People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.

To quote the first words of the old Dune movie:

“A beginning is a very delicate time.”

What we should all take responsibility for is the health and quality of the community. We should be more active citizens, instead of the passive “consumers” we’ve all been corporately groomed to be.

I think more instances are the answer because this activity can’t be cheap. maybe Lemmy.world splits off into 2 or 4 instances. Lemmy1.world etc

This dynamic will have to stabilize in costs. I don’t know what that looks like.

We’re all guests in an apartment building with an open door policy in a village of apartment buildings.

Help out your building owners with the utility costs if ya can, design some cool apartments for others to experience and visit, but most importantly: take care of your neighbors and commune with each other to grow a stronger community

One of my favourite things about early days Reddit was it’s growing community of positivity. There was actual encouragement to be nice to each other and subreddits were built around celebrating stuff.

Negativity was downvoted into oblivion so you never saw that stuff on the All page and popular pages.

I’m seeing the same thing with Lemmy right now and hope it continues long into the future. The lack of profiteering should really help with this.

It’s like hanging out at a friend’s house. Follow their rules.

I’ve been on this earth long enough not to trust the “nothing sketchy going on here, just people giving away stuff for free!” never turns out well.

…I’m sorry, but blind positivism won’t get you, Lemmy and nothing else to anywhere. Nothing is perfect neither free of “predatory capitalism” – one day, you will “be the product”. And there is nothing you can do about it, because this world ain’t a fairy tale where we’ve got fairies flying around and giving us anything we want – we need money. And lots of it.

Shout at me, swarm at me with negative downvotes like it’s the best thing you can do (which probably is), but this is the real world, giving it to you with a couple words, fair and square.

Thanks OP. We have an opportunity to do things differently, and better.

When I signed up on a mastodon instance winter of 22, I moved a couple times, when I settled down, I setup $5/mo to the site.

When I signed up to lemmy.world, I did the same after a week.

No ads! No spying, no coercion, no CEOs whims to extract profit from accumulated past collective work. Sure admins mods etc can become assholes – and we can move.

Wikipedia’s innards can be icky at times, man politics around some pages is infuriating. GUESS WHAT. WE DONT EVEN GET TO DO THAT MUCH on a corporate site. Most Wikipedia.org pages operate just fine. There’s always someone “wrong on the internet” somewhere, we can choose where we put our energies.

Reddit seemed incrementally better than most – up to the Troubles. But I just got lulled by the mostly great people there and the great conversations, but jarred awake, again, by the reminder than in reality, it was just another pump and dump deal. It was just taking longer than my attention span.

I’m actually paying monthly to help with server costs. What am I?

While I understand what you’re getting at, users can be viewed as “the product” if they are contributing content (posts, comments, votes, and other forms of engagement) and “the customer” if they are consuming this content in any way.

Without content or readers there would be no Lemmy, just like for Wikipedia with no editors or readers there would be no purpose for that site either. The terms “product” and “customer” aren’t intrinsically related to monetary value.

Actually, this is not necessarily true. Because it is open source doesn’t mean it cannot be commercial. I can happily imagine that with the future rise of spam, porn, and other nasties, I would happily pay small amount of money for well moderated, clean experience.