It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.
Is running ads really that taboo?
EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of “millions of users”, which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that.
The advertisement model needs to die. No one wants to have their experience corrupted by panels trying to sell you something. We can find other ways to fund the network
AO3 is a huge website that makes money purely off of donations. They often get like quadruple the amount they ask for every time they ask for money. Wikipedia comes to mind as well, although I’m not sure if they only make money off of the donations. Instead of donating to a third party service, Lemmy should build in the ability to donate into the website.
I’d like this to be avoided as much as possible. But I am a bit weary about the fact that even small instances have to copy everything else on the Fediverse and thus will be very strained. Or do they copy the stuff only when their user wants to view it? Not sure how it works.
I think I’d rather have an optional membership to support the instance with perks or something. Not reddit gold though. Lemmy silver?
I run my own instance and I don’t run ads because I frankly hate seeing them myself. They clutter up the web view, cause lag on the webpage, and frankly are annoying and ugly to look at.
I’d rather pay out of my own pocket to keep my instance going rather than run ads. Donations would be ideal to help keep it running for longer. As sad as it is, if I couldn’t keep paying the server costs and there weren’t any donations… I’d just shut the server down. I personally will never run ads on an instance I run. I don’t want to perpetuate or support the lifeless corporate greed cycle.
How much money does it even cost running an instance?
If it is just a single person private instance, relatively cheap (like a few USD). As you scale it up though it does quickly get pricey. I think mine is around 20-25ish/mo plus 4/mo for backups. I know some of the bigger instances are closer to 50-100/mo and it’s only going up as their users go up.
If donations work, it maybe a good way to finance it. Does it require loads of work and moderation? Or is it easy
Donations seem to be plan for instances in the fediverse, I’ve heard of some other efforts to monetize instances either through advertising or subscriptions but apparently those instance were quickly defederated with.
There was a bit of technical work to stand up my own instance but developers are working on making setting up an instance easier. I haven’t had to moderate anything on my instance yet as it is <10 users at the moment but it is definitely something you have to keep in mind as your instance grows.
Defederated means isolated more or less? Good luck with your instance!
I use https://1984.hosting (for privacy) to run my instance on a VPS. I’m using 1 core 2GB RAM VPS and that costs 10 dollars a month. So far everything looks to be running pretty well.
There probably are cheaper VPS providers as well, so you likely will be able to go cheaper.
And how many users can that host? With that price there maybe not really a need to actually run ads. What work is involved with running an instance?
Why do we want a single instance to be as large as reddit?
narrator: We don’t.
Ads? Hard pass.
I’d rather set up my own server and federate.
You should set up your own server no matter what happens. That’s my plan.
sorry, I block all ads by default. if I get popups indicating that I need to whitelist, I block elements until I never see that crap again or the site is unusable, after which I find a different site.
no ads. never
Preach!
Before the internet (yes, I’m old), it seemed like there was broad opposition to advertising in general. Some eschewed television altogether, while others stuck to pbs and public access only (believe it or not, back then public tv had no ads!). With the rise of the dotcoms came a simultaneous resurgence of the false notion that advertising is essential to “capitalism”, by which people really meant " entrepreneurship". Now so many people are ready to accept advertising, believing that we can’t have good things without it.
I will never accept advertising as a necessary evil. It is just evil.
I’m there with ya, internet was available to me in ~94 when I was 15. it sure was a simpler time all around - I grew up running around in the forest, barefoot, floating rivers on inner tubes.
I dont hate advertisements - but I’ll do everything in my power to avoid viewing them
Nothing stops them from doing so.
But I don’t think that’s the path you’ll see super often. Most people enthusiast enough to host their own instance and open it to others probably disagree with ads, and users are very likely going to reject them.
Plus, wether we like it or not, Lemmy is majoritarily used by people with a lot of tech knowledge - the exact same group you’d expect to be running ad blocking software.
But if federated social networks keep growing to the point they could rival a platform like Reddit, for sure some ad supported instances will coexist with user-funded ones.
I’d like the idea of certain instances becoming so large that it attracts the larger populous and becomes one of the major platforms. That is if it remains to be open source and federated.
(Edit: or just a community)
Why is background crypto mining not used? If it’s openly communicated and is an opt-in option, people might prefer that over donation or ads.
I would much rather traditional ads than crypto mining. I don’t want Kbin or Lemmy to become environmentally unfriendly electricity sinks.
I consider stuff like that malware.
Why not just skip the step and instead ask people to join a mining pool instead of what some people to be malicious utilization of their machines.
Crypto mining has a lot of negative conotations, and for good reason. The whole crypto ecosystem is full of scammers and bad actors. And ad supported websites only have incentive to monetize more and more until they are ad infested and can only be used with an ad blocker. That’s the state of a lot of the web today. Plus most big ad networks come with user tracking baked in which is another downside.
I’d rather have a nominal subscription model just to cover costs rather than see an ad anywhere. The cost of hosting per user can’t be much more than a dollar or two per month. Web hosting isn’t all that expensive nowadays.
I’m probably just being idealist of whatever but personally I really hope it doesn’t. I don’t really like the idea of one instance getting so big that it has the ability to disrupt all the other ones, I’d much prefer in was all just little niche servers run by people who are passionate about the subject, even if it’s not making them any money.
But probably it’ll all just eventually conglomerate into one big thing and then turn rotten and we’ll all have to find something else, because that always seems to be the way it goes. But these are the wild west days for this platform, enjoy it while it lasts!
But that’s the beauty of ActivityPub. You can always just fork the code yourself and start a new project that could federate with Kbin and Lemmy.
Ad paragraph 2: The beauty is that you do not have to only enjoy it while it lasts. FLOSS cannot end in this way. As already explained by @saucyloggins@lemmy.world, if this all just conglomerates to a centralized and rotten state, you simply create another instance and federate exclusively with those instances that are not rotten. Maybe only with the smaller instances that, for example, focus on a topic you find interesting.
You do not even have to fork and maintain anything. You simply use the SW as is, but without having to deal with the aspects that you find problematic (centralization on a few large instances and rotten admins, etc.).
I’d probably be fine with Old-Style Internet Ads: A Div that displays a bit of text or a small image that suggests an interesting product for the user, possibly related to the page content they’re viewing.
But new style internet ads demand things like iframes, numerous scripts, user tracking, user anti-tracking circumvention, and attempts to weasel their way out of the small sidebar they’ve been scripted into. If there was any way for an advertising network to ban/blacklist any advertisers that do things like that, or even offer them a limited model for what they can add to a page, I’d be a little more okay with them.
Who’s going to see them when everyone here uses adblocks and VPNs? Who’s gonna click on them when everyone here is a world-wary anti-consumer? Who’s going to buy anything when everyone here knows very well what they want and where to get it?
Finding advertisers, billing advertisers, and collecting from advertisers is all work you can avoid of your users just give you money.
I’m talking about the possibility of it growing and reaching the larger populous. They do not have adblockers. They will therefore finance the instance. Not for profit, but for sustainability. But even now, there are people here who do not mind small and non-intrusive ads if it’s for a non-profit instance. Not everyone here, even now, is a world-wary anti-consumer, whatever that is.
On internet advertising I am an absolutist: ONE ad and I’m out of here forever. Done and done.
Possibly OP doesn’t understand the implications of internet ads. The two way nature of the internet will be impossible to resist “just a little feedback” and were back with trackers etc.
Ads on print magazines, thoigh they often got thick, are tolerable. They’re obvious (or can be mandated to be so). The feedback is from sales or contact; net ads attempt to be “attention based” and are inherently tracking.
JPEG ads would seem ok, in theory, but even there, they track – the image fetch back to the host tracks your browser id and here we are back to tracking.
No ads.
I Psy 5 bucks/mo to this and a mastodon instance I use. I’m glad to pay for NO ADS.
The cliche “of you’re not paying you’re the product” is too simple. But it’s not entirely wrong.
SUPPORT YOUR HOSTS WITH CASH MONEY!
I’m gone if there is ads even though I’d block them. I’m sick of ads. They have ruined the internet .
If they add a gold like feature that splits between the instance and the project that would be useful in addition to community donations.
I’m here because its not like the rest of the internet. I run tor relays to help the network, I contribute to foss projects and I seed distros too for the greater good. There is enough of us here to keep it going.
I’ve been chipping in for my mastodon server for over a year. The admin there posts the finances so we all know when it’s time to kick in again, but if we went to a paid rather than donated set-up, then I’d be OK with that. If my admin decided that he needed to run ads that were like printed newspaper ads then I wouldn’t mind so much. But ads that track me, ads that change size, ads that show up and block some or all of the screen, ads that play video and audio, pretend to be content etc are the ads I dislike and I would flee.
Couldn’t agree more.
There should be somewhere a constitution in the federation within which advertisements are banned. Completely.
undefined> If they add a gold like feature that splits between the instance and the project that would be useful in addition to community donations.
This seems like the best solution, IMO.
I’d rather have a smaller/cheaper platform with no ads than a bloated mess like reddit with ads and data mining.
A small community is perfectly ok.
The point of the fediverse is that hosts can pick their own business model - free, freemium, ad-supported, subscription. Just like e-mail, you sign up with the provider who provides the type of service you think best meets your needs. If they piss you off, you move to a different provider.
If the fediverse demands hosting for millions of users, someone will make a server to host millions.
I personally think “big” instances should focus on user/identity management, while communities live in small groups on small instances. This lets the identity providers include/exclude with much better granularity (compared to the beehaw mess) making the communities much less susceptible to being collateral damage.
