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.
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.
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.
Wish they would be more upfront about it. Wouldn’t have a problem donating to fund grants. But I want to know upfront.
I read on reddit that they have to do the drives in this way in order to amintsin some sort of charity or non profit status? Something along those lines. Like they have enough in the bank to be fine but they need to do this for some legal reason.
Forgive my half recollection of a reddit comment that could have been bs in the first place.
It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Your server’s admin ask for money, setup a method to receive donations (ex: Liberapay, Paypal, etc) and there you go.
If you raise more than you need, the community can vote to donate it to other communities in need, to the Lemmy or Kbin devs or to some charity.
What happens to your account on a federated server if that one fails though?
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.
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.
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.
I think the server needs to be prominent in the ui for now at least so people remember where to log in to
See: your edit lol
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.
@if_you_can_keep_it @Rogueren Assuming that one Federated Service is the end all be all user experience for what you’d like to share can hurt many. In Mastodon I kept seeing people (during the Twitter Exodus) who wanted multi-sever posting to each local feed under one account. Like Lemmy’s cross site posts, not sure if Lemmy lets you cross post multiple times to different communities. But some basically wanted Mastodon to work like Lemmy and FB Groups.
e.g. Main Post -> Community 1, Community 2
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.
I mean inflation might have hit them a little bit but dot coms have always been around $10 in my mind. Other TLDs can vary but you can get good deals through promotions sometimes.
Were only talking about the address here.
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.
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
Really nice merch, with small logos on. Think how the LTT stealth stuff is.
I know some people love merch but I’ve never really seen the appeal. If I want to support something I like I would rather purchase their media (artist) or donate directly if they have that option.
I do agree though if there is merch, I would vote for smaller logos.
Just another form of revenue. The more revenue streams, the better. Merch is good because it means people get something physical back for their money.
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.
à la tumblr
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
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.
I suspect reddit’s reported unprofitability isn’t due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.
Hookers and blow, right? It’s always hookers and blow
Yea, lemmy is volunteer run, so most of the cost is going to be hosting it would seem, unlike reddit who have to pay for employees/office space(?)/legal fees/ect. I would imagine that the larger instances will have the most problems paying for hosting while the small ones will probably be fairly cheap.
We don’t even know for a fact if they are truly unprofitable or not, it’s not like anyone here has reviewed their books.
No, but it would be extra stupid for Spez to say that if it weren’t true because it could affect investments and draw legal action.
Honestly, who knows at this point? I’ve seen some horrible business/legal decisions happen over the last 5-10 years. Some people will practically set themselves on fire just for the chance to make higher profit. Hypothetically, this certainly wouldn’t be the first case of a sketchy business drawing bad legal attention to itself, not by a long shot. I have seen a lot of businesses shut because of this type of behaviour.
The other lies from Spez about the developers certainly don’t help his case, either. That’s another fantastic way for Reddit to open themselves up to potential legal issues.
Their hosting costs also rose exponentially when they decided to host their own videos and pictures.
Which they could have locked behind Reddit Gold or some pay-tier. /shrug
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.
___Communities can get quite big, the big communities would be quite expensive to be hosted right?
I don’t host any instances myself, but I have experience with web hosting in general. Yes, the hardware will need to scale vertically with more activity, but I don’t know what lemmy’s anticipated load thresholds are.
I would guess a decent i7 with an SSD and 16GB+ RAM would handle lemmy quite comfortably for a good while. So the expense isn’t entirely trivial, but it’s nothing compared to a centralized service with hundreds of millions of regular users.
HW gets cheaper. And prolly in big group will be some ppl who can donate. And we are going to experience burst of bots. One way how to fight them is pay little for posting. Or maybe we shutdown internet BCS of CO2. Everyone need to decide if they wanna pay with money or data, there is no free lunch.
Shut down the internet because of co2?!
Hell, I’m already practically wasting a few domains already as is. Maybe some day I’ll set up a subdomain with my own instance.
Donate to the devs!
I think the price is spread out across multiple generous people that generously host instances. I think it really depends on how much members there are. From what I heard my instance is 25 $ a month. Another instance I was in on Mastodon cost a few hundreds bucks to run. This is why it is good to help out your fellow admins. On the other hand, lemmy and other fediverse software are open source, so they don’t really have to pay for developpers. Also the scope of what lemmy or Mastodon do is considerably smaller that Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Facebook isn’t just a social media, it’s a spying engine and an ad recommendation platform, Lemmy and mastodon are just social medias, so of course it costs less to do.
Yup. On Facebook/Twitter the product isn’t the content, its a whole shitload of agregated personal data of the users and advertisements that use said data to target the users, so its only natural that these companies would be spending ludicrous amounts of money finding new ways to collect and parse that data.
Given that lemmy is an OSS project and decentralized, it draws a lot of people with knowledge and resources. You could easily host your own instance for your friends, to have them connect to other instances. And i think there are enough people in these communities that have some left over server resources to host their own instances.
I got an old server from work sitting around at home doing nothing. Seriously thinking about hosting my own instance on it
Does your work also have some solar panels laying around for you?
