Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
They’re not, it’s just donations so far. Reddit actually used to profit from donations only too about 10+ years ago and had a bar showing how much they earned every day vs how much they need to run the servers.
I wasn’t aware of this! I was reading through these comments and thinking that would be nice to have here too. It would echo the nice amount of transparency if something like this was implemented. Are there any downsides to showing this info?
The only downside is that it’s bad for business. Donations will naturally slow down once users see that revenue > expenses, or users will start expecting some extra features to be added with the extra funds etc, which they rightfully should.
It’d operate like a NGO would and should but as a for-profit business (which is not ideal since they wouldn’t be regulated and audited as an NGO). Even if it does register as NGO, the show runners still get to decide their wages at the end of the day. And what’s stopping them from inflating the figures shown to users? They could say it costs $2m for overheads and pay themselves $1.5m as wages.
They aren’t. Do they need to be, though? Maybe once the scale gets gargantuan, but even then - is it strictly necessary to be profitable? As long as donations cover costs, I assume most instance administrators want what the rest of us want - a good platform for discussion and content aggregation.
I agree with this sentiment, there are a lot of admins who are very virtuous and and will pay money out of pocket and dedicate time to this cause which is appreciated. The big thing in the beginning is the actual time it takes to run an instance, when servers get big they are going to need employees, no one can be on call 24/7 for something that costs them money (with the exception of a child).
Once Lemmy has around a million active users funding the actual server costs will become a problem but I’m sure people will figure out how to make money off of it well before then, wether it be ads, data selling, alternative services, subscription models or something else.
Whats important right now is that as a community we do what we can to keep this place alive, and to help out the hard working admins.
Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.
I suspect we may also see more instances focused on very specific topics to keep operating cost down.
Agree, and such instances would be more resilient to federation issues. I think communities should be spread out on small instances, while users are concentrated on larger instances with better infrastructure.
Would that make you lose your comment history and username? For example I needed to create separate accounts for Beehaw and here. It’s similar to using different forums in the late 90s/early 00s in that way it seems.
If an instance you had an account on went dark, you would lose access to that account, and the ability to view your comment history in isolation. As far as I can tell, the comments you made in communities would exist as long as the instance the community is on exists. Same with your username - there isn’t a mechanism for making them globally unique beyond appending the instance domain name (again, just like e-mail).
Beehaw is kind of a special case right now because they have chosen to cut themselves off from a number of other Lemmy instances including lemmy.world. Normally you wouldn’t need multiple accounts - I read and post on multiple instances from just my lemmy.world account. You can see remote instance communities under “Communities” / “All”. If one you are interested in isn’t there, you can search for !community@instance, and wait a bit. That starts the sync of the community to your instance, and you should be able to access it a few minutes later.
I think a good business model is similar to your idea, but with a twist:
Unless accounts become portable across instances, I could see best practices shifting towards users having their own personal instance so that they control it and thus can’t lose access to their history etc. But since ain’t nobody got time for that, I imagine the business model being companies providing turnkey personal instances and getting paid for hosting and management.
I think this may be the wrong question. I am the administrator of a reverse engineered PS3 video game server, so it’s illegal for me to make a profit or any kind of revenue or donations from that platform. However, I maintain it for thousands of users simply because I and others enjoy it and want it to exist. That’s not a sustainable model for a business or for running something as gigantic as reddit, but it’s what I want and enjoy, and for right now it’s affordable, and I’m happy with that.
Not counting the cost of your time, how much money do you spend on this server?
It costs me roughly $15-25 a month to host our game server, but I have other costs like our website that I’m dealing with as well, so taking all those other things into account and I’m probably spending something like $30 a month for now. I’m actively working to migrate my Wix site to WordPress to save money. Now, if we had thousands of concurrent users instead of like 30-40 concurrent users on a typical day, or if we needed significantly more storage, my costs would probably go up a lot. The growing storage and user count are both important things I’m thinking about carefully, because I imagine there might come a time I need to reevaluate our strategy
Plot twist: not everything needs to be profitable.
Ok but it still takes funding. Servers cost money, admins time has a cost and they gotta make a living. So there has to be some self sustaining quality to it otherwise you’re relying on peoples generosity to donate and having admins that might have to go days without checking things (and burn IT burnout is bad enough when you’re getting paid. Plus if these people do similar for work the last thing you want to do when you get home is fix some server issue.)
Donations are indeed key, at least for the major sites with thousands of users and a lot of pressure on both infrastructure and administration. It is not profit-oriented, but it does need to be sustainable.
It seems, however, quite a few people are happy to make some voluntary contributions to keep the operation up and running. I have not yet heard of a Mastodon server shutting down due to a lack of funding. In the threadiverse, a lot of people have been donating a coffee to the creator of Kbin and Kbin.social (who will provide a better means of donating in the coming days), and lemmy.world is receiving hundreds of dollars every month at Patreon and Open Collerctive, to name a couple.
Once you put users in control, many of them are willing to pay for products that they would otherwise never have spent a dime on. Personally I have never paid for any piece of software (other than streaming services), but I try to make a round and donate to open source projects every year. :)
@sab What streaming services do you pay for? I’m all for supporting small indie studios, but Disney and the like can deal with me pirating their content.
