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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.

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[-] MrEUser@lemmy.ninja 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’m going to tell you a secret…. Yes.

All those things could happen. Some people could run a site that has ads. Some people could run a site that charges a membership. Some sites could have a Patreon membership. Some sites could do subscriptions….

And some sites could be completely free.

The funny thing is, because of the federation, no one will be harmed. Let’s say I startup a site and all I do is pass through the cost of the site to each user. No profit, just what it costs to maintain the server is shared among the members.

Is that unreasonable?

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[-] fidodo@lemmy.sdf.org 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] archomrade@midwest.social 22 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] DarthCluck@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Merulox@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Sounds like Microsoft's embrace, extend, and extinguish

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[-] irkli@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago

No insult intended but as you say, new here, rtfm a while before complaining.

Yeah, it is a good idea for you to pay. How's two bucks s month sound? No ads, no tracking, no personal data theft, the ability to change instances if the one you're on goes fascist/corporate/whatever you dislike. Code you could actually modify.

No CEO whims, no need for "growth" I'm that ever increasing destruction mode.

It's different than corporate media. Those of us old enough remember the early internet and beyond, bbsing. This fedi shit is the good shit. Adapt! It's pretty fkn great.

Lol it's sucks now! Lol from the hyuuge influx of new people, new code, changes and a taste of chaos. I love this.

CHANGE IS GOOD!

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[-] mojo@lemm.ee 27 points 1 year ago

Because there will always be rebels running small to medium size instances based off of donations. It was the very first thing to happen at the birth of the internet, and will continue to happen today. Will there be a few major instances that eat up the majority of the fedi? Yeah, probably, but the design of the fedi is that the experience of decentralized social media will stay the same regardless of what's going on with instances of the network.

[-] hydra@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Let's just hope it doesn't go the way of email, it started the same way: federated service controlled by no one. Nowadays big corporations influence banlists to enforce a protection racket and non-compliant instances are both banned and filled with spambots.

[-] PaintedSnail@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

I'll be honest with you, I would rather have the ban lists than not. No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous. If someone gets on an IP blocklist because they either can't or don't know how to secure their system, then no one should trust anything from them. Having a way to identify them before they cause a problem is enormously helpful.

There is already a project underway to identify federated servers that just spew spam, and I am all for it.

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[-] Zippy@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

While correct in that email is definately now limited to a small number of major corporations, the core function has not been monitized. In other words, because I have a Gmail account, I am not limited to Gmail apps nor do they inject advertisement into them. I can live with that.

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[-] albertye@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

The fediverse is the coolest thing that could happened, freedom is what all people should seek for, creating their own spaces and not supporting corporations that only want to make money out of people's lives, data, attention, mental health, etc ...

It's better to support the instance you are in with donations for sure.

[-] SulaymanF@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The Fediverse SHOULD allow monetization and they don't yet. As per Mark Bayliss:

The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining and have been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.

I'm not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.

[-] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 23 points 1 year ago

I'm not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.

I'm not sure this is what the community wants, or what we should want. The server operators should be able to get enough money to afford operation and cover some of their time investment, but I don't think competing with businesses that obsess over large growth is a worthy goal.

[-] SulaymanF@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I understand what you’re saying but I do fear that we risk relegating Mastodon and Lemmy into niche apps the same way desktop Linux never got popular. As the linked author noted above, most people don’t care about “free as in speech” or whether a site is open source or not, they just want working social media where they can talk to others.

[-] notavote@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

I am, somehow, on both sides. I do think monetization is necessary, but would also like to keep part of it out of it.

I guess that I see monetization a bit idealistically, like having non tracking ads and sponsorships, or having separate instances with paid accounts that is also financing others... stuff like that. But that might not be enough anyway, as it is not for reddit, twitter, fb, yt... even with all of their data harvesting and selling.

So maybe donations are the way to go? Wikipedia is one of the biggest sites of the world and is managing to collect enough money through donations.

Lemmy/Mastadon is even easier, country/cities can have their instances to allow their citizens access to social network, companies can have their instances for their users and potential users or just as giving something to community.

And we can have this kind where we donate to individual administrators.

I think that even if I would enable adds they would get less than 1USD per month for me, let's say I donate 10USD per year for lemmy+mastadon?

Maybe tutanota, protonmail can have their instances? They are already hosting stuff, so would be a big problem (except moderation).

I can see all of this fail, but I also see it can succeed.

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[-] SmallAlmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] small44@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Moohamin12@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] matt@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] ClevelandRock@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] what_is_a_name@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

I may be a minority. But I would gladly join a server that is paid and I get stability, but also a better stronger fight against the inevitable onslaught of shit - in return.

[-] natflow@apollo.town 5 points 1 year ago

I would too. But only now that I’ve gotten a little familiar with how the fediverse works in practice. For entirely new users, asking them to pay for the Lemmy learning curve is a lot.

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[-] Chadarius@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Think of the Fediverse much more like Wikipedia than anything else. It is run in donations and volunteers. It is not for profit and for the benefit of all people.

[-] SloppyPuppy@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

Wikipedia is probably the most important thing on the internet fight now. It also needs some amount of servers, many crawlers scan it daily, I assume its a shitton of users and logins and API hits and what not. And still it survives on donations alone.

Eventually lemmy is not a streaming services with videos and and a lot of bandwidth. Its just text and people connecting. So I assume you dont need massive servers and shit.

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[-] hsl@wayfarershaven.eu 12 points 1 year ago

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?

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[-] lightrush@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's already monetised. Just click on the links under Donations in the main sidebar or straight to the OpenCollective page for a glimpse. We pay for it with our money. That's how we know we're not the product.

[-] rickdg@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

If we're talking the fediverse in general, I believe Zuckerberg is launching his twitter clone very soon and it has ActivityPub integration.

[-] sqibkw@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

That's very concerning! Sounds eerily similar to how Google killed XMPP back in the day. Honestly we probably shouldn't allow any federation with them to stay safe.

There was a really good writeup I saw recently either here in Lemmy or on Hacker News somewhere, can't seem to find it. In short though, Google adopted the decentralized standard, built it into Gmail so everyone uses their client, then eventually dropped support for talking with other XMPP clients.

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[-] yuki2501@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

That depends on how the admins decide to run their instances. After several crises and dramas, etc., I can say that those who decide to monetize eventually will; but so far people have been supporting their admins through crowdfunding.

The really big instances are deciding to be open to Facebook in exchange for big money. A lot of folks in other instances don't like it, and some instances have already decided to defederate from them in advance (search for the hashtag #FediPact). Yes, there's lot of drama involved.

[-] dinckelman@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

I am fully open to people running everything collecting donations. Or even sponsorships are cool. Straight up monetization through making users pay for shit that doesn't give anything in return is not cool. Let alone the fact that users make all the content to begin with

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[-] NutWrench@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

Well that's the nice thing about a decentralized platform. If someone tries to "take over" Lemmy, they would have to take over all 1,100 Instances on separate servers in different countries to ruin it.

[-] dsemy@vlemmy.net 6 points 1 year ago

Email became mostly centralized without any company buying thousands of independent email servers.

The same could (and probably will) happen with other federated services.

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[-] fidodo@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] slimarev92@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] KD_14@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I could see someone trying to sell ads on their instance. But ya I can't imagine many people would join unless they had some other features that are better than other instances.

[-] lillie@pawb.social 5 points 1 year ago

The Fediverse will never be monetized. It's open by nature, instances are maintained by donations and out of the administrator's pocket. Why? Because they have a passion for it.

Even if someone chooses to monetize one instance, people will move to another that isn't monetized. It's free and open by design, and will always be that way.

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[-] matt@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] hup@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

How many hobbiests running miniature train sets in their garage have monetized those train sets? How many backyard gardeners sell their crops.

In most cases people who choose to develop and administrate an instance of their own are largely just hobbiests of another type. Sure it costs them some money. Many hobbies cost money, it doesn't stop people from building things or growing things for fun.

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[-] jamesoh5@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I think there should be some monetization. Otherwise how will people pay for the server costs. Maybe small ads placed in the platform across the fediverse?

[-] AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

Advertising is poison. It corrupts everything It touches.

Users can donate to instances they wish to support.

[-] Rediphile@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago

Reminds me of anti-piracy perceptions. People are always like 'i bought the album to support the artist' which is great, sure, but they act like torrenting the album and just sending the artist the price of the album directly isn't an option when it always is. Artists will always accept a donation.

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[-] GONADS125@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I'm donating $2 a month for Lemmy.world. It's not much, but it adds up if enough people pitch in a dollar or two here and there.

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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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