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.
Open-source projects have always been sustainable by donations. Just look at Wikipedia; it’s been around for 22 years. Linux has been around for even longer.
If lemmy.world ever sold out, I’d probably just move to reddthat.com. Problem solved.
I could see someone trying to sell ads on their instance. But ya I can’t imagine many people would join unless they had some other features that are better than other instances.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some people may monitize by having paid for subscriptions, like email.
Others will offer free services with banner ads on their site, like email.
Others will offer the service as a way to drive traffic and adoption of other services they offer, like email.
Others will run them at their own cost because they want to, like email.
Companies will run their own instances, like email.
Notice a trend here. For all of you who think the Fediverse is doomed because “ermegurd not platform, is gonna fail”. Umm, email?
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.
You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards.
You can, but as I said, because you aren’t a know provider every message from your server will end up in the spam folder of everyone using Gmail.
You won’t have a functional system unless you back it with either Gmail or Outlook.
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.
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.
As long as we don’t allow capitalist corporate greed to ruin the Fediverse like it has ruined (and will continue to ruin) practically everything.
Did you know that you can move to North Korea and enjoy life without capitalism and greed?
Did you know you’re commenting on a site that was created specifically because people don’t like capitalism and greed?
