I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
That’s like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.
I haven’t seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.
Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don’t speak up, I would conclude we don’t have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?
Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.
I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.
We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.
Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.
Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.
Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.
- mastodon.technology shutdown because the admin ran out of bandwidth (family member was dying)
- mastodon.lol shutdown because the admin ran out of patience (some kind of nauseating fedi admin drama)
- switter shutdown because it didn’t have the legal means to comply with new online safety regulations that were being passed
- ownership of pawoo.net changed hands, twice! the first 2 owners figured it wasn’t sustainable financially to keep it online.
Point where I said we should run ads
I didn’t care so much about specific wordings but answered to the gist of it. Yes, I cannot strictly quote you on that, but so what?
“Many are opposed to ads” gave the impression it would be worth considering to have ads.
Anyways, that’s like the least interesting angle, to discuss what specific words you used.
Before we revert to ads surly we try medals. Set a standard price on each. Then when a comment/post recieves such a thing divide that reward between user, user instance, post user, post instance, community, and community instace. That way servers, admins, and high quality content creators all have an incentive. It could theoreticaly be weigted however wanted. Only issue I see is it would need some sot of blockchain to ensure no fuckery goes on.
The “financial aspect” is much smaller than you seem to think.
It is not that expensive to run a server, and there are lots of people willing to contribute. You can look at the previously posted expenses and donations information from the lemmy.world admins.
You might be telling yourself these things are difficult and expensive because you don’t know, and precaution leads you to overestimate the actual costs and difficulty. That is fine when you’re making choices for yourself, but it reliably produces incorrect results if you try to apply it to the world at large. In reality, there are lots of people out here who know how to run Internet services; and some of them have set this one up pretty well.
(note: I am a social democratic capitalist, don’t take this as an anti-capitalist rant)
Ever wonder why capitalistic IT is so expensive?
It’s not because of the cost of developers, hardware or internet, even though those things are not cheap.
It’s mainly because companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft make insanely huge profits and those profits must come from revenue. And to ensure they don’t lose market share, they overspend an insane amount on hiring armies of the best developers, most of whom aren’t doing much productive work, but are paid hefty salaries.
And they also have complex internal politics, manager layers, architects, and a whole lot of highly paid people working alongside the developers and slowing them down.
So the parent is totally right. Hosting something like Lemmy and developing it isn’t that expensive, especially because it runs on a lot of volunteer time and doesn’t have a lot of fluff around it.
And also, they aren’t spending armies of developers and UX engineers to analyze and maximize the number of hours you spend on Lemmy. Or to maximize ad revenue. Or to implement DRM. Or to think of a premium offer and then develop a two tiered experience.
Once you get rid of all the capitalistic fluff, most of the basics we need are surprisingly cheap and easy to develop and run.
I do believe people should make it a regular practice to pay for the software they like and use. So donate here and there.
But if you are ever in doubt, just look at the sheer number of Linux distros built and maintained by volunteers.
I’d suggest the “complex internal politics, manager layers, architects” – and the fancy offices, cafeterias, and other amenities – are actually quite a lot more expensive than the developers.
But don’t underestimate ads, and things that are similar to ads. In competitive markets, ads are really expensive, because ads are rivalrous. Venture A has to outbid Venture B for ad placement. The same sort of logic goes for hiring, especially hiring of trend-driven fields like project management. (“I’m a Scrum Master, who are you, a scum master?”)
I agree.
In terms of things that make capitalistic IT expensive, #1 would be the profit extracted by shareholders (either directly or through licensing schemes) , #2 would be the layer of highly paid “very important people” and then #3 would be developer cost.
One note: It’s pretty rare for tech companies to directly issue profits to shareholders (i.e. as dividends). Rather, profits are usually reinvested into expanding the company; and shareholders make money by selling shares that have risen in value.
Eh… Tech companies do some of the biggest stock buybacks, which is a transfer of profits to shareholders.
But yes, they also reinvest money.
I don’t know yet there have been several instances that shut down do to finances. Tell me how does something shut down due to finances if it’s not costly for the person? The Fediverse is also much larger than Lemmy.
In August, total expenses = €1205, total donations = €2649
People want this thing to work and are willing to donate to make it happen. And again, it’s not as expensive to run as you seem to think.
This is ONE instance. Search or make a post and ask how many instances have shut down due to finances. Outside of finances it’s burnout due to moderation.
Could you explain in detail how you, personally, are helping?
Or, more generally, on what basis do you think you know better?
I think “shut down due to finances” really means “it was too much work to organize this, collect donations and run a production website” or “my site was too niche to attract users and i didn’t want to put the effort in”.
There’s enough instances with public finances, to show that it’s a solvable problem.
Does it matter? What if I start 24 instances tomorrow and shut them all down by friday? Does that really have an impact on sustainability? Conversely them pointing to lemmy.world is a prime example of exactly how it is sustainable. As long as one instance remains running it is sustaining. Other instances may come and go and that’s sad and all. But it’s pretty affordable by most metrics
It does matter if people are on your instance, just say you don’t care about others. Several instances have shutdown without warning and people lost their accounts. It matters because people matters. We should also want good experiences. Stating that people will get over it and find a new instance and make new posting history is selfish af
Untold email servers have shut down and people have lost their accounts there. But email seems pretty sustainable still. So that doesn’t seem like a good metric either.
For context lemmy.ca runs on $125/cdn month and could be downsized still, we’ve overspecced for the load we get today. We could probably cut that in half.
At the end of the day, there are three ways to finance a server.
- The server owners do it, by paying from their own pockets. Only viable as long as the server is small and the owners are deeply concerned with the success of the server.
- A third party does it by sponsorship, advertisement, etc. Bad idea as they will eventually want to meddle with your content - astroturfing, selective enforcement of rules, etc.
- The userbase does it by donations, membership, etc. Frankly I think that it’s the most reasonable solution.
OP raised the concern that most people won’t donate. Does it really matter? I don’t think so; what matters is the total amount being donated, not who does it. If it is a concern, perhaps a subscription model could work, too, but the instance would need to show some service beyond what you’d expect from a Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin/etc. instance.
I’m from the belief that “ethical ads” are a trap. 90% won’t be ethical, and the 10% left won’t pay you much. That’s how the cookie crumbles.
Another concern that I see is moderation, as it’s part of what makes an instance viable or not. The old Reddit model (let users moderate users) is surprisingly good in this aspect, as it allows the server owners to only address server-wide issues, but IMO it needs to be improved on (for example, letting admins and mods recruit users for specific tasks - e.g. I might trust someone to remove content, but perhaps not to ban users).
I agree with everything you’ve said. I think option 3 is the best and most reasonable option. A Freemium model makes the most sense.
Servers aren’t free though. So you’re going to get people who do it as a passion project and hope they have the tools to moderate their own instance or a small team of volunteers to help which is dependent on unpaid labor.
There needs to be money behind any stability.
Exactly! Judging by the downvotes already people don’t agree. It’s bothersome to let people’s hard work on multiple levels to go undervalued. Servers absolutely aren’t free. Moderation is a heck of a job.
I’ve wondered a lot about this.
Ultimately, I think we’re going to need to compensate the devs, mods and contributors if we want this to succeed long term.
How to do that with a group that is (understandably) allergic to ads is another question.
Wikipedia does it just fine, I’d argue they’re a pretty good comparison with similar overhead - developers, moderators, infrastructure. (Except obviously they’re a single org, rather than distributed.)
Wikipedia is also a registered charity, has a $100,000,000 endowment and receives substantial funding from philanthropic foundations and tech giants.
Personally, I don’t think that’s a particularly realistic approach/funding model for Lemmy.
How was it done in the past? Forums? BBSes? Fidonet?
On the other hand I think the way they do a donations drive every year is a good idea and probably works well. The Fedi could benefit from that I’d bet.
The Fedi could absolutely benefit from something like that!
I wonder if we could coordinate and plan a day/weekend (sometime when we expect a large number of users) where folks have memes about donating, encourages people to, devs tell us about their needs/plans etc…
At the same time and just to pump the brakes a little, I work in charitable giving and for at least our organization, while we do mass donor drives, those are mostly about engagement as the real money comes from high level donors. That being said, our potential donor population and strengths are probably very different.
Well yeah, compare us to 20 years of wikipedia and of course there’s going to be a massive difference. I’m not saying we’re going to follow them, but they are an example of success in this area.
Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004 when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. Server downtime in 2003 led to the first fundraising drive.
It’s also an explicitly philanthropic venture with a noble mission about being the source of human knowledge.
I love our memes but they aren’t quite the same.
Wikipedia received almost 400k in 2005 and more than 1.5 million in donations by 2006.
For what it’s worth, a lot of instances are funding just like wikipedia did but if we want to expand with full-time devs, moderators etc (which is what I think we’ll need for long term sustainability) I just don’t think wikipedia’s success is a particularly reasonable comparison.
Oh, it is absolutely understandable when it comes to the ads part. But there are other ways. Plus, there are ethical ads and Open Source ad companies, maybe that’s something to look into. I just know we need to explore ethical options and not just rely on donations.
Yup. I wonder how much transparency and a self sustaining model (vs maximize profits) could bring down costs to even make it a subscribe free but with ethical ads or something.
It’s tough. We want to walk the line between accessible for everyone vs thing that crashes and relies pretty heavily on a handful of posters and an even smaller number of mods.
You could test out your idea by spinning up an instance that offers curated ads, or probably better yet go entirely ad-free and have a subscription service. Some people may be interested in sustainability, especially if you speak in a language that resonates with them, like explain the value-added benefits of being on a sustainable server vs. a “free” one. e.g. the devs get a salary there and also contribute to the overall Lemmy codebase, beyond that instance so that it benefits the entire Fediverse. But it would be up to you to be the change that you want to see in the world, and make it happen. Also, I am guessing those kinds of discussions won’t happen so much on the Fediverse itself, but rather in Matrix or Discord (or Slack?) servers were the actual developers of the Fediverse hang out.
Yes, there’s the Matrix spaces and ActivityPub forum where these types of conversations are had, but the masses don’t know about them and or aren’t involved. I like getting the people that will be directly impacted opinion. I don’t care about ads, it was a post to explore options. You bring up very good points and I appreciate that.
My thoughts:
- I think this is ultimately about growth. The Fedi can survive in its current DIY donations based form, but growth, seems less likely I agree. This growth need not be crazy, I’m talking about normal healthy growth.
- The issue, as you say, isn’t just server costs, it’s giving the people who do the work a helping hand to live and be rewarded. It’s the sustainability of the admins and moderators where burn out is a real problem.
- There’s also a bit of a privilege problem too I’d guess where underprivileged people are naturally pushed out of admin work because they just can’t afford to do it. I think it’d be culturally nice if that weren’t the case.
- so in a way a question here is whether admins and moderators should at least in some instances get some form of salary. I think that’s an interesting idea, and that the Fedi would certainly benefit from having people dedicated on a more full time basis to making things good.
Being all that, my general take is that for the Fedi to grow it has two major cultural issues it needs to address:
- The lack of software collaboration and reusable and composable software
- The aversive relationship with money, as you say. You can’t deny the existence of the capitalistic world outside, and doing so, no matter your values, will I bet ultimately come with some trade offs that maybe aren’t worth it and maybe more will not want.
I appreciate your reasoned response and approach. I’m not denying the harms of capitalism but let’s be honest here we all benefit and we all participate. We buy clothes, shoes, games, etc everyday people here against capitalism participate by buying goods that are leisure. So, why then to suggest options outside of donations is terrible? Admins/mods put in a great deal of work that shouldn’t just be left up to donations. Sure, money can make things get ugly but if one truly believes in the ethos of this place then we can trust it would be handled correctly.
Sorry, I’m a little confused, I didn’t suggest options outside of donations are terrible.
To quote myself (amongst other statements in my post)
The issue, as you say, isn’t just server costs, it’s giving the people who do the work a helping hand to live and be rewarded. It’s the sustainability of the admins and moderators where burn out is a real problem.
I guess most instances are going to ask members a small yearly contribution, like 10$ per year or something. That could make the servers more sustainable
Totally out of a blue idea. Probably stupid but… what if there was a system which shows the community in real time how much money is needed/dev,mod,hoster time is worth, and people “top up the jar”. No mystery of „they’re probably already been donated enough”. We’d see how much is needed. Probably would need to have a bit of trust to the receivers not to abuse it but… idk just random thought lol
I know that those that use Open Collective it does something like this, but you have to be approved
I’ve never run a server, so I can’t really say much about how sustainable it is to do it right now, but ultimately I don’t see why it should be able less sustainable than running any other popular website.
Granted, I think you’re totally right that there’s a generally unsustainable attitude that’s pervasive on the fediverse and the open source community in general, which amounts to a sentiment that “someone else will pay for all this”. It’s wrong, it’s naive, it’s unhelpful, and it’s basically an express lane towards the tragedy of the commons. I’ve worked for non-profits and I’ve seen first hand how difficult it can be to turn users into supporters, but the sad truth is that non-profits are just like businesses in the sense that if costs are higher than revenue they will not survive very long, and this is true for community run fediverse services too.
I do think that people who like the fediverse should want it to become financially sustainable, at the very least.
I’m open to the idea of limited, non-invasive ads for example. (Plus I think that if the fediverse ever becomes massively popular we’re going to see thinly veiled ads anyway, in the form of “influencers” and “sponsored content”. That’s inevitable, and honestly probably even worse that straight-forward ads.) I would not leave my Kbin.social or my current Mastodon instance if there were a small number of ads.
Also I could be wrong on this but IIRC, Misskey supports user data storage quotas that can be expanded for a price. And I think that’s potentially a smart and sustainable method of getting those people who make heavy use of their server to chip in a little bit. If someone wants to post a lot of images, audio and video to their Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, etc., instance then I think it’s reasonable to expect them to cover some small fraction of the hosting cost by becoming a paying member or paying for a server-level storage plan.
Honestly even if the Fediverse is mainly run by corporations, that is still 100x better than the non-fediverse. Mainly because the direct and immediate competition from other instances will keep them in check. You can’t pull shit like Reddit, when users could immediately leave and get an almost perfect substitute. And I believe there will always be a substantial amount of crowd or privately funded “community instances”, whose major goal is just good social media.
I can understand. I just would prefer the more indie aspect remain in control of the people. That admins and mods can be compensated for their hard work and for costs/fees
I’ll tell you what will make it unsustainable, getting banned “disagreeing” for criticizing and questioning the Terms of Service: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit
Good thing you already put just “Disagreeing” in quotes.
Wow, what the heck. I’m sorry that happened to you. Obviously, admins/mods are within their rights to enforce their rules however but it shouldn’t be in such a way. I hope you find a better experience elsewhere.
Hmm. Does this mean that it’s expensive to run this whole Fediverse thing and that the money is running out?
It means that many servers have shutdown due to costs. That there will be more users due to Twitters incompetence a due to platforms adopting ActivityPub down the line. This will have significant strain on resources, remaining with only a donation option is dangerous
