be built and in the long run it would be a financial hole.
Brave of you thinking that I don’t have multiple Fediverse accounts. Buying those instances would be worthless, since users would just migrate to a different instance, even easier than moving from Reddit.
Another possibility is that a big corporate will dedicate a dev team to make their own FOSS fork of the Lemmy codebase that, due to its rich feature set and support, becomes THE version of Lemmy to use. Kinda like Meta and React (though React was originally fully internal to Meta, you get the point). Of all the big companies to do this kind of thing, Meta would be the best, imo, given how they’ve been with their AI models and React, but I still don’t like the idea given what we’ve seen happen with Red Hat.
…except lemmy is GPLv3, so any fork has to be released with the entirety of it’s source code, which stops companies from doing shit like that.
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 point of caution:
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 the email comparison is apt. We are currently in the bbs/dial-up ISP stage of the fediverse. When people had aol.com or netcom.com addresses.
That gave way to powerful centralized services such as Hotmail or rocketmail, that had the promise of never changing your email again. We then saw Gmail become the big boy on the block with amazing technology.
Even with these powerful entities, there were still hobbyists and corporate email.
I predict the fediverse will follow a similar path. lemmy.world and beehaw are like the netcoms, or even the bbs’s, basically hobbyists, and Internet communists setting things up for the common good, or simply because it’s fun.
We’re going to see instances fill up, become unstable, unreliable, etc. People will get frustrated when Lemm.ee, or their preferred instance can no longer support the volume they have attracted. We’ll see a professional service like a Hotmail that promises a forever home. You’ll likely also see vanity instances like what rocketmail offered. Given the nature of the interest based servers, we’ll likely see vanity instances come about singer than they did with email: starwars.fedi, lotr.verse, piano.lemmy, etc.
Once corporate interests start to see value in a powerful, stable instance that can collect user data and serve targeted ads (starwars.fedi is easy to target), they will dump enough money to push out the hobbyists. The hobbyists will not go away, but they won’t be needed anymore.
That’s when you’ll see the disruptor. Someone who comes into the space like Google did, and the fediverse will be an open protocol that is dominated by a few massive interests.
All in all, I’m not predicting doom, just the natural course of events, which actually will be great for the fediverse. Just like I love my gmail.com account more than my hotcity.com account, I think the future of the fediverse is bright, even if corporate interests get heavily involved, and dominate the 'verse, because there will always be room for innovations, and hobbyists, and while a single company could dominate, the protocol is still open for anyone to do their own thing, and not be bound to a single company if they don’t want to be.
I think this is spot on. It’s completely foreseeable that a well funded enterprise could stand up an instance that’s super robust and can handle a lot more traffic than current ones. They could, say, attract celebrities to do AMAs and handle the load. Or maybe they could create some communities that they stock with a giant amount of useful content.
They’d do it for free, and it would just be another instance, but it would become invaluable, with more and more communities hosted there, and more and more users making it their home instance, until the owners felt they were valuable enough that they put their content behind a paywall or they start serving ads. Sure, people could just move to other instances, but the point would be that suddenly doing without them would be painful.
But unlike Reddit or Twitter, it’s not as much as all or nothing situation, and other instances can compete in the same realm.
Sounds like Microsoft’s embrace, extend, and extinguish
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.
TIHI
I haven’t read a ton about it, but isn’t this what Meta is potentially going to do with Thread?
That is the worry, yes. There’s very little incentive for them to join the fediverse as a for-profit company otherwise.
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.
Please don’t start obfuscating words. Elon.
standing our ground means defederating any and all meta servers as soon as they’re identified
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.
they’d abstract that away for their users, they won’t know or care. And if one instance gets blocked, they’ll just spin up a new one and migrate the data. Meta users won’t have to think about the whole fediverse aspect of it because it they had to, it would never get off the ground. So meta has to abstract it away or it’ll be DOA. Which means we have to keep blocking any and all meta instances when they’re identified as such
What’s the background on this?
deleted by creator
What’s the background on this?
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).
Yes but you need to sign their NDA to be sure.
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.
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 cist of hosting.
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.
“Generally not trying to profit” - but we’re all humans. If someone offered (hypothetical amount) $2M to “buy” an instance, which admins would sell?
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.
But who would stay on an instance with ads or something when there are thousands of options?
Hell, I made accounts on the top handful of instances just for situations in which one goes down for maintenance, or the admins do something weird (like defederating from big communities).
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.
That’s a great idea, then each user owns their own info entirely.
Is there any community suggestions instance? Wouldn’t mind making a post with a backups functionality request if one hasn’t been made yet 😅
That’s true, an instance would be very tempted by that. I was referring more to the day to day, there’s no incentive to squeeze users.
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.
CHANGE IS GOOD!
Depends how successful we are in fending off Zuck from trying to muscle his way in. That’s probably the first challenge.
Otherwise this is a non-issue, as there will simply always be both kinds. Nothing is stopping you from simply Self-Hosting your own Lemmy server.
I’m lazy. Checkmate!
For real though, lots of money is a great motivator.
Yes, which is why you should pick your server with care. If you do not pick one that suits your desires, that is on you.
This will not be as effortless as reddit any time soon, so if that is your goal, you may prefer it over there.
Nope, no way I’m going back. However, I’m still fairly new so I haven’t really “researched” which instances I should be joining. Except for lemmynsfw…for obvious reasons. LOL
If they want to crate a Lemmy instance so badly, why don’t they? It’s open source, everyone can host an instance if they want to.
The only thing I can imagine is that they’re restricted from monetizing it due to some rule of the license
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
I think most people are assuming we’ll have the ability to fend off anything. All it’s going to take is Zuck creating a new fediverse-enabled platform and just giving everyone with an Instagram account access using their already existing accounts. We’ll be outnumbered by the millions.
We don’t need to become more successful than Meta in order to fend him off, so to speak. We merely need to still be here, and independent.
Realistically every instance can monetize in whatever way they see fit but I highly doubt this’ll be a thing. Mastodon is way bigger and more expensive than Lemmy and it runs just fine through donations. No reason why the same won’t work here.
Lemmy itself is also likely to follow in Mastodon’s path by getting money from sponsorships and fundraisers. See https://www.investopedia.com/how-mastodon-makes-money-7482865
Sponsors want something in return though, surely?
For many people, myself included, paying $10 a month for some VC schmuck to buy another pina coloda while he’s resting on the beach smoking a Cuban cigar laughing about how much money he made from exploitation is a no-way. On the contrary, paying $10 once every few months to cover hosting costs for a service we all enjoy using and is not misusing our funds is something a lot are happy to do.
When I purchase something or subscribe to a service (the only subscription services I have are servers I rent sooo…) I think twice about whether I wanna spend this money because I can find a loophole around it, donating to keep my instance alive is something I’m ready to do.
And that’s really the only sustainable way things like this can exist. The Internet has been having it’s free lunch for so long we’ve forgotten how to buy our own.
I’d say it’s more that we’ve been paying out the nose in the form of offering up our data and digital autonomy, and by allowing not only the Internet but our societies at large to degrade and polarize. We’ve paid dearly for our ‘free’ services, in the case of the US with everything from our reproductive rights to our connections with our own families and communities.
I’d much rather pay the price of an extra latte now and then for real internet communities than deal with actual Nazis and orbital Teslas for some shitty undermoderated ad feeds infested with trolls, AI, and literal societal saboteurs on the payrolls of Putin and Winnie the Pooh.
Just a shoutout on the main website or github. Not much else, they tip in to support the project.
This might work for now, but I’m skeptical how well this would work in the long run. Do those company pay a monthly fee to be there? What happens when there’s a hundred companies on that list? What happens if a company pays a substantial amount to be there and threatens to stop paying if xyz doesn’t happen?
- Just like there’s Lemmy and Kbin that powers the “threadiverse” / reddit-like portion of the fediverse, Mastodon is only one software that enables micro-blogging like experiences. There’s Pleroma, Misskey and many more. And of course there’s always the possibility for more to be developed over time.
- Of Mastodon there’s likely hundreds of so-called “forks” out there. Since it is open source, people can take that source code, and host their own version of the project. This means they can make their own changes, include changes by others, remove features they don’t like, and so on.
- Mastodon is not just run by a handful of people owned by a corporation, forced to work for them. Large parts of the project are contributed by volunteers, which can jump ship to another implementation as soon as they feel like the one they’ve contributed to is not acting in the interest of users.
- Admins which actually host Mastodon instances get to decide when to update to a newer version, or whether they want to use a fork that includes the features they like (which the “official” Mastodon project has not (yet) included) or anti-features that might’ve been put there due to pressure from outside (possible but less likely).
The power here is in the hands of users and admins. We just have to be careful not to let a company like Google or Facebook/Meta take control over a substantial portion of the fediverse. See also: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
I do agree with most of your points, except for one.
Mastodon is not just run by a handful of people owned by a corporation, forced to work for them.
Yes, for now. What happens when it requires so much administration and development that someone needs to manage it? Eventually, it will get big enough that its required to be a company. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
deleted by creator
I’m just aware how many projects have come in promising to be the underdog who does things differently only to end up running into the exact same challenges and making the exact same decisions as all the others
Yes and Mastodon itself is a registered non-profit organization. There’s a few people they’re able to pay to work on the projects, thanks to sponsors and donations. But there’s a lot more contributors (over 800). I think the people doing valuable work on FOSS projects have a lot of opportunity to work elsewhere if they feel like they’re being made to do things antithetical to their values. Not to mention the amount of noise they could make to expose the project and its shady goals, if that were the case. Things do work differently for FOSS projects than your average for-profit investor-driven project.
Good to know!
It’s already monetised. Just click on the links under Donations in the main sidebar or straight to the OpenCollective page for a glimpse. We pay for it with our money. That’s how we know we’re not the product.
if any corporation tries to get in on it, you can count on them trying to monetize it
considering the offers facebook were making, it wouldn’t be very surprising if some instances caved. It’s a good thing that anyone can make their own instance for that reason.
As soon as Lemmy instances are unsustainable out of pure interest for the concept of the Fediverse. I doubt there will be subscriptions, first it’ll be donations, and then some instances may have ads. It’s an inevitable that both will happen (either on the same instance, or some instances opting for donations to stay up, and others opting for ads to stay up). No one can run the servers necessary for this platform out of pure charity; the bill for the Fediverse is going to be due someday, and it has to be paid.
But it’s sustainable if it’s non profit.
Most third party Reddit users were happy to pay in the range of $5 a month. The reason everything is shutting down now is because they don’t just want to break even, they want profit, and a shit ton at that.
The fediverse makes social media non-profit by default which means that we can all share the cost.
Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in the world and is still non-profit. It shows that it’s sustainable.
But even non-profits have costs that they need to cover somehow. If they don’t, they’re still not sustainable.
You ask for donations. I’m donating to my instance for instance.
If something is free then 99% of users won’t spend a penny. Anyone who ever did any business knows that. You either make 1% pay for everyone (just like “free” games on mobile phones do), force everyone into subscription or sell your users to advertisers. Choose your poison.
Yes, but that’s not the point.
The point is to keep the servers relatively small so that the non profits can keep breaking even on nothing but donations, even with an influx of new users entering the fediverse.- bigger instances should ideally only be trying to grow when their donations are more than covering the costs. (That being said I wouldn’t be surprised if the bigger instances started having problems what with their seeming ability to continually accept new users without closing once)
In the grand scheme of things the bigger instances having 20K users isn’t a whole lot, and can be done using smaller servers - the thing with social media is that usually only about 20-25% of people are actually “active” - the rest are lurking or dead accounts and maybe occasionally commenting.
The smaller instances (like the one Im on) have anywhere from 1-1000 users and are highly unlikely to fall outside the range of the low cost of a little bit higher than a hobbyist side project, and what with the tendency for smaller instances to have more % of their members also be donators probably never have to fear running out of money
It really only becomes an exponentially expensive problem when you reach twitter and Reddit levels of users on the same instance - as you end up needing more and more expensive custom load balancing and caching solutions in order to keep up with the demand - basically it’s more sustainable for a few thousand people to support the costs of a 1000 instances with 100,000 total members than it is for a company to try to make a profit off of a single monolithic structure supporting the same number of users.
The fediverse splits this load across servers, even segregates it. There are areas of the fediverse that I will never see due to a lack of direct connection through the nature of how your feed works, this helps as not everything is needlessly routed through a single point.
Also Wikipedia faces the same issues and still manages to get through - sure they put up banners asking for donations when margins are getting in to what they consider the “danger zone” but usually the danger zone is more than what’s required.
- Basically they always over budget so they never go under.
I’m wondering whether I would do good or bad if I host my own Lemmy instance for myself, to lower my impact on other instances.
That’s sustainable for now, because instances are microscope. If at some point in time we expect lemmy to become a mainstream platform for communication with tens or hundreds of millions of users in their respective communities. It will become unsustainable long long before then IMHO (I’m happy to be wrong only time will tell)
The cost/user for Lemmy instances is through the roof, and the grand majority of people will not be willing to make donations. Perhaps awards like what Reddit did is a good option?
What about longevity. Who is going to pay for the storage for the hundreds of petabytes of storage for comment and media history? What about replication between instances? Do you have a retention period and delete history, losing knowledge to time?
I worry :/
Edit:
Maybe I worry too much, but now after Reddit maybe I’m just gunshy and am afraid of finding and contributing to new communities that end up being wiped due to sustainability issues.
I hope this problem gets solved, or worked around in some capacity.
This is inevitable as well.
A user base as large as Reddit has an infra bill in the tens of millions. And that’s mature, with cost optimization at all levels to reduce compute, static content costs, more effective caching…etc
Lemmy instances are probably an order of magnitude more expensive to run on a per-user basis, at least.
This means the bill for the Lemmy fediverse if it had the active user base of reddit could be conceivably be near or over a collective $100mill/y with the majority of that just being a result of fragmented, high cost, infrastructure running a (at scale) low performance application.
That’s easy to fix. There’s a ton of new fediverse apps popping up. Just charge them an API fee.
Just… a reasonable one.
The cost will be spread out on an instance by instance basis due to which the cost per user will be low and if not they can also host their own instance which doesn’t cost a lot. If it’s something around $5 a month I wouldn’t mind paying to support a service I plan on using everyday.
That’s not how cost/user works. The cost/user actually goes UP the more small instances you have as a result of more expensive, smaller scale, and severely less optimized infrastructure. Infrastructure gets cheaper on a per-user basis as it consolidates, there are lots of technical reasons for this, but it can be summed up with scale (infra per “unit” is cheaper the more you can guarantee you’ll use, and LOTS of cost optimization paths open up the larger you get).
My point is that the community is going to hit a growth barrier, and that barrier is money and efficiency. Would you be willing to donate $5/m to 50-100 instances? Since to support that kind of scale they would need to whittle down to one instance per community for large communities, and massive communities (think 10-50 million users) might not even be able to exist with the current Lemmy hosting model. I wonder if even 1-5million user communities would even function without dedicated engineering to support the infrastructure and custom tools/services to make it work.
…etc
It’s a real problem. One that will be felt sooner than you might think, and one that will limit the growth, stability, and longevity of communities.
Tl;Dr: economies of scale are an economic reality. Lemmy will likely go like email, with large centralized private companies running the most popular servers.
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Donations are already happening in the Fediverse. Lemmy,world is funded by donations to the Mastodon.world instance. Many Mastodon users donate to their instance. I give $3 per month to my instance (sfba.social). They put out a quarterly report breaking down how much cam in and went out.
I donate in order to have an ad-free experience. If the admins separate the finances of Lemmy.world and Mastodon.world I will donate here as well.
If anyone puts ads on an instance it’s not really a good encouragement for someone to join, and what with the nature of the fediverse it’s more likely to make people try finding a better deal elsewhere.
I would definitely move to a different instance if my instance started using ads to fund itself - I’d rather the instance mandated a subscription than doing that.
Also another thing to consider is how other instances started spewing ads all over the fediverse - the ones that have managed to get by without advertising would probably defederate from those that did so that they don’t end up showing another instances ads. Meaning it makes no sense to support ads in the first place if you want to stay federated.
That said if it got so unsustainable that I had to pay a subscription I would probably consider moving to a smaller instance anyway or hosting one myself for myself.
How many hobbiests running miniature train sets in their garage have monetized those train sets? How many backyard gardeners sell their crops.
In most cases people who choose to develop and administrate an instance of their own are largely just hobbiests of another type. Sure it costs them some money. Many hobbies cost money, it doesn’t stop people from building things or growing things for fun.
I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.
For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.
I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.
It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it’s a pretty foreign concept for some folks who’ve bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.
Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.
I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.
Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.
But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it’s not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.
Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you’re not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what’s the point?
Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that’s your whole motivation it’s going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.
There’s a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.
Exactly. Federation means no single instance needs to serve millions of users. If one gets too big and becomes too commercialized, you can move to a different one that shares your values. If large instances cost more per user as they scale up, we just need more instances.
I also think people are vastly overestimating the cost to serve users on Lemmy/kbin. Last time I calculated it, lemmy.world costs were around €0.01/mo per monthly active user. That can be maintained with 1% users donating €1 a month.
Yes, the concept of the Fediverse has so many inherent advantages over classical, corporate monolith social media that I hope that in the end, after all the desperate attempts of current sites (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) to finally become profitable have failed, it will lead to a freer and better Internet.
If I move to a different instance, what changes about my experience?
As long as a company can’t outright buy the whole network or something like that, I don’t think it could get fucked over in the same way that something like twitter or tumblr can.
