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?
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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I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to ‘award’ posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.
Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.
Honestly I would hate that, but if that’s what keeps the lights on then I’ll deal with it. I would prefer to move to an anonymous donation model like Wikipedia but I’m skeptical that will work.
Why would it have to be blockchain? Plus like the other commenter said, that provides incentive to bot comments and such. Donation based stuff works fine.
Blockchain has been used previously (see dogetipbot) in a similar concept and worked well.
Since tips would be given at the discretion of users finding certain comments particularly good, a bot would only be able to abuse the system by creating good comments.
I have seen of many instances not being funded sufficiently through donations. If the level of user donations is able to cover only 50% of operation costs for an instance, if monthly upkeep is say $60, then it is reasonable for an owner to subsidize the rest. But, as lemmy (and consequently each community) grows in popularity, a 50% coverage of operational costs is simply not sustainable. That is, without a tactic such as Wikipedia’s notorious pity-ware ad banners.
Providing an alternative method of funding could assist instance owners to keep the community running.
Sounds good as long as it doesn’t provide an incentive to pay for posts or comments to rise to visibility because then there’ll just be advertising everywhere
Yes I agree.
One alternative is something similar to awards on reddit. However one could argue that it would impact the visibility of awarded posts by making them more ‘eye-catching’. The only way such a system would not impact post/comment visibility is if it is a private transfer of value.
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.
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.
It’s literally all donated
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.
We can setup some sort of raffles. $5 donation for entry, winner(s) gets a $100 (or higher depending on participation) giftcard of their choice.
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.
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)
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@cwagner @psylancer Also the fediverse in general having easier ways to self-host at home or on a VPS, which helps distribute costs/storage/bandwidth.
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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.
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.
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 don’t get it. Why would you call that more efficient? In your example a profit driven company will grow at a higher rate than a FOSS project right ? So in what way is it more efficient?
Yeah your issue is youre looking it from the perspective of a cancer cell. Growth isnt always good. Too much growth and you run out of resources. Keeping things sustainable and self sufficient and not reliant on loans and “infinite growth” ponzi economics tends to work better in the long run. (Example: libraries)
Honestly I thought they meant resource efficient, cause we don’t need to track the users every swipe (plus another million fingerprinting methods), which saves a heck load of clocks. There’s also almost no per user saved data minus the most basic subscriptions, so everything just runs better
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.
Very well put
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.
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.
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.
Then you need a new account I think. It’s a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol I think (but I haven’t done any reading). Your identity is tied to the instance it was created on.
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.
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.
Idk what he’s referring to, but wikimedia funds the operating costs of Wikipedia as well as the salaries etc of those that work to keep the site running.
They have been criticised for bloat, but the site itself is entirely dependent upon donations.
WP has a story that sums it up nicely: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/
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
Basically, volunteer code commits, volunteer admins, and donations for hosting costs.
Fosstodon is a pretty great example. It’s a fairly large mastodon instance which makes enough in donation revenue to pass some on to other open source projects. It’s not heaps ($600 in 2021), but I think it demonstrates that donations are a viable funding model. If things got tight I expect the community would meet the challenge.
It’s not like you need to build a custom data centre - it’s just renting a server, maybe even a VPS.
That said, of course the admins and mods are volunteers. I’d like to imagine that one day a few lemmy instances could charge a subscription fee for a premium, well managed experience.
Yeah exactly. If my instance stickies a post asking for donations, I’d throw them a couple bucks. No doubt
I think the idea is that many people can run lemmy servers so the load is split between everyone hosting them.
I’m running my own instance, so I’m doing my part!
The cost will be spread out, and people can monetize how they see fit. I’m wondering if there will be additional benefits you can add to your instance for a charge that people might be willing to pay.
I’m considering offering an Element server and maybe email on mine with a shared username for each service. That’s going to take time to setup, though.
We must prove that it’s valued and let the monetization come later. I’m working on this in my spare time. Once I can grow, maybe I can put more effort into it. I think it’ll be a lot of people like me for a while financing it out of pocket.
There already is a question similar to this. You can find lots of ideas there :)
