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.
But it’s sustainable if it’s non profit.
Most third party Reddit users were happy to pay in the range of $5 a month. The reason everything is shutting down now is because they don’t just want to break even, they want profit, and a shit ton at that.
The fediverse makes social media non-profit by default which means that we can all share the cost.
Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in the world and is still non-profit. It shows that it’s sustainable.
Exactly right. I never had a problem with Reddit wanting to make money for their services. If you give me exactly what I want, I will pay.
But even non-profits have costs that they need to cover somehow. If they don’t, they’re still not sustainable.
You ask for donations. I’m donating to my instance for instance.
If something is free then 99% of users won’t spend a penny. Anyone who ever did any business knows that. You either make 1% pay for everyone (just like “free” games on mobile phones do), force everyone into subscription or sell your users to advertisers. Choose your poison.
That’s sustainable for now, because instances are microscope. If at some point in time we expect lemmy to become a mainstream platform for communication with tens or hundreds of millions of users in their respective communities. It will become unsustainable long long before then IMHO (I’m happy to be wrong only time will tell)
The cost/user for Lemmy instances is through the roof, and the grand majority of people will not be willing to make donations. Perhaps awards like what Reddit did is a good option?
What about longevity. Who is going to pay for the storage for the hundreds of petabytes of storage for comment and media history? What about replication between instances? Do you have a retention period and delete history, losing knowledge to time?
I worry :/
Edit:
Maybe I worry too much, but now after Reddit maybe I’m just gunshy and am afraid of finding and contributing to new communities that end up being wiped due to sustainability issues.
I hope this problem gets solved, or worked around in some capacity.
Non-profit organizations still take in money to pay for their expenses. That doesn’t negate their non-profit status.
I think this is something that’s hard to organize with our current economic system, but very much worth experimenting with.
The neat thing is we can try any concept we can dream up and federate. People can run through funding concepts and structures and failure isn’t all that bad.
Im still wrapping my head around the concept but FOR EXAMPLE could someone create an instance that requires a subscription fee, link it to their own app (like a retooled RIF) and offer a curated and managed experience?
Vs
Join a free instance, use what free software you want and have to figure out the nuts and bolts yourself?
Each federated instance can have their own requirements for signing up, so they should be able to.
Oh then thats absolutely where I see Lemmy going if its a success. Give it 10 years and people will know their app or their managed instance and have no clue what Lemmy is.
In the root comment or the one that started this I mentioned a downside. Fast iterating paid instances can gain from larger federated instances without returning value. There needs to be a method to share bandwidth, processor time, and/or value.
The great bit is we’re all now part of this expirament!
It’s not hard at all. Tons of organizations and websites exist purely from the money collected from members and donors.