It feels like more Lemmy apps are going to make their way on to the app stores. With more apps, comes more people. More people, more API calls. How do we scale this server and hopefully all of the others to come, financially?
There are some REALLY interesting Podcast 2.0 features in the works. Especially using “value4value” and “boosting” as a way for listeners to tip their favorite podcasts and fund them directly. I wonder if somehow we can learn from it?
For those who do not know, hopefully these Podcasting 2.0 features will help podcasters continue to thrive in world where companies like Spotify and Amazon have decided to destroy our incredible open and free podcast networks by making “exclusives” and putting them behind paywalls that don’t follow the open standards.
I’d really love to integrate Podcasting 2.0 RSS and the fediverse. How cool would it be if every podcast episode just had its own place in the fediverse with a place to chat and it all worked together somehow automatically.
I dunno. Just a thought.
Here’s some info:
Developer here. I’ve been looking at the API calls made by the app, and I’ll try to give a good example of what is going on:
To be honest, you’re probably not going to see a drastic change in API calls right now. The only things that you are calling the API for are:
- Load items in the feed
- Load post/comments
- Load profiles
- Submit votes
- Submit comments
- Submit posts
- One initial call at app launch to obtain user info (subscriptions, settings, saved posts, etc, lemmy’s API gives you all of this in one call)
This is about the same use that you’re going to see in the actual web version.
While there may be upsides and downsides to how they are doing it right now, you can get pretty much all of the info you need through one API call. For example, if I get a post, the response will include most of the user info, most of the community info, and obviously all of the post info, plus more. I don’t need to make separate calls to retrieve all of that data.
Same goes for user info. In just one call, I can retrieve all of the information as far as subscriptions, moderated communities, user settings, and more without having to make a separate call for each one.
The issue is going to be mainly just the influx of traffic in general, not the apps themselves from what I can tell.
I’m also including the app’s name in the user agent so that if something were to ever become a problem, anyone can reach out and discuss what they are seeing so that it can be corrected.
I was chatting with someone about this earlier today. It would be great if there was a fan-out system something like icecast crossed with bittorrent, so people could contribute VPS or home internet to propagate Lemmy traffic. That would require some crypto signatures in the protocol to make sure the messages weren’t tampered with, of course.
I’ve been happy with lemmy.world and Ruud’s management, so I started contributing $2 a month to his patreon. I never paid a cent to reddit, but I want this place to succeed.
I think a Wikipedia donation system could work. Just takes a percentage of the core users to contribute.
Edit: https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld or https://patreon.com/mastodonworld
I just look to the microblogging side of the network (which has about 10 million total users) as a case study.
The ideal situation? More nodes are added to the network to spread the load and control away from a few very large and very expensive instances. The realistic situation? Some instances manage to secure external funding (such as mastodon.social) and grow extremely large at the expense of smaller instances that shut down from a lack of users and funding. Decentralized protocols like the fediverse and email are not immune to centralization thanks to lazy users who join the biggest instance. My pessimistic outlook is that the Fediverse will eventually become like email, with a few very big instances and a lot of spam making it difficult for smaller instances to enter the network. Enjoy the fresh new internet feeling while it lasts and move on when the platform starts to decay.
I think donations are sufficient.
Lemmy doesn’t seem to be too hard to run. Current popular instances run on HW that costs well under 100EUR monthly which well within reason for crowd-funding.
I see you’re getting downvoted, and I do have to agree that it’s a pretty optimistic take. With traffic even a tenth what reddit gets, the costs would be significant.
Now it’s true that eg. Wikipedia can handle massive server load on a donation model, but I think the utility from Wikipedia is more obvious and more amenable to attracting donations. I think it’s a good idea to think about palatable monetization options early on, so we can avoid ending up in a situation where the experience has to suddenly get degraded by intrusive ads or whatever.
