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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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.
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.
What happens to your account on a federated server if that one fails though?
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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It’s literally all donated
Really, the only direct cost of lemmy is the development. That’s the beauty of lemmy’s decentralized nature, the cost of actually running it is spread out among tech hobbyists with spare hardware and time (edit: and only ~$30/year or less for a domain name), or may even have some money to throw at new hardware. For most people, the connectivity doesn’t incur any additional cost to whatever they’re already paying for internet access.
There are plenty of free and excellent open source projects that neither charge money or generate profits, they’re driven by passionate developers who give their and talent for the enjoyment of it and betterment of the community.
___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.
You bring up a very good point. Currently lemmy.ml has thousands of users. Lemmy.world has thousands of users. The hardware they have selected to run their instances is adequate for now, but, what is the plan for scaling out if the user base grows? Is there one? They have a donation page on each lemmy instance (click or tap the heart icon,) but that can’t be enough to pay for the cost of running something used by millions of people, even if only 100s of thousands are ever only online at any given time.
In terms of UI/UX, @dessalines@lemmy.ml has mentioned in a post they are currently working on major performance improvements and enhancements.
Ideally, I think no one instance should have a million users to begin with.
Ideally, yes. If that can be the reality, and I suppose that is how it should would with federation, then server costs should never get out of hand.
For that to happen, I believe that interacting with people from other instances and moving your community and account from one instance to another have to become possible / easier.
At present, people flock to the instances with most users as those often have more local content (local content is generally easier to find than federated content) and they often have a smaller risk of shutting down. If I create a community on a smaller instance, the chance of it being found and interacted with are also much smaller than if it had been created on a bigger instance (because of, as I said, local content being user to find).
Sure, I can create an account on myfirstlemmyinstance.com (example URL, not an actual instance) with 10 users, but if my instance decides to shut down, my community of, say, 500 users will now have to move somewhere else and all old content will be deleted.
Idk for everyone else, but when I was on reddit once I had set up the subreddits I wanted to see, I really spent 99% on my time on just those. Every so often I would leave or join subreddits but it was rare. Like if people are not doing searches as often then the lag is more tolerable. Plus, won’t content from larger and older instances be indexed by search engines eventually? Right now because so many communities are being created on so many different instances, it’s more obvious that the searching is laggy but things will surely settle down as time passes.
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.
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.
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.
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 $10/year?
Check tld-list.com for price comparisons of different domain providers.
sell checkmarks like Tumbler.
for x$ 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?
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
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.
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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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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.
This is a great idea.
edit: misposted comment - see bizarre explanation below (and it’s not just me)
- westworld - lovely visuals
- alias - excellent theme music
- bojack horseman
What lol
