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?

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?