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.
I would like to see the host push ads, so that it’s sustainable. It doesn’t have anything negative to the community except it will sustain the instance do does the Fediverse.
Ive seen some things (totally unrelated mobile apps) make ads optional. I think its a good idea if youre iffy about having them but do need them to keep the site up, im sure people would be happy to enable ads to support these types of sites. Plus cant be any worse than the shite youtube has for ads
I’m considering a free version on the app stores with limited ads(subtle and no tracking), a paid version without them, and one with optional donations on alternative stores.
I don’t like ads and I don’t want to shove them down unwilling throats, but most people don’t care (and frankly I need the money)
Among the ones that do, there’s those that hate seeing them, and ones with privacy concerns. If I make them subtle and offer an upgrade to remove them, I hope that’ll satisfy one group, and the other one can get a build where the ad libraries were never installed in the first place
Phase 1: Collect underpants
The word you’re looking for is sustainable, not profitable
It doesn’t have to be profitable. Especially for people that already have computers running 24/7 and good Internet, a Lenny server is just another process they run on their machine. Admin/mod duties would probably be the hardest part.
I think it’s more like a hobby, it doesn’t necessarily NEED to be profitable as long as you and other people enjoy it and contribute to it. So far I’m loving it and it really feels like a breath of fresh air compared to reddit, especially without the karma system
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
Thanks!
All things considered, spending $30 a month on a hobby is pretty good.
People like you make the internet a better place :)
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.
The admin of my local lemmy instance is very transparent about hosting costs and has a ko-fi for donations. Last I saw there were enough funds to last several months but I have seen additional activity on the donations since. They have a strong focus on a geographic community and it looks like there is no shortage of people happy to contribute because of the need that fills.
It depends on the instance, some don’t have much of a reason to exist and are probably going to be an out of pocket thing for a sole operator as a hobby project until they lose a job or get bored. Others are going to have some more structured organization running them with some sort of funding structure.
I am a proud monthly donor. My couple of bucks I send Ruud and the admin team every month helps make this corner of the internet a reality.
So, that’s how it’s funded.
If you’re able, please consider sending in a donation. You can do so at Open Collective or Patreon.
Help out a sprout?
Both those links go to Mastodon not Lemmy. Am I right in assuming that your account Is on an instance that hosts both? Probably federating with M before feasting with L next?
Good question. The dude who hosts lemmy.world started by hosting mastodon.world. So all of his patreon/crowdfunding is under mastodon.world, but it’s all going to the same pool of server costs that pay for lemmy as well. He’s pretty cool, actually, posts transparency reports on a regular basis.
You’ll also notice that donations are going down every month. That’s to be expected, number of active users has also gone down, until end of may, when it stabilized. We expext donations to stabilize as well, and if they won’t we’ll post a message asking for people to donate if they can/want
If only they knew…
I’m donating $5 to the Lemmy devs and $5 to Lemmy.world currently on patreon.
In addition to all of the answers here, development costs for protocols like ActivityPub can be partially offset by grants by organizations like W3C that work to build open standards.
I run my own instance just because I want to build a community that people can enjoy. I do it out of my own pocket and don’t ask for donations of any kind. Not everything is about profit for some people. If I were running a site as big as Lemmy.world, then I would consider it, but only to cover some expenses.
This. We need to stop seeing such online gatherings as opportunities to be profitable. I personally view them as social interactions and opportunities to exchange random and interesting information. Water cooler talks or forums (the ancient greek/roman sort - I wonder how many shitposts those had).
When you invite people over to your house for a gathering (also incurring costs - even if people bring something to cover the catering bit, you still have to clean up afterwards) you wouldn’t consider it as an opportunity to profit right? (Or you are and are just hosting an MLM party or have some sort of agenda to push).
One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.
They’re not, and profit isn’t the reason people run Lemmy instances. In fact, avoiding the problems that arise when human communication is capitalized upon is a driving theme behind open source software and federated social media.
Its been so long since ive been on a part of the internet like this, it used to be almost all like this, now its almost all a buisness.
Right. I’m loving this. It is a huge breath of fresh air. Obviously the people hosting Lemmy.world have to pay for this though. If they put out a subscription that was minimal in cost I would pony up even now with the jank and all. This place is worth investing my time and energy into I feel.
Profit might not be the point, but it is going to cost time and resources to run an instance. Unless the admin is just planning on paying for everyone’s ability to use Lemmy on their instance out of their own pocket, ads or subscriptions may be necessary. And depending on how much time and effort goes into keeping it up, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them to want to make a profit on it so they feel like it’s worth the effort.
I’d hate for an instance to blow up in popularity only for the admin to decide it isn’t worth the time/effort/cost and shuts it down.
I mean, Wikipedia does it and they’re the 7th most visited website on the internet. 🤷
And they have more money from donations that what they actually need.
