I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
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I think Lemmy, like Mastodon, will crumble if people don’t wrap their heads around federation. Mastodon stuggled because everyone just joined mastodon.social, not understanding that the server you join only affects your local timeline.
We need to teach people that you can join a small instance and still get 99% of the stuff you want from every other instance
Speaking as someone who totally doesn’t understand federation (but totally does get servers being overloaded) - I can completely see why they all joined what appears to be the primary instance. I did. I really struggled to work out which server to join and had to wade through a few that had their own special rules (eg “no creating communities here” - idr which one that was tho).
I ended up joining lemm.ee simply because it seems like a nice generic server set up to do general stuff with that wasn’t lemmy.ml. Is that a good choice? idk.
I had a similar problem grasping mastodon (actually the reason I didn’t really use it in the end).
Lemmy servers need to work more like Counterstrike or TF2 or WoW servers (edit: or IRC servers - that’s probably a better comparison tbh), where you might want to join a specific server with its own personality, but most people probably don’t care and are more interested in whether it performs well and is likely to be around a while. I also think some simple things like making the server less prominent in the UI and not making local communities the default view would help loads with people not feeling like they’re less because they’re not on the primary instance.
Edit: LMAO except I didn’t. I posted using the account I’d made on lemmy.ml but decided not to use. Lemmying is hard, yo.
I think the server needs to be prominent in the ui for now at least so people remember where to log in to
See: your edit lol
My local timeline is literally the whole reason I joined this particular instance. There isn’t enough traffic in the niche subs, so I find a popular instance with posts that tend towards my interests, instead.
@if_you_can_keep_it @Rogueren Assuming that one Federated Service is the end all be all user experience for what you’d like to share can hurt many. In Mastodon I kept seeing people (during the Twitter Exodus) who wanted multi-sever posting to each local feed under one account. Like Lemmy’s cross site posts, not sure if Lemmy lets you cross post multiple times to different communities. But some basically wanted Mastodon to work like Lemmy and FB Groups.
e.g. Main Post -> Community 1, Community 2
I bought a server for about 100 a year… With my whopping 2 users… It’s overkill… So… My comment is a wasted way of saying idunno
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As paradoxical as it is, I think that these open source non-profit projects are a lot more efficient than profit-driven, debt-fueled corporations.
First of all, the main contributors to a FOSS project do it for passion and do not take a salary.
Secondly, they don’t have the infinite growth mindset that pushes enterpreneurs to to spend as much as possible for maximum growth, all financed by a growing amount of investors (and debt, which costs interest fees).
If a FOSS project reaches maximum capacity, they will close subscriptions, they will throttle traffic, i.e. they will slow down growth, but they will not go into debt. Slowing down growth is something that a for-profit company would never do (at least until the interest rates were low and the investors were plenty, today idk). Eventually someone else in the community will decide to do a generous donation or open their own instance.
I think the second point is the one that makes the biggest difference. If there is a need for new features, people will make them. If there is a reason for people to join, they will join. Steady state is much easier to manage.
Donate to the devs!
Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:
- a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
- not shift the page content when displaying the donation banner!
Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.
This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.
I’m alright with centralisation personally, as long as it’s easy enough to move off of. If Lemmy or Kbin or whatever starts being evil, you could always branch off your own organisation and still have the same content fairly seamlessly through federation. (And yes, planning to remove federation counts as evil and hopefully would cause an exodus beforehand)
Because Lemmy is open source, the only danger is a fork that removes compatibility. We’ve already dealt with this early on in the project with hexbear forking off (for good reasons, that instance has a lot of added features like pronoun flair and emotes). But that’s coming to an end soon as hexbear is working on upstreaming back to Lemmy’s main branch and should be open to federation this time next week.
a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
Can you elaborate? I have the impression, that we need to think more deeply about how the donations should be distributed. E.g. a users fund are donated proportional to their subscribed Communities? I think it’s difficult, as people’s time spent on a community doesn’t necessarily mean it’s proportionally valuable. I’ve had a few subreddits which I used rarely but we’re quite important to me.
Each instance is free to field their own donation drives for their running cost. They even can display advertisements if they feel like it. There is no “one size fits all” here, and there shouldn’t.
Each instance is potentially in a different jurisdiction, making it hard to transfer money, etc.
Not only that, but I think having funds centrally collected and then distributed is a particularly bad idea. It comes with too much opportunities for bad blood. Money and friendship don’t mix.
The only unifying constant of the network is the software that runs it. This though needs to be improved in various areas, for which centrally collected funds would be ideal, as every instance will benefit from it. No operator of any instance would have a disadvantage from advertising the central donation drive. They would benefit from it by having better software in the end.
Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It’s not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.
With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn’t. Meaning there’s fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn’t succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.
Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.
A donation drive could be a good model but the decentralized nature of the platform would complicate things.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be patreon pages for servers & instances you support, which is enough to keep the lights on. Especially if it unlocks a little cosmetic token or icon.
I really don’t care how to decorate my account as long as I can keep using the same service that I would want to use on a regular basis … I’d pay for the server and I really don’t care what they give me because the fact that they exist and continue to exist is more than enough repayment for me
Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.
when you donate money, you’re not funding wikipedia’s operating costs. wikipedia itself is self sufficient. what you’re funding instead is the wikimedia foundation- which is set up to not receive grants but to give them.
the drives are misleading, to say the least
If it is not funded through user donations, how is it self sufficient? Genuinely curious.
Wish they would be more upfront about it. Wouldn’t have a problem donating to fund grants. But I want to know upfront.
I read on reddit that they have to do the drives in this way in order to amintsin some sort of charity or non profit status? Something along those lines. Like they have enough in the bank to be fine but they need to do this for some legal reason.
Forgive my half recollection of a reddit comment that could have been bs in the first place.
What happens to your account on a federated server if that one fails though?
As someone who burned reddit accts regularly this doesn’t really concern me. But if it really worries you couldn’t you set up your own private instance with you as the sole user? Nothing is more reliable than yourself. Even corporations with millions of dollars can close up shop at a moments notice.
I signed up for the lemmy.ml Patreon and am happy to support an open, federated site like this. I’d never pay for Reddit Gold, Twitter Blue, Discord Nitro, or any of those other nasty pay-to-win commericalized things but I’ll pay to keep an open platform from implementing stupid “premium” bullshit.
It’s literally all donated
I’d love hosting a chunk on my anyways online Linux box (and if it was easy I could put up another junk box or two (like i3-i5 8GB 256GB-512GB/1-4TB) if it fits on a 1Gb ethernet line, but I admit I don’t have the time (/energy) for all the stuff around (I’d do backups) especially if the hardware breaks or there are troll infestations etc.
Before the whole world migrates to Lemmy, maybe we could hold on by teaming up in some way.
Maybe my shard should be about doing just that, and hopefully people wanting to set up ‘lemmys’ could gather and share experiences and help.
Thoughts?
sell checkmarks like Tumbler.
for x$ a month get a checkmark next to your name on posts. in whatever colours you pay for. buy checkmarks for others.
What would the checkmark mean?
Just that you support the lemmy community.
Since it’s distributed, the cost doesn’t even compare to a centralized instance. It’s really hard to say how much it would cost to host everyone across the fediverse, but because of decentralization, it’ll be a hell of a lot easier to achieve.
ActivityPub consumes a lot of resources, so the cost for each instance owner will still be high
It’s not a problem on mastodon, really, so, I don’t see why it would be here!
The thing is, Lemmy is decentralized. You don’t need to have an account on an instance (server) to use that instance’s “subreddits” (communities) - instances communicate their activity to each other automatically, so any instance will do (provided the instances haven’t banned each other). It’s just like email.
So it’s pretty simple to just stop accepting sign-ups once an instance starts to become impractically large. Anyone can start an instance for just the cost of a domain ($10ish/year, or free if it’s a subdomain of an existing website) and a server (that random computer you already have lying around will do just fine, for free). And a small instance can do fine on just donations and the good will of the operator.
Apropos of nothing, where are you finding domains for $10/year?
Check tld-list.com for price comparisons of different domain providers.
I was able to get a .win domain for $4.16 yearly on cloudflare. Cloudflare seems to have some pretty cheap domains.
I think the price is spread out across multiple generous people that generously host instances. I think it really depends on how much members there are. From what I heard my instance is 25 $ a month. Another instance I was in on Mastodon cost a few hundreds bucks to run. This is why it is good to help out your fellow admins. On the other hand, lemmy and other fediverse software are open source, so they don’t really have to pay for developpers. Also the scope of what lemmy or Mastodon do is considerably smaller that Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Facebook isn’t just a social media, it’s a spying engine and an ad recommendation platform, Lemmy and mastodon are just social medias, so of course it costs less to do.
Reddit used to have something similar to health bar showing how much “gold” was bought to support the website. but later on out of greed they started using it as a paywall.
We can have a health bar that doesnt paywall ANY features and very transparently displays funds raised\used for a server. It can be used to display how much funds its being supported, how much server costs are, salaries for open source maintainers, mods, etc.
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