I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?
My instance of ~300 users (and uh, far less active ones) is costing me $223/year
I’ve had users donate about $25 so ~10% community funded and 90% admin funded.
That’s fine by me at the current cost. Though if we somehow got a bunch of new users I’d have to cut off signups at some point unless more donations rolled in. I could probably handle a sizeable increase in users first though.
Why does it cost that much?
Are you hosting it on a hosting platform somewhere?
$15/mo server rental, plus a few dollars to store backups on a separate service, object storage for media, email, and domain registration. Total $18.64
I have a home server that could easily handle it, but I wouldn’t want to put something so public on it.
If you want to see your instance survive, see what you instance admins have in mind regarding funding.
And donate. Depending on how many users there are, but 10 bucks a year per user would bring instances a long way.
That makes sense! But I’m also curious is this the only way of income without relying stupid ads, or can you think of other things?
Donations or grants would probably be best. I’m sure there are community grants available for doing public good.
I’ve also seen some open source things sell merch, where you buy a hat or something with a particular logo. It’s still donating with extra steps, but it’s a little different
Our instance admin broke it down recently, and it’s actually not too expensive to run. Without wasting money on engagement, growth, data collection, marketing, etc, it’s not actually that expensive to run social media platforms I guess
Until you get into image/video/file hosting, it’s very cheap. So long as people are ok with off-site storage usage, then it shouldn’t cost much at all.
Merch is a pretty big risk, or at least was when I was doing it for bands. I know there are solutions for on demand creation now that might be more feasible
Well, Mastodon has been around since 2016 IIRC which is nearly 8 years and it’s still growing and expanding. There’s no reason to suppose Lemmy will be any different.
A large part of the issue of sustainability is intent. Meta, Twitter, Microsoft, Google etc are profit driven. By that standard, no fediverse software is sustainable because for-profits only care about continual growth leading to continual profit.
Lemmy is open source. No one who develops it or hosts an instance really cares about it being financially profitable so there’s not that motivation. The motivation is more akin to doing something positive for people and at the same time, indulge in a hobby/interest they have. If the people who benefit from it (you and me, the users) recognise that benefit I would hope they donate to its development and the instance they’re on. This in turn enables the users who can’t afford to donate to still be able to participate in a system where profit is not King.
So sustainability in the fediverse really means ‘can I afford to keep doing something I enjoy doing?’ As long as they can, it’s sustainable.
Just to add to this, to my knowledge the Lemmy model does not prevent monetization. So, if you want to try to start an Instance and someday monetize it, you can try if you want.
You’ll be competing with all the other Instances still, but if yours is unique and offers great value, you could potentially turn this into a job.
I would have no issues if Ruud decided to quit his day job and admin LW full time, paying himself a reasonable, middle class salary from the server donations. So long as he remained transparent about it all like he has been so far.
Honestly, I actually hope this happens someday, because it would make a different kind of far more common monetization a tiny bit less likely. That’s just selling the Instance. It’s his, on his hardware, so if someone offered him 5 million for it, he could just sell it. But if he’s drawing a salary from it, and he loves it, he may not be so willing to sell out. He wouldn’t necessarily need the money, because we’d already be paying him directly.
I actually hope that some dev work goes into providing “premium features” for paying subscribers. Things like profile cosmetics, awards, “superlikes”, gif embeds, maybe sub only communities/threads. I view all of these as perfectly acceptable premium features that folks pay for on platforms like Discord that don’t deter free users. If it helps make instances sustainable and keeps high quality admin & moderation in place, I would argue it would be a big community benefit.
Another possibility is instance - as - affiliate where the admin sets up affiliate accounts with services like VPN, Amazon, a web host, etc. To enable users to buy things they would already and give a kickback to the instance.
Here’s what interests me: obviously on a single instance you need to scale the infrastructure as more users join. But how much do you need to scale to account for the usage of federated instances?
I ask that because the answer in this thread is broadly “it’s sustainable because each instance is low cost, and you can always add more instances” but that doesn’t work if, after the number of instances grows 100x, all existing instances face an increase in costs even if they didn’t gain many more users, because they’re receiving more messages from federated instances, and need to download and store stuff from those other instances for their local users.
That’s a very interesting question and I’m not sure of the answer.
Obviously on some level, the cost of the infrastructure scales with the number of people using it. But so does the ability to crowdfund, if there are 100x more instances then theoretically there would be 100x more potential donors to meet the cost.
One clear way to influence the scaling in our favor would be to utilize instances with clear themes and purposes. If everybody on a particular instance is interested in the same content, that reduces the wasted computational resources compared to an instance where all of the users are interested in different topics, and thus subscribed to a much wider variety of communities.
My intuition is that as long as the platform only hosts text and images, the costs should be manageable, especially with inevitable improvements to computational efficiency that are likely to come as Lemmy matures. For instance, I believe there is some kind of patch that reduces storage utilization that should be shipping with the next version (0.19).
My line of thinking is really wondering about what optimisations are necessary to allow Lemmy to scale in this way. Large social media sites have very interesting designs to deal with the huge amount of data flowing through them, caching as much as possible close to where it will be needed. I don’t know about Lemmy’s design though and I don’t really have a good idea of how that would impact optimisations.
To take an example I remember from reddit (actually I had to re-read about it because I didn’t really remember it…) reddit caches ordered lists of things, for example, the list of posts on the homepage. The problem is that the ordering has to be reevaluated all the time because it can change whenever someone votes. (Let’s assume we’re looking at a listing which incorporates voting). To make that work efficiently the reddit programmers made vote processing actually update not just the backing store and invalidate the cache, but modify the “cache” directly, which is now more like a denormalised view of the backing data. The way this was done meant that later, when the rate of votes increased, there were again problems because all this processing was contending on these denormalised views. I’m thinking this is probably going to be complicated by the federated aspect, because that’s a separate source of updates from those local sources.
I would also say that you can’t expect linear scaling for donations: early adopters are going to be enthusiasts, and correspondingly more enthusiastic with their money!
You mean say I have an instance with 100 users.
If they all hang out on communities on the server (more or less), no problemo at all.
But if they all roam around and sign up on thousands of active communities on other servers, my server will be under water.
I love thinking about stuff like this (P=NP, complexity, etc) and I do not see very much about that concerning the lemmyverse which is IMO a shame.
I’m planning setting up a Lemmy build so I can tinker around with it, but you know, time and stuff. I also spent a lot of time just setting up the docker version so maybe it’s quite the job :-)
I think it’s more sustainable then Facebook ,Twitter and others. Why? Because it’s federated! if one instance goes bankrupt or shuts down for whatever reason it doesn’t close down the entire program. If anything, at worst a portion of Lemy communities would get erased from history. Lemmy in reality is really just an interface, with a bunch of different instances combined to provide the content. The cost is actually cheaper then other social platforms from the last 10 years+ like Facebook because in a way the cost for the “service” is divided by all the different instances hosted by volunteers,
I hope this makes sense, if any questions do ask.
