I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
The fediverse is not a single database or server. It’s a protocol and standard that’s distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can’t be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they’ve stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.
Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you’re not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it’s a closed source centralized monopoly.
One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that’s something that can happen in the future
A point of caution:
A large company absolutely could come in and absorb the majority of lemmy traffic and build proprietary code and features on top of the main protocol, eventually making the open source protocol obsolete and supplanting it as a paid/closed-source service. It has been done repeatedly by tech companies, and it is the main reason many people distrust Meta’s interest in joining the fediverse.
For all the reasons you just mentioned, we should fight tooth and nail against that from happening, but we should at least be aware of the threat.
I think the email comparison is apt. We are currently in the bbs/dial-up ISP stage of the fediverse. When people had aol.com or netcom.com addresses.
That gave way to powerful centralized services such as Hotmail or rocketmail, that had the promise of never changing your email again. We then saw Gmail become the big boy on the block with amazing technology.
Even with these powerful entities, there were still hobbyists and corporate email.
I predict the fediverse will follow a similar path. lemmy.world and beehaw are like the netcoms, or even the bbs’s, basically hobbyists, and Internet communists setting things up for the common good, or simply because it’s fun.
We’re going to see instances fill up, become unstable, unreliable, etc. People will get frustrated when Lemm.ee, or their preferred instance can no longer support the volume they have attracted. We’ll see a professional service like a Hotmail that promises a forever home. You’ll likely also see vanity instances like what rocketmail offered. Given the nature of the interest based servers, we’ll likely see vanity instances come about singer than they did with email: starwars.fedi, lotr.verse, piano.lemmy, etc.
Once corporate interests start to see value in a powerful, stable instance that can collect user data and serve targeted ads (starwars.fedi is easy to target), they will dump enough money to push out the hobbyists. The hobbyists will not go away, but they won’t be needed anymore.
That’s when you’ll see the disruptor. Someone who comes into the space like Google did, and the fediverse will be an open protocol that is dominated by a few massive interests.
All in all, I’m not predicting doom, just the natural course of events, which actually will be great for the fediverse. Just like I love my gmail.com account more than my hotcity.com account, I think the future of the fediverse is bright, even if corporate interests get heavily involved, and dominate the 'verse, because there will always be room for innovations, and hobbyists, and while a single company could dominate, the protocol is still open for anyone to do their own thing, and not be bound to a single company if they don’t want to be.
I think this is spot on. It’s completely foreseeable that a well funded enterprise could stand up an instance that’s super robust and can handle a lot more traffic than current ones. They could, say, attract celebrities to do AMAs and handle the load. Or maybe they could create some communities that they stock with a giant amount of useful content.
They’d do it for free, and it would just be another instance, but it would become invaluable, with more and more communities hosted there, and more and more users making it their home instance, until the owners felt they were valuable enough that they put their content behind a paywall or they start serving ads. Sure, people could just move to other instances, but the point would be that suddenly doing without them would be painful.
But unlike Reddit or Twitter, it’s not as much as all or nothing situation, and other instances can compete in the same realm.
I haven’t read a ton about it, but isn’t this what Meta is potentially going to do with Thread?
That is the worry, yes. There’s very little incentive for them to join the fediverse as a for-profit company otherwise.
Incidentally, Google is kinda doing this with email.
If you run your own email server for your business, they will rate limit you under the guise of spam protection, even if your emails are never caught in their spam filters. Some business reported up to 12 hour delays on their emails being delievered. They want everyone to use preferably their own service, or at least another major giant’s, so they can push the smaller players out of the market.
No ads, no tracking, just donations. The model proved itself when twitter went to shit and a big influx of users came to mastodon, it all worked out.
Many mastodon instances shut down. There’s always a risk that at some point the donations are not enough to sustain an instance. It could be very problematic if mods lose their communities when an instance shutdown.
Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.
Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.
I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.
You mean promotion. Not all promotion is bad. When a game developper posts a content update about their game, that’s promotion. And I think most subscribers of that community will be pretty happy to see that kind of promotion. It’s opt in.
I’ve been on Mastodon for months and haven’t noticed any ads. Just people letting me know about some product they like. Wait…
That’s been always the case on other platforms on top of the official ads. Damn every now and then you’d see what’s clearly an guerilla ad campaign hitting the front page of reddit.
The big difference with Lemmy is that it’s not really a service, it’s a open protocol and standard, like email, or http. The service itself is provided by distributed instances that adhere to the protocol. Like those protocols, no one company has been able to get a monopoly on it. Some have taken over a lot of it, like Google with Gmail, or cloudflare, but if you don’t want to work with them there are a ton of other options you can go with, and you will not be locked out of the system if you do.
Reddit was a centralized closed source system so if you don’t have a Reddit account then you are locked out of the system completely.
Lemmy is decentralized so no one instance has or can gain a monopoly. If you want to break ties with one instance you can just switch to another one and still participate with it and the rest of the fediverse.
Not only does that give you choice in a worst case scenario, it also keeps all the instances on their toes because they don’t have dictatorial control over their users.
Spez’s fatal miscalculation was that he thought he had user lock in, but unlike other social networks where it’s your only option to keep in contact with your real life friends, or it’s the only platform your favorite creator posts on, they had neither. Almost all accounts were not connected to your real life and posts were mostly links to other platforms. Very few creators had Reddit as their sole posting platform. The interactions were ephemeral and superficial. Dropping Reddit was the easiest service I ever had to drop.
This is a great analogy. It would be like asking what happens when someone tries to monetize email.
All the users would jump ship to another one immediately.
Most email providers are monetized. For most providers you either pay a subscription or they inject ads. The important thing is if they get too greedy and start providing a bad service you can switch providers.
Email services are monetizable, but email itself cannot because it’s not a tangible thing, it’s an idea and agreement to follow that idea.
The concept of the Fediverse is horizontal rather than vertical growth - i.e. More smaller instances rather than increasing the capacity of the larger ones. We’re also seeing that Lemmy currently only scales to a certain degree. Right now, most instances are either covered by their admin because they’re so small that the cost is manageable or instances are setting up donations.
It’s conceivable that a business would set up an instance and charge for it - but I think it unlikely. A year town the road, though, who knows?
Hadn’t occurred to me before - I guess instances/mods can limit the number of new users they take in so it doesn’t impact performance too much.
Yup - as the admin of a small instance, I plan to keep it small. I want to contribute the Fediverse but not have this become more than a hobby.
Doesn’t really make sense, if they’re federated then you wouldn’t need to pay them to access their content. If they’re not federated then what are you paying for?
The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.
Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.
As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it’s very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.
Yep. I don’t get why it is so hard for people to understand that non-profits CAN sustain themselves from donations. There’s so much brainwashing and gaslighting by corporations going on that people start to question everything outside of the ultra-capitalist system, even the most basic and genuinely nice human interactions are doubted
Yeah it’s weird, there’s plenty of examples of what people would consider “profitable” non-profits: For example Mozilla Thunderbird pulled US$6 million last year in donations alone, with the average donation being US$21, I think.
Mastodon, another non-profit, while not quite as lucrative, pulls in around £24,000 a month on Patreon donations alone, not counting any outside sponsors or Open Collective donations, and so on.
Build value, and people will happily support you.
However if reddit decided they want to plug the leak, if they offered $1 million to the admins of sh.it.just.works and lemmy.world and beehaw, if they accepted, reddit could then defederate the three largest instances from everywhere and Lemmy would basically have to start from the ground up again. A lot of users would probably not bother making an account elsewhere as they may feel it not worth it since it could happen again.
Lemmy wouldn’t have to start from the ground up. They would already have all the source code and instances, a potential userbase who was already convinced not to let these people control their social networks, who already have the frontend installed on their devices, is already used to the interface and features of the app. Even if Spez were to do this, other instances would be built and in the long run it would be a financial hole.
Another possibility is that a big corporate will dedicate a dev team to make their own FOSS fork of the Lemmy codebase that, due to its rich feature set and support, becomes THE version of Lemmy to use. Kinda like Meta and React (though React was originally fully internal to Meta, you get the point). Of all the big companies to do this kind of thing, Meta would be the best, imo, given how they’ve been with their AI models and React, but I still don’t like the idea given what we’ve seen happen with Red Hat.
