One thing that’ll need serious consideration:
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
Edit: sorry if you saw this comment two or three times, posting can still be a bit buggy…
I will tell this nonstop, online advertisement (as a form of monetization) is pretty damn dated nowadays. You could give them literally a dollar every year and they would make more from you than serving you ads.
Unpopular opinion: I kinda feel like a reason ads are so popular nowadays is because it gives the user a way of feeling they are supporting a product/creator by doing pretty much nothing.
your post is very interesting for me to consider
I think pitching in a dollar every year is preferable. Heck, I even pay much more to Youtube to get rid of advertisements. But it does pose a significant threshold for new users.
A hybrid model doesn’t sound too bad to me, where you can pay for an ad free server.
Get a VPN to India or Turkey (there are likely a bunch of other countries too). It’s a lot cheaper: I pay around £1.50 (RS129) a month
They are popular, because it’s a way to squeeze out extra money out of the users (often in addition to paying for the product) and since the software is proprietary the users often can’t do anything about it.
Btw notice how most youtubers turned into salesmen that want to sell you something in each video and their sponsored segments are often minutes long.
I’m thinking about creating my own personal instance hosted on maybe a RasPi or something, just for myself. It would cost very little (RasPi and Domain name are already laying around unused…).
It might not be the fastest, and if my internet is down then the instance won’t be available (but then again I’d be the only one using it anyway).
But I’m still trying to figure out other pros/cons with that approach.
I fully support that idea. Nothing comes free and as a lemmy.world user I’m using lemmy.world resources to browse lemmy.ml pr whatever. It’s only fair that I fund this server to do it’s work in some way.
As long as we aren’t charged for getting the content itself.
How are fediverse admins currently funding their instances?
Self funding or donations
Thanks, I have another question: what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won’t have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?
If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo
That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it’s overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.
That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it’s relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
Beehaw was running on a 96€/month VPS and temporarly upped it to 336$/month to handle the reddit implosion.
Ooh, that’s less than 5c/user/month, this can totally work without overloading with ads.
Hell, that is like one impression per user per month on Adsense. You could put a single unobtrusive text ad on top and probably pay for your server
That’s a good question that I’m unqualified to answer but I’m sure that !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is a good resource for this.
Just having ads is not a problem.
Advertisements are fine, as long as it’s not too hard to block, or if they follow the same rule as other posts in that you can always upvote/downvote and comment on them.
I don’t think many instance admin would go for it though currently, as that would be the fastest way to turn your users against you.
I would prefer that ads NOT be the same as regular posts to prevent people from mistaking promoted ads for actual content. Reddit was really bad about this, you would click a thing thinking it was legitimate only to find out it was an ad after the fact. I want my content and my ads to remain separate. They need to be clearly marked (not stealthily marked like on reddit), the ratio of ads to content should heavily favor content, and they need to be dismissible.
Maybe admins could start with opt-in ads that they ask if you want when you create an account? Very few people would accept them but some would and even tho it wouldn’t cover the costs it could help a bit. You definitely shouldn’t just enable ads for all tho
I don’t understand why people think it’s necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?
No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don’t notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).
Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.
Back in 2008 I met a bunch of the VLC devs at a KDE related open source software conference. They talked about their experiences getting approached by companies with “fuck you” levels of money with offers they couldn’t refuse – and yet refused. In 2008 it was about bundling spyware with installers, largely. I always admired their stalwart refusal to bend.
Side note: this was shortly after they’d completed their transition to Qt as their toolkit. They stole their little volume control widget from KDE’s media player, Amarok. The beauty of open-source and cross pollenation. I expect Lemmy and kbin and others in the fediverse will freely cross pollenate too. In the end, open source wins.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
Perhaps you are right. They also have server costs, but maybe they aren’t as big. But other federated networks exist: Mastodon, Matrix and PeerTube. I don’t think they have ads, so Lemmy should be able to at least reach their size without them. I can’t say what would happen when it reaches a billion users though.
On the other hand the costs will be distributed among many instance owners, so I don’t know why ads would be needed. We can have thousands of instances for example.
How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.
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I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501©(3) status).
Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we’ve gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.
Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I’m sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don’t need advertisements or to profit.
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CEO-Proof, but not Lazy-Instance-Owner-Proof. ahem beehaw ahem
Beehaw’s choice was Beehaw’s choice, and reading through their reasoning for it, I can understand why they’d defederate with the current influx of users seen.
And that’s the point and their right- we all have the choice. If you’re unhappy with a server’s federatipn choices or user base, you can move to an alternative and still federate with the other servers for content.
But then you just use another instance. As long as it stays decentralized, it will be robust. If one instance takes over, then it’s no different.
I still don’t quite understand what happens to all the content on the decentralized instance.
Say I belong to the lemme.world but subscribe to a sub about, oh I don’t know, let’s say Movies, on Beehaw. Once they decentralize all that content become inaccessible, to me from any other instance, right?
I mean i know i can find another Movie sub on anther instance but it may many be as good as the one on Beehaw.
Unless I created a login on beehaw instance I’m not going to be able to access any of their content or participate in that sub on that instance.
Did I get that right?
Almost, but not quite. If lemmy.world doens’t defederate from beehaw (it’s a two way thing) then you can still see all their posts, and interact with lemmy.world users on those posts. But beehaw users, and users of every other instance won’t see your comments, and you won’t see theirs.
I’m not saying nothing is lost when an instance goes haywire. But, it’s certainly much more robust against those things then reddit. How much have you lost by not being part of beehaw? Something, but, it’s still a very good community.
🤣
Not exactly. Lemmy has separated the developer role from the admin role.
From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development. Two full time developers isn’t going to be enough to get Lemmy to a position it can compete against Reddit or the next Reddit. Lemmy is rough around the edges and needs work; it needs to develop ways to incorporate code from others.
From an admin role, the various servers are going to need to solve major issues, including how to fund server costs. We are also seeing the fraying of the federation model as different admins have different goals for their part of Lemmy and these goals clash with each other.
There is going to be a ton of growing pains, and some of them are going to come from the fact that there isn’t a CEO of Lemmy to choose which way to resolve problems.
From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development.
No they don’t. The platform is open source, so the more users they have, the more of those users will become contributors.
Yes they do. This is why some FOSS goes to places like Apache, why there’s a Python foundation, Spark has Databricks, Kafka Confluent and Trino Starburst.
The good thing about open source is that it allows everyone to contribute code to the base. The bad thing about open source is thay it allows everyone to contribute code to the base.
You need repo maintainers, developers that are constant contributor, code reviewers, people maintaining CI CD Pipelines, etc etc.
Yes it’s less than having proprietary, but it’s nowhere near “0”.
But how is the organization going to handle and review all this additional code? You can’t just trust someone coded something correctly without reviewing the code.
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It’s called decentralized
You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting.
If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.
But there will be other instances. If this one does something stupid, then we go to another one and miss almost nothing.
That’s a bit like saying “Yeah so we don’t care what reddit does, because you can always go somewhere else”
It’s the biggest instance, so it’s where most of the community and content would be etc etc. Just like what happened with beehaw could happen to world as well. This is only true for a mature decentralized federated ecosystem with a lot of redundant communities so that if one goes down you can easily consume the same content from a different instence. Is that the case now? I would say no, so it’s even less leader-proof.
Lemmy is perfectly fine with beehaw defederating.
There is certainly the risk of a single instance dominating. But even now there are a few significant instances and losing beehaw didn’t ruin anything.
It’s definitely good, but it isn’t full proof. Nothing is.
r/boneappletea
Sorry I couldn’t resist
Lol.
Guess it’s my turn
RIght. It does depend on there being multiple major instances.
It depends what he’s the CEO of. For example whether it’s a non-profit, a for-profit, a co-op, etc. It also depends on the licensing of the data. I don’t think this last bit has been tackled by Lemmy yet. Wikipedia has done it quite successfully. If the data is licensed under CC for example, and backups are published, then migration of the whole instance becomes possible like it is for Wikipedia. That would be one hell of a disincentive to fuck around, even if the company is for-profit. Non-profit co-op plus CC-licensed data is probably the most resistant.
Does not have CEO, yet …
But I can solve that. From now on I will take that burden.
Refer to me as super cool Lemmy CEO
First order of business, I command you lemmings to vibe.
Stay tunned for upcoming changes !!!
Lemmy.world might get a CEO, but it’ll be different then the Lemmy software (which is open source) and it appears to be possible to migrate off of a given instance if this one gets unreasonable
Fuck off CEO
mmm someone is not vibbing would you like to go to lemmy.gulag ?
You can chain me but I will never be silent and I will never stop fighting for a FOSS/JS-free web
Oh chain you?! Don’t threaten me with a good time.
*wips you
Who is my dirty litlle Stallman?
Have you heard of Linux Operating system, I heard they are pushing proprietary code in kernel for better performance does that not sound good my boy?
NOOOOOOO!!!
CEO-resistant.
This. Even Lemmy could technically get fucked over
Not CEO-proof until user and community migration by individual is possible
This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.
Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn’t until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail – donations are nice but are never enough.
As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.
We’ll need someone to input that data, I guess we’ll need to create a new position for that.
I shall be the CAIIO (chief AI input officer) and may salary will only be $150m.
Hey that’s a lot of work for one dude. I’ll be your associate. I shall be the ACAIIO and my salary is twice as much as yours because of the longer title
Guys, we can all share. I’m sure we can create plenty of management and HR positions for everyone ;)
The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances
It’s not quite the same, but Meta/Instagram is working on a Twitter competitor that will use ActivityPub and therefore is essentially one huge Fediverse instance that they’re launching.
I disagree. The Free Software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system weren’t created for profit, but for user freedom. There is nothing wrong with making money in an ethical way (unlike what Reddit does), but that is not necessary for projects to survive and there are plenty of examples of this. Debian for example is a fully free operating system and it’s maintained entirely by volunteers for free.
The Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Blender Foundation. They are all non-profits.
Every platform/service/product that is owned by a single company is eventually going to breakdown and turn into the worst form of itself. Companies are driven by this fiscal quarter being better than the last and it is inevitable that eventually quality has to go out the window to increase profits. The only sure-fire way to “reset” quality or force the company to ensure quality is to not monetarily support them. But with the internet, that is very difficult to achieve with having so few platforms that connect us all owned by companies. The only answer on keeping the internet a quality space for socialization and connecting with each other, is decentralization.
Also MBA proof!
Well I’m not so sure about that. Just give it time, someone will find a way to monetize it. People are creative.
The problem isn’t necessarily people monetizing a platform, it’s forcing everyone to participate in the monetization whether they want to or not.
If there was a hypothetical Lemmy instance that was ad-supported or even subscription-based, that would be fine. Because we always have the choice to go to a different instance.
So who actually owns the server this instance runs on? Doesn’t it just mean they do whatever they want? So confused
There are a ton of Lemmy instances that all communicate with each other and each instance is ran on hardware by different owners. So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
My understanding is that (at present anyway) since accounts are not federated, your account on that “gone to shit” instance will be gone. Your content will still be on many federated instances, but not your account. That would be lost.
Yeah, one thing Lemmy needs to solve is account migration. Instead of creating a new account on a new instance you move your existing account from one instance to another. It won’t save the account if the instance is already removed, but it at least gives an option to move if you feel like there’s a better instance for you.
Ah… dope. So it’s currently just running through donations I presume. Another dumb question: If an instance owner goes rogue and just nukes it are your posts gone too or is it archived somewhere?
So if a Lemmy instance goes down, all of the communities and comments go down with it? Seems almost worst than having a CEO?
Seems like the saving grace is anyone can either start or move to a different lemmy instance whenever. It’s not like someone can just host their own copy of Reddit if spez ever went nuclear.
I’d say “sort of.” Lemmy as a software is under a classic benevolent dictator situation. It’s open source but as long as the lead devs remain two people we are kind of at their whim. Yeah someone could fork it but it’s the same issue of you’re now at the whim of that person keeping their fork up to date and what they want to do. Until they kind of allow more people having a say on the main repo it’s up in the air what happens truly.
We’ve seen this same situation with Emby to Jellyfin. Where the open source project gets so good it goes close source, becomes a company and leaves everyone scrambling to get people to help work on the last bit of open source code. Meanwhile Emby just used their huge install base to upsell people. Jellyfin is still trying to get full parity with Emby despite Jellyfin having thousands of contributors and being open source. It’s hard to keep up with well funded innovation compared to volunteer work.
I jumped ship from Emby to Jellyfin a long time ago. Just looked at their site now: “Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps.” Pretty sure you get all that in Jellyfin already.
Sure but anyone can implement something using the activityPub spec and federate with other instances regardless of what flavor they’re using.
so good it goes close source
That’s what the GPL is for: preserve freedom of the users.
To put a finer point on it, that’s precisely why it’s important for Free Software to be copyleft rather than merely permissively-licensed. (And for it to either have a trustworthy copyright holder, like the Free Software Foundation or similar non-profit, or to have too many copyright holders to make changing the license tractable.)
Exactly. They would have to rewrite all the code in order to make it proprietary. AGPL license ensures that not even an instance owner can (legally) change the code of their own instance without releasing the modified source code.
We need to make sure that any apps that are created for Lemmy, also have a Copyleft license. At the very least they should be Free Software (which doesn’t seem to be guaranteed sadly, since most people don’t know what that means).
“Created for Lemmy” isn’t really a thing, all you need is to implement the ActivityPub protocol. Whether or not it has any relationship to Lemmy has no bearing on if it can talk to instances using Lemmy’s implementation.
There is no dictator. The developers don’t have any control over people’s instances. They have very little power. We are the ones that have all the power since Lemmy is decentralized and Free Software.
On Reddit the users have way less power, but more than they realize. They can’t create their own instance of Reddit, but they can leave the platform entirely (and probably overwrite all their content with gibberish), which would probably kill the company.
Benevolent dictator is a software development term, that’s why it’s italicized. It’s not literal
I’d say it’s still behest to the benevolent dictator but it’s easier to switch to another if one goes bad. Lemmy.world is up to 150k users. It’s a main instance now and Ruud is providing server space for us all to use. If he goes bad then someone else has to step up and provide server space for other instances to take up capacity.
Lemmy as a whole is at 150k, lemmy.world is at 33k right now, and is 3k behind lemmy.ml (though it seems lemmy.world has more active users).
So who is the dictator then? Ruud or the developers? :) We could call him a dictator of his own instance and it is certainly the most popular one right now.
I guess Reddit users don’t want to leave their platform, because they are afraid of losing the content and the community. Most of them probably haven’t seen that there is a good alternative yet. When we are using one Lemmy instance, we know that there are many alternatives, because we know that that’s the whole point of Lemmy. So even if there is a big instance that has most of the users, it should be fine. It would be better if the users were more spread out though.
I’m trying out lemmy and enjoying it so far it feels more engaging (I was using baconreader and had a lot of smaller communities). I loved reddit for what it was and am pissed at corporate assholes ruining it for profits. Lemmy has made the internet feel a little bigger again.
I’d say each instance host is their own dictator, but there are so many hosts that you can always move to another if you dont like what theyre doing. It’s not like you’re stuck spending money to jump from one to a next and apps like Jerboa let you copy your instance accounts to eachother.
Maybe it’s inevitable that every proprietary and centralized platform will end this way. They just keep getting worse. It’s been exciting watching Mastodon grow and now Lemmy. We now have a chance to change something and become more independent from greedy corporations. We can have software and platforms that don’t exploit us and where we, the users are the ones in control. People only need to want to make the switch. Then we can have a better Reddit here.
I didn’t know Jerboa had a feature like that. That’s awesome!
honestly the internet should be nationalized its the only way to ensure fair competition
NoCEOShitification
Unspezzable.
