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.
The big difference with Lemmy is that it’s not really a service, it’s a open protocol and standard, like email, or http. The service itself is provided by distributed instances that adhere to the protocol. Like those protocols, no one company has been able to get a monopoly on it. Some have taken over a lot of it, like Google with Gmail, or cloudflare, but if you don’t want to work with them there are a ton of other options you can go with, and you will not be locked out of the system if you do.
Reddit was a centralized closed source system so if you don’t have a Reddit account then you are locked out of the system completely.
Lemmy is decentralized so no one instance has or can gain a monopoly. If you want to break ties with one instance you can just switch to another one and still participate with it and the rest of the fediverse.
Not only does that give you choice in a worst case scenario, it also keeps all the instances on their toes because they don’t have dictatorial control over their users.
Spez’s fatal miscalculation was that he thought he had user lock in, but unlike other social networks where it’s your only option to keep in contact with your real life friends, or it’s the only platform your favorite creator posts on, they had neither. Almost all accounts were not connected to your real life and posts were mostly links to other platforms. Very few creators had Reddit as their sole posting platform. The interactions were ephemeral and superficial. Dropping Reddit was the easiest service I ever had to drop.
This is a great analogy. It would be like asking what happens when someone tries to monetize email.
All the users would jump ship to another one immediately.
Most email providers are monetized. For most providers you either pay a subscription or they inject ads. The important thing is if they get to greedy and start providing a bad service you can switch providers.
Email services are monetizable, but email itself cannot because it’s not a tangible thing, it’s an idea and agreement to follow that idea.
Oh, I guess I’ve never noticed lol. Does Gmail have ads?
Yup! But they put them in the promotions tab so they kinda blend in with promotional emails and they’re presented very natively. The only way you can tell the difference is a little ad symbol.
They can’t over exploit their users because users have choice. Back when Gmail first came out there was a rush between companies to provide the most storage and features and that’s because email being an open standard inherently encourages competition!
I’m fairly certain ads in google search are affected by email content.
The Android app does, at least in some sections (“Social”, f.e.)
The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.
Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.
As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it’s very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.
Yep. I don’t get why it is so hard for people to understand that non-profits CAN sustain themselves from donations. There’s so much brainwashing and gaslighting by corporations going on that people start to question everything outside of the ultra-capitalist system, even the most basic and genuinely nice human interactions are doubted
Yeah it’s weird, there’s plenty of examples of what people would consider “profitable” non-profits: For example Mozilla Thunderbird pulled US$6 million last year in donations alone, with the average donation being US$21, I think.
Mastodon, another non-profit, while not quite as lucrative, pulls in around £24,000 a month on Patreon donations alone, not counting any outside sponsors or Open Collective donations, and so on.
Build value, and people will happily support you.
However if reddit decided they want to plug the leak, if they offered $1 million to the admins of sh.it.just.works and lemmy.world and beehaw, if they accepted, reddit could then defederate the three largest instances from everywhere and Lemmy would basically have to start from the ground up again. A lot of users would probably not bother making an account elsewhere as they may feel it not worth it since it could happen again.
Lemmy wouldn’t have to start from the ground up. They would already have all the source code and instances, a potential userbase who was already convinced not to let these people control their social networks, who already have the frontend installed on their devices, is already used to the interface and features of the app. Even if Spez were to do this, other instances would be built and in the long run it would be a financial hole.
Brave of you thinking that I don’t have multiple Fediverse accounts. Buying those instances would be worthless, since users would just migrate to a different instance, even easier than moving from Reddit.
Another possibility is that a big corporate will dedicate a dev team to make their own FOSS fork of the Lemmy codebase that, due to its rich feature set and support, becomes THE version of Lemmy to use. Kinda like Meta and React (though React was originally fully internal to Meta, you get the point). Of all the big companies to do this kind of thing, Meta would be the best, imo, given how they’ve been with their AI models and React, but I still don’t like the idea given what we’ve seen happen with Red Hat.
Wikipedia is probably the most important thing on the internet fight now. It also needs some amount of servers, many crawlers scan it daily, I assume its a shitton of users and logins and API hits and what not. And still it survives on donations alone.
Eventually lemmy is not a streaming services with videos and and a lot of bandwidth. Its just text and people connecting. So I assume you dont need massive servers and shit.
With that said, I’d encourage everyone to sign up to donate a dollar a month to your Mastodon and Lemmy instance. To me, a couple of bucks a month is worth it to not have to fight against a dumb algorithm or deal with ads.
I wonder how similar Lemmy is to Wikipedia in terms of storage/bandwith requirements? It’s text and pictures in both cases, but there may be nuances that i’m not aware of as a noob
One big difference right now is that it’s a ton of small people donating their time and servers for this. So the costs aren’t as centralized and are spread over many people.
I saw a thread of instance owners talking about why they host, and some actually get free server usage through their work or run servers already and Lemmy only uses a small portion of that.
Wikipedia’s page serves simple. The documents get edited and processed into html when submitted.
Lemmy dynamically builds the html for every single http get.
That’s a very different cost for a server.
Umm, no? Lemmy UI is a PWA/SPA and all the html “building” happens in your browser.
It doesn’t really matter that much if the Lemmy protocol itself doesn’t build the html - there is still a process that involves multiple steps that may or may not be server side in order to build the comment trees that we see.
There’s a node, yea! Oh hey… that node has children! Awesome! All of those exclamation points are either server side or client side lookups. Hurray! Oh look it’s a wikiepedia article. No exclamation point lookups allowed.
This is the only way to monetize and the best way
Depends how successful we are in fending off Zuck from trying to muscle his way in. That’s probably the first challenge.
Otherwise this is a non-issue, as there will simply always be both kinds. Nothing is stopping you from simply Self-Hosting your own Lemmy server.
I’m lazy. Checkmate!
For real though, lots of money is a great motivator.
Yes, which is why you should pick your server with care. If you do not pick one that suits your desires, that is on you.
This will not be as effortless as reddit any time soon, so if that is your goal, you may prefer it over there.
Nope, no way I’m going back. However, I’m still fairly new so I haven’t really “researched” which instances I should be joining. Except for lemmynsfw…for obvious reasons. LOL
If they want to crate a Lemmy instance so badly, why don’t they? It’s open source, everyone can host an instance if they want to.
The only thing I can imagine is that they’re restricted from monetizing it due to some rule of the license
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
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I think most people are assuming we’ll have the ability to fend off anything. All it’s going to take is Zuck creating a new fediverse-enabled platform and just giving everyone with an Instagram account access using their already existing accounts. We’ll be outnumbered by the millions.
We don’t need to become more successful than Meta in order to fend him off, so to speak. We merely need to still be here, and independent.
Realistically every instance can monetize in whatever way they see fit but I highly doubt this’ll be a thing. Mastodon is way bigger and more expensive than Lemmy and it runs just fine through donations. No reason why the same won’t work here.
Lemmy itself is also likely to follow in Mastodon’s path by getting money from sponsorships and fundraisers. See https://www.investopedia.com/how-mastodon-makes-money-7482865
Sponsors want something in return though, surely?
Just a shoutout on the main website or github. Not much else, they tip in to support the project.
This might work for now, but I’m skeptical how well this would work in the long run. Do those company pay a monthly fee to be there? What happens when there’s a hundred companies on that list? What happens if a company pays a substantial amount to be there and threatens to stop paying if xyz doesn’t happen?
Good to know!
Give it 15 years.
I’ve been online since 1990; 10-15 years seems to be the maximum time a community can live without shitting itself over greed or something new and better coming along to scoop up users.
That said, things like Usenet and IRC still technically exist… They’re just niche now. The way this shit works is more like those, so it will likely never fully disappear.
To be fair, there is a line between greed and monetization. Monetization can be simply to fund servers costs and labor. Especially as the community grows, it’s just going to get more and more expensive. I think a donation page or a toggle-able ads option (off by default) would be great ways for users to support the site to fund the costs without it being greedy. Both options could give some sort of donor badge as a thank you, because there’s no features involved with it so people don’t feel forced to donate/support.
I think the key really is transparency. I’m not going to throw money into a black hole and hope it does some good, but if there is some level of transparency showing running costs plus deficit/surplus towards those costs then I wouldn’t mind contributing.
Or, for the time being, this platform never takes off and reddit’s moat temporarily prevails. Eventually Reddit will die, but no one can predict when.
It will be interesting to see to what level the server traffic changes in Reddit. I was looking at a post last night (for was still kinda working if you weren’t logged in) and it was a lot of confused people wondering what all the fuss was about, very few people ppl against reddits actions, and it clicked, the majority of people against spez had just left once the apps stopped working.
I checked the user history of those defending Reddit, all very young accounts so I guess ppl who joined recently and only know the Reddit app are left, but the older users… Gone.
How many hobbiests running miniature train sets in their garage have monetized those train sets? How many backyard gardeners sell their crops.
In most cases people who choose to develop and administrate an instance of their own are largely just hobbiests of another type. Sure it costs them some money. Many hobbies cost money, it doesn’t stop people from building things or growing things for fun.
I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.
For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.
I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.
Exactly. Federation means no single instance needs to serve millions of users. If one gets too big and becomes too commercialized, you can move to a different one that shares your values. If large instances cost more per user as they scale up, we just need more instances.
I also think people are vastly overestimating the cost to serve users on Lemmy/kbin. Last time I calculated it, lemmy.world costs were around €0.01/mo per monthly active user. That can be maintained with 1% users donating €1 a month.
Yes, the concept of the Fediverse has so many inherent advantages over classical, corporate monolith social media that I hope that in the end, after all the desperate attempts of current sites (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) to finally become profitable have failed, it will lead to a freer and better Internet.
If I move to a different instance, what changes about my experience?
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if any corporation tries to get in on it, you can count on them trying to monetize it
considering the offers facebook were making, it wouldn’t be very surprising if some instances caved. It’s a good thing that anyone can make their own instance for that reason.
As soon as Lemmy instances are unsustainable out of pure interest for the concept of the Fediverse. I doubt there will be subscriptions, first it’ll be donations, and then some instances may have ads. It’s an inevitable that both will happen (either on the same instance, or some instances opting for donations to stay up, and others opting for ads to stay up). No one can run the servers necessary for this platform out of pure charity; the bill for the Fediverse is going to be due someday, and it has to be paid.
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.
But it’s sustainable if it’s non profit.
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!
I think this is something that’s hard to organize with our current economic system, but very much worth experimenting with.
It’s not hard at all. Tons of organizations and websites exist purely from the money collected from members and donors.
This is inevitable as well.
A user base as large as Reddit has an infra bill in the tens of millions. And that’s mature, with cost optimization at all levels to reduce compute, static content costs, more effective caching…etc
Lemmy instances are probably an order of magnitude more expensive to run on a per-user basis, at least.
This means the bill for the Lemmy fediverse if it had the active user base of reddit could be conceivably be near or over a collective $100mill/y with the majority of that just being a result of fragmented, high cost, infrastructure running a (at scale) low performance application.
That’s easy to fix. There’s a ton of new fediverse apps popping up. Just charge them an API fee.
You can’t do that, the fediverse and Lemmy software doesn’t work that way.
What about some sort of equity load balancing shenanigans? Small instances take on some load roughly equivalent to what they use from other instances or something. In another comment I was talking about funding instances and being able to rapidly iterate funding methods. One issue is they get value from the federation, so contributing all or some portion of what you use may be fitting.
Just… a reasonable one.
This is miles away from how the Fediverse works.
The cost will be spread out on an instance by instance basis due to which the cost per user will be low and if not they can also host their own instance which doesn’t cost a lot. If it’s something around $5 a month I wouldn’t mind paying to support a service I plan on using everyday.
That’s not how cost/user works. The cost/user actually goes UP the more small instances you have as a result of more expensive, smaller scale, and severely less optimized infrastructure. Infrastructure gets cheaper on a per-user basis as it consolidates, there are lots of technical reasons for this, but it can be summed up with scale (infra per “unit” is cheaper the more you can guarantee you’ll use, and LOTS of cost optimization paths open up the larger you get).
My point is that the community is going to hit a growth barrier, and that barrier is money and efficiency. Would you be willing to donate $5/m to 50-100 instances? Since to support that kind of scale they would need to whittle down to one instance per community for large communities, and massive communities (think 10-50 million users) might not even be able to exist with the current Lemmy hosting model. I wonder if even 1-5million user communities would even function without dedicated engineering to support the infrastructure and custom tools/services to make it work.
…etc
It’s a real problem. One that will be felt sooner than you might think, and one that will limit the growth, stability, and longevity of communities.
Tl;Dr: economies of scale are an economic reality. Lemmy will likely go like email, with large centralized private companies running the most popular servers.
Donations are already happening in the Fediverse. Lemmy,world is funded by donations to the Mastodon.world instance. Many Mastodon users donate to their instance. I give $3 per month to my instance (sfba.social). They put out a quarterly report breaking down how much cam in and went out.
I donate in order to have an ad-free experience. If the admins separate the finances of Lemmy.world and Mastodon.world I will donate here as well.
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As long as a company can’t outright buy the whole network or something like that, I don’t think it could get fucked over in the same way that something like twitter or tumblr can.
It’s already monetised. Just click on the links under Donations in the main sidebar or straight to the OpenCollective page for a glimpse. We pay for it with our money. That’s how we know we’re not the product.
Because there will always be rebels running small to medium size instances based off of donations. It was the very first thing to happen at the birth of the internet, and will continue to happen today. Will there be a few major instances that eat up the majority of the fedi? Yeah, probably, but the design of the fedi is that the experience of decentralized social media will stay the same regardless of what’s going on with instances of the network.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t go the way of email, it started the same way: federated service controlled by no one. Nowadays big corporations influence banlists to enforce a protection racket and non-compliant instances are both banned and filled with spambots.
I’ll be honest with you, I would rather have the ban lists than not. No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous. If someone gets on an IP blocklist because they either can’t or don’t know how to secure their system, then no one should trust anything from them. Having a way to identify them before they cause a problem is enormously helpful.
There is already a project underway to identify federated servers that just spew spam, and I am all for it.
No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous.
Okay you do have a point. The thing is they get abused for email where it’s pretty much a racket. I just really hope Lemmy doesn’t end up the same way, since if some bad faith powerful actor starts having control over a list then they get to dictate which servers can federate and which ones not, which is pretty much a walled garden.
I do get the need to identify malicious instances preemptively though, spambots are a threat wherever we go and some instances are just insufferable like exploding heads.
While correct in that email is definately now limited to a small number of major corporations, the core function has not been monitized. In other words, because I have a Gmail account, I am not limited to Gmail apps nor do they inject advertisement into them. I can live with that.
But is hosting your own mail server and using it for work/finances/everyday life still an option? I don’t think so, at least not without workarounds because sooner or later you will have to send/receive to/from big email.
I looked into it not too long ago. It’s basically a standard spam protection to block any emails from a private server. Sure Google doesn’t own Email, but any Ody with a Gmail account won’t even get your email in their spam filter, it won’t even make it that far.
As someone who works with small businesses, most of whom run their own internal email server, I completely disagree. Yes, it does take some knowledge of DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and DNS, but any well-managed server would have those set up properly anyway. GMail has no issue accepting email from a correctly set up server.
AOL servers, on the other hand, are a massive PITA.
Good to know.
We are already cut off from big tech social networks, who cares if it were to happen again? It can only make us grow bigger than we are now.
The Fediverse SHOULD allow monetization and they don’t yet. As per Mark Bayliss:
The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining and have been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.
I’m not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.
I think you’re missing that point.
If you’re paying to provide a free server, and along comes another server owner who wants to peer with you. Only they’re charging their users for the same thing you’re giving away for free. Why wouldn’t you be a little bit miffed that they want to take your freely-given service and sell it to their users - because that’s what would be happening in that situation.
Monetising something that’s intended to be free is very, very difficult. Not impossible (see open source software and the businesses that grow around that), but it’s a lot harder when it’s a service.
I think the best solution to this whole monetization issue is to just make sharing bandwidth as easy as possible on the fediverse.
If hosting can be done by everyone using an instance, no one entity has to bear overwhelming costs, so there’s no excuse to demand money.
That’s an interesting idea - have a special tier on one or more cloud providers paid for out of that source, or even a flat payment to any server provider based on number of users/activity or something like that?
I don’t think I would have joined my server if it required a fee to join but now that I’m on it and enjoying the experience and administration I’d gladly throw a buck or two a month their way for servers/maintenance.
Why would we want to compete
Subreddits have 10 million subscribers, I haven’t seen a Lemmy group with more than a few thousand people. I don’t know about you but I’d like Lemmy to be as rich in content and discussion as Reddit was. Unless you like social media when it’s empty of users.
Were you on reddit 10+ years ago?
Yes
Well, then you’re free to go back to there. I do happen to prefer fewer more thoughtful users.
Some people may monitize by having paid for subscriptions, like email.
Others will offer free services with banner ads on their site, like email.
Others will offer the service as a way to drive traffic and adoption of other services they offer, like email.
Others will run them at their own cost because they want to, like email.
Companies will run their own instances, like email.
Notice a trend here. For all of you who think the Fediverse is doomed because “ermegurd not platform, is gonna fail”. Umm, email?
In a quest to kill spam, email has become somewhat unhealthy and centralized. Setting up a new email provider is a lot more difficult today than it was years ago. Sending a message to the established providers from a new provider will often end up in spam.
Email has not become centralised at all. You have a clear misunderstanding of what that means in the context technological services.
A centralised service is one provided by a sole or group of providers who decide who and who cannot provide said service.
Email in no way fits that description. You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards.
You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards.
You can, but as I said, because you aren’t a know provider every message from your server will end up in the spam folder of everyone using Gmail.
You won’t have a functional system unless you back it with either Gmail or Outlook.
I have spun up a lot of email servers over the past few years for clients and not had the issue you speak off. Perhaps you need to look either at your implementation or maybe that you are doing it on a VPS provider with a shit record?
I have brand new domains with on-prem email servers spinning up constantly and do not have the issue you described.
If you are using hosted servers then perhaps you need to dump the host.
It’s interesting to hear your take as someone experienced, because on hobbyist forums like /r/selfhosted I used to hear the complaint above all the time. Maybe people aren’t doing things correctly. I’ve never messed with my own email server and have no dog in this fight, but I’ve definitely heard that complaint a ton.
LeMail 😁
