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.
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.
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.
Do the expenses include the cost of labor from admins and moderators?
When there is a big issue hitting the fediverse (like an bunch of script kiddies attacking servers and pushing CSAM), are we going to just wait for the admins to clock out of the regular-jobs-that-pay-the-bills and then take a look at it?
Lemmy.world is the largest instance and is getting less than 25 cents per user in donations. Meanwhile, Facebook has shown that the true price of what a privacy-respecting social media site is around 10€/month. Do you really think that 25 cents per user is enough to keep this minimally professional?
