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.
Their problem is that they allowed themselves to become too big and unsustainable in the long run.
It’s not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.
Donations alone on the biggest instances aren’t enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won’t make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.
@petunia @Spzi Some are not about money: mastodon.lol is purely a personal decision; switter.at is not gonna lobby against governments that want to censor queer voices (which is what “online safety regulations” are really about). For Pawoo, Pixiv certainly had the money to keep it running, so this might be profitability concerns (given that at that time Pixiv also phased out other less-popular services to focus on its main platforms); CrossGate/Russell could be financial and liability concerns.
I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles.
There are no “big instances” in the Threadiverse. The largest one (LW) has less than 13k active MAU. These numbers are ridiculously low and offer no real stress to the system. Let’s 10x this number and see what starts happening.
We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy.
The top 10 instances account for 74% of MAU. And the bigger instances (LW, Beehaw) are balkanizing the Fediverse: trigger-happy with the defederation buttons, avoiding any instance that can bring “unwanted” activity, etc. Even if other instances start making experiments, they will only be interesting if they happen out in the open.
The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough.
Does it? From my perspective, we have a small group of people who are just messing around with things that they can run themselves, a slightly larger group of people who are discontent with reddit and wanted an alternative, but very few people who actually care about an alternative and are willing to put substantial resources to help with development and to accelerate adoption.
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.
People are not forced to see ads. Ad blockers exist. Which in a way is actually a problem. People managed to enjoy sites and blocking ads, so they got used to the idea that no ads + free access is an universal possibility and the natural state of social networks.
As for price: I’ve been offering plans for Mastodon access that cost $0.50/month/user on communick. I’ve had exactly ZERO people on this plan.
My conclusion: it’s not the price point. It’s just that people don’t want to pay for social media.
Have you considered that it isn’t the price but the subscription? Many people I know have a real aversion against subscription services with this constant threat of being cut off and arbitrary price increases.
I am pretty sure an up-front single “life-time” price would have more takers, even if such a promise is obviously still subject to many caveats.
Subscriptions have gotten a bad rep lately because of companies that try to turn a product (like a car and heated seats) into a “service”, but there is nothing inherently wrong/unfair about someone that provides a service that has occurring and constant costs based on usage.
Also, for those that want to have full control over their own identity, they can have their own managed server, which is still a bit expensive but will be made a lot cheaper with the next generation of fediverse services (like takahe and mitra) . Once that gets more mature, users would be able to bring their own domain and a service provider would be a commodity like an email hosting service. In the case where I can port account and my identity to different providers by simply changing a DNS record, the power will be fully in the hands of the people and there will be nothing for them to worry about.
The top 10 instances account for 74% of MAU.
Yes, because even with federation it is inherently advantageous for a user of a social platform to be among the largest pool of people they can identify, to make random stumbling into discussions and groups as likely as possible.
It’s a weird thing where we want the federation to provide a network of smallest scale platforms, yet we do this for social media, where the experience is naturally best when it starts with a single giant platform you filter down not an ocean of individual bits you have to glue together.
I’m guessing you are not old enough to remember how the internet used to work before Facebook? This idea that walled gardens are somewhat better is a meme that needs to die.
The web itself is the giant platform. Ease of discovery is not an inherent property of centralized networks, it’s just that we haven’t had built the proper tools to make this work in a decentralized manner.
To make my case: what killed RSS was not that it was difficult to discover new blogs. What killed RSS was that it couldn’t be monetized by the publishers when they started using it. What made Twitter so successful was that it let those publishers to have some sense of control over the distribution. Had we properly supported content creators with actual money instead of the promise of eyeballs, the internet would be a much better and healthier place than it is today.
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.
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?
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 can only say that when the provider of my instance ask for donations, I will donate. Because they do a bloody good service on all sides and that should be honoured. I guess that this is applicable to all instances?
Donations isn’t the way to go because most people don’t. I’ve seen about three polls that have had thousands of responses and the majority of people fell in the never donated category and many fell in the never donated and will not donate category. Something feels wrong about leaving people’s hard work to donations, obviously it should be a part of the equation.
I donate, and I’ll donate again, and as far as I know it is covering costs. I believe the person who runs this instance (Jonah) does so because he wants to, and if he should ever decide to close it, then I think he should, if it stops bringing him joy and fulfillment.
I feel like you are devaluing the fediverse by reducing it to monetary value. Simply put: If we are talking about bringing in corporate sponsors and ads, then speaking for myself, not only would I no longer donate, but I would no longer feel connected in any way to this platform.
There are plenty of other forums that aren’t federated but are sustained by people because they want to, not because of monetary gain.
Just look how monetization has leeched the soul out of things like podcasts and YouTube (I’d say reddit, but reddit was never good to begin with). Do you really want that here? I know I don’t. I’d rather see it end than become another site like that.
What is your definition of “covering costs”? If the person running the instance goes to say "I actually enjoy this so much that I want to make my full-time job. My salary as whatever is $150k/year, so to this full-time I need to make at least that much. "
Do you think that the admin is being fair? Are you going to continue donating? Is the amount of your donation contingent on how much they are getting in total?
Where did I say corporate sponsors and ads? Please state where I said that. It’s obnoxious how often people state something incorrectly particularly when the original post wasn’t ambiguous. I feel that YOU and others are devaluing the Fediverse by poo pooing over people’s hard work and time. A thank you simply isn’t enough. If im wrong for valuing people that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.
You say you want good faith discussion, but you’ve completely nixed the main point we have today, with no room for argument. You may not know it, but you are coming at this in bad faith.
I mean Reddit Gold was a cool idea back in its heyday.
But yeah, funding it via donations comes with some implications in regards to cutting non-donation costs.
Say you have a single donation tier, on patreon or so. If push comes to shove and you get too few donations, the following would be perfectly understandable things to happen:
- To cut costs, non-donating users are rate-limited for their interactions.
- To cut staff cost, defederation is vigorously employed to both cut external content to review and also marginally cut server cost from the actual federation updates.
- To further cut staff cost, non-donating users will automatically be temp-banned if reported with no prior investigation, and placed in a low-priority review queue.
These all sound grotesque, but also understandable if you think about it, in particular the last one as personell cost is always really significant. Yeah you could argue “might as well go paid-only”, sure. But to a point free users are okay, they just have to accept that in any “maybe” situation, they’ll always lose out due to costing too much vs paying too little (nothing that is). “You get what you pay for” would be a way of putting it.
The moderation could be the biggest part of wanting to just quit. Humans are pretty shitty creatures especially when anonymity is involved. This definitely has nothing to do with finances. It’s not expensive at all. If someone shut theirs down due to finances then their life was probably crumbling and that can happen to anyone. What is your question?
Mine’s relatively small and I haven’t had a single donation from the ~400 users.
Also if they did donate, less than a dollar each, the server would be paid for an entire year.
