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.
Open-source projects have always been sustainable by donations. Just look at Wikipedia; it’s been around for 22 years. Linux has been around for even longer.
If lemmy.world ever sold out, I’d probably just move to reddthat.com. Problem solved.
Don’t even mention how risky it is having various people running the servers themselves.
Security? Backups? Due diligence? Ability to pay? Awol?
All different person to person.
Idk a good solution, but the fediverse has big problems to solve. One of which is that instances are single servers, there is no distributed compute model, which means they crumple under load and can only scale so far. Not to mention the unsustainable costs that start coming with it…
If Lemmy in general grows to the user base of reddit, infrastructure costs(if it was optimized via scale) would be in the tens of millions/year. Given that it’s a hogepoge of mixed providers using expensive AF hosting probably hundreds of millions.
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This very instance (lemmy.world) is scaling across multiple instances with load-balancing right now.
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I don’t think this comment is correct.
‘The fediverse’ is several pieces of open source software that interface with each other, and they can be hosted on distributed computing / cloud services as much as any other service. Its up to the instance runner.
Lots of other problems with your comment, such as assuming enterprises are more efficient than motivated individuals.
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Instead of having a technical and factual discussion about it, let’s instead attack people!
No one here needs your flavor of toxicity…
If you can’t attack the argument or idea, attacking the person to rub your ego is a pretty toxic and nonproductive thing to do.
It’s your choice to be offended and to respond aggressively instead of treating it as a discussion on how we can improve the platform, what deficiencies are concerning, and how those will affect the users and instance owners.
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M8, I’m not here to have slap fights with people like you.
You clearly are talking in bad faith, you claim I’m making inflammatory despite you failing, entirely, twice now, to attack my argument and not me.
And after pushing you to not be an ass, here you are again, being an ass. How about you try and engage on the topic, instead of stooping to interpersonal politics?
I have little idea, yeah, that’s why I’m actually talking about it to kick off some conversation that either shows me why/how I’m wrong or otherwise increases my understanding. You have done neither, you have no leg to stand on to complain there as you have done nothing about it.
I’m a professional in this space, and am speaking from my experience in the industry and with scaling applications. I have a basis of understanding to pull from, and am enjoying actual discussion with others and have found a few technical people to dive deeper with, unlike you. And have learned a lot from others who have expanded on my points in other threads, and corrected me where I’m wrong. Again, you have done none of this.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with technical conversation and common discourse/argument? Because toxicity is not how you carry one on.
I look forward to you failing to understand or absorb any of this, and continue with your personal attacks instead of contributing to actual discussion!
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Don’t even mention how risky it is having various people running the servers themselves.
Security? Backups? Due diligence? Ability to pay? Awol?
All different person to person.
Idk a good solution, but the fediverse has big problems to solve. One of which is that instances are single servers, there is no distributed compute model, which means they crumple under load and can only scale so far. Not to mention the unsustainable costs that start coming with it…
I’m not opposed to operators trying to make money, if some server brings some feature that I find valuable, I won’t begrudge them trying to make money off it. I think the hopeful thing with federation is that when one feels that an individual server is being abusive or doesn’t like their monetization approach or is unhappy for some other reason they have the choice to go elsewhere. Competition is good.
I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Imagine inge a stable commercial service with high quality moderation (hopefully paid for by the operators) but with an option to follow other instances and transfer your data to another instance. That could be pretty good for drawing in people who just want something that works and refuse to leave reddit.
Give it 15 years.
I’ve been online since 1990; 10-15 years seems to be the maximum time a community can live without shitting itself over greed or something new and better coming along to scoop up users.
That said, things like Usenet and IRC still technically exist… They’re just niche now. The way this shit works is more like those, so it will likely never fully disappear.
To be fair, there is a line between greed and monetization. Monetization can be simply to fund servers costs and labor. Especially as the community grows, it’s just going to get more and more expensive. I think a donation page or a toggle-able ads option (off by default) would be great ways for users to support the site to fund the costs without it being greedy. Both options could give some sort of donor badge as a thank you, because there’s no features involved with it so people don’t feel forced to donate/support.
I think the key really is transparency. I’m not going to throw money into a black hole and hope it does some good, but if there is some level of transparency showing running costs plus deficit/surplus towards those costs then I wouldn’t mind contributing.
Or, for the time being, this platform never takes off and reddit’s moat temporarily prevails. Eventually Reddit will die, but no one can predict when.
It will be interesting to see to what level the server traffic changes in Reddit. I was looking at a post last night (for was still kinda working if you weren’t logged in) and it was a lot of confused people wondering what all the fuss was about, very few people ppl against reddits actions, and it clicked, the majority of people against spez had just left once the apps stopped working.
I checked the user history of those defending Reddit, all very young accounts so I guess ppl who joined recently and only know the Reddit app are left, but the older users… Gone.
If we’re talking the fediverse in general, I believe Zuckerberg is launching his twitter clone very soon and it has ActivityPub integration.
hopefully the cost of running it is not so much and all users chip in to a degree to keep it going.
Most servers already seem to have Patreons or similar donation platforms running, and subscriptions would not surprise me as everyone starts to settle into this thing. It would make a lot of sense to help spread the load and since content wouldn’t be gated behind the subscription, I can’t see why it would be bad.
I think I have similar thoughts on ads. If an instance wants to run ads to support itself, I don’t see an issue as long as those ads aren’t “federated” out and sent to other places.
I think the ability to have all of these different setups, without restricting any access to content, is the beauty of the fediverse. At least as I understand it.
That is a great point about federating ads. I’m quite sure that would make other instances consider blocking or defederating other instances.
hopefully never
I am more of a business person than a developer, so I approach it from that perspective.
I suspect that we will see different instances using different ways of paying for the service. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least bit if there might be an ad supported instance, donation supported instance, subscription instance, etc. I think this is great because it puts power in the hands of the user to chooser the experience they want. It should strongly encourage the design of a platform that prioritizes the user.
Right now things feel hacked together, but its inevitable that at some point performance issues, onboarding friction, and UX issues will be addressed. I really think its only a matter of time before decentralized platforms talking to each other take over.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a pay-to-federate model as well.
I’m hopeful that no single instance will gain such a large proportion of the userbase that they could try to defederate and hold other instances to ransom like that. I’d like to think their users would jump ship rather than be cut off from the rest of Lemmy.
I think though that more needs to be done when onboarding new users to spread the load across more than a few popular instances.
I could maybe see users supporting it if the instance in question were open about their finances and were using the money for purposes the users involved approved of.
For example if the money were being used to pay infrastructure costs and for one or more Lemmy developers rather than to make server owners rich.
Personally, I will always block ads and never use a service that I can’t ad-block, but I will sometimes pay for services that put the money back into the product. So I might support a patron model.
100% and I actually love this about the fediverse. Everyone can experience it within their own rules.
I could see both ads and subscriptions work (although, the former might be “useless” for those using adblockers, after all, so I’d see persistent/static sponsorship ads similar to how some FOSS projects do it to be more likely).
Especially the latter, for certain services that focus on providing value. A friend of mine mentioned Misskey for example, apparently being used by some Japanese artists. Considering Twitter’s on its way out by being harmful to commission artists, I could see someone spin up such instance and ask X amount for providing a marketplace for commissioned goods.
People could monetize individual instances. They can’t monetize the whole thing because its open source software.
I’m kind of shocked how many young kids don’t get this.
Everybody has to learn everything some time.
It is okey not to understand it. Don’t be rude. You were also not born with knowledge of the principles of free software and fediverse.
Yeah its more that I assumed each generation would get naturally better at tech, but its more like cars where the first generation knows how to fix them and subsequent ones don’t, because the cars get so good that you don’t need to
There’s some truth to that. The computers I was first exposed to costs thousands of dollars and all you got was a text console with a prompt. You had to figure out how to make the magic box do something meaningful.
Now a Raspberry Pi computer with 1000x more compute power, memory plus network connectivity costs $6. The equivalent of the computers I originally learned to program on is now basically a disposable commodity.
I recently experienced this while building an upgrade for my 3D printer. The upgrade kit included a touchscreen. I found out later that the touchscreen was effectively its own separate computer with more than 10x more resources than the actual computer inside the 3D printer that was doing the most important calculations.
The compute and memory resource constraints were basically nonexistent factors in the design of the printer and the upgrade kit. Merely, a simpler computer was easier to design for and characterize, so the printer itself had a very simple computer, and for the UX, a “beefy” computer was much easier to program. It’s bizarre seeing how little the amount of computer resources mattered. It might as well have been free.
I really wish those 6$ raspies were easily accessible though.
Your point still stands, it wasn’t easy getting a tower in the olden days either.I just bought a few at adafruit. I didn’t realize they were in short supply now.
I really wish those 6$ raspies were easily accessible though.
Orangepi was the alternative for a while. There are lots of “knockoffs” that are even cheaper these days. RPi decided they wanted to focus on business customers first and have kind of strayed from their mission in exchange for (likely) perpetuity and subsidizing the hobbyists and poor people they are supposed to care about.
LTT did a good video on alternatives 4 months ago. That’s a while in this market though, so I’d definitely shop around.
Shockingly- I’ve heard from a few of my teacher friends that the upcoming generation isn’t that computer savvy. (EDIT- “traditional” computers that is).
We’re starting to see the “tablet kids” grow up. They were raised with iPads and iPhones. And they didn’t have to deal with figuring out how to “deal with the inner workings” to download a bunch of computer programs. Their typing skills are apparently not that great as well for the same reason.
Can confirm. I’ve heard the exact same thing from several teacher friends as well.
I confidently told my retired parents that I thought we were approaching a world where self-hosting and open source would be far more common, I’m disappointed that it sounds as if I overestimated computer literacy in the new generation :(
The average person is just as unlikely as ever to understand the processed behind the tools (conputers) they use. But the nerdy kids of each generation have more access to knowledge that lets them nerd out even harder. And the connectivity of the internet gets ideas shared easily. If someone is interested in a hobby these days they have a knowledge base that only the most dedicated nerds had back in the day.
it might happen anyways if the new cool thing is hosting microservices like social networks, video streaming, etc for friend groups
The average person is just as unlikely as ever to understand the processed behind the tools (conputers) they use. But the nerdy kids of each generation have more access to knowledge that lets them nerd out even harder. And the connectivity of the internet gets ideas shared easily. If someone is interested in a hobby these days they have a knowledge base that only the most dedicated nerds had back in the day.
This is the consequence of so many years of idiot-proofing things. While not necessarily a bad thing most of the time, having shit that “just works” absolutely ruins troubleshooting skills. I see it all the time with my nieces and nephews.
But how long until the fediverse is monetized?
Why male models?
It already is. As soon as something like this is internet facing, you get search companies and now AI companies mining data to use for commercial applications.
In terms of the sites themselves though, it’ll vary and depend. As it grows in populatity, there will be monetised content in plain sight (think all those secretly sponsored and advertising posts on reddits used to try and push products subtly - the bigger the user base, the more attractive it is to target users with hidden advertising), and then there will be what the servers do themselves. Some may exist on donations, but others may chose to try to place adverts, others may go for subscriptions.
Ultimately there does need to be money coming in from somewhere to keep the services going. There are many free success stories: Wikipedia continues to be free, without adverts, thanks to donations from users and sponsor organisations. Mozilla continues to produce a free open source browser through a mix of donations, sponsor organisations, and paid search deals. Linux is a huge free open system, with a mix of donations, sponsor organisations and commercialisation of the ecosystem.
There isn’t really a reason why social media can’t also be “free” for consumers, but we don’t know yet how that will play out. On traditional social media, the user is the product - our data is mined, we’re marketed at, we’re advertised at, our data is sold on. The fediverse breaks alot of these methods - or more accurately it opens up these methods to everyone as anyone can access much of the data, removing the value companies have in monopolising and gate keeping the data. It’s a double edged sword, but be in no doubt even in the fediverse companies can and will monetise whatever data they can get their hands on.
Hmm. In the old days, pretty much every ISP ran a Usenet server. The cost was covered as part of your internet connection bill, it was just part of the service.
I could see a potential future where running a Lemmy instance became table-stakes for ISPs, like Usenet used to be.
