So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?
3 years ago by ryan213 to c/nostupidquestions
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.
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.
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.
I think this is spot on. It's completely foreseeable that a well funded enterprise could stand up an instance that's super robust and can handle a lot more traffic than current ones. They could, say, attract celebrities to do AMAs and handle the load. Or maybe they could create some communities that they stock with a giant amount of useful content.
They'd do it for free, and it would just be another instance, but it would become invaluable, with more and more communities hosted there, and more and more users making it their home instance, until the owners felt they were valuable enough that they put their content behind a paywall or they start serving ads. Sure, people could just move to other instances, but the point would be that suddenly doing without them would be painful.
But unlike Reddit or Twitter, it's not as much as all or nothing situation, and other instances can compete in the same realm.
I haven't read a ton about it, but isn't this what Meta is potentially going to do with Thread?
That is the worry, yes. There's very little incentive for them to join the fediverse as a for-profit company otherwise.
I think there are benefit of killing twitter, mocking el*n and skirting europe regulation on moderation laws. But the worry is there, I hope the devs stand their ground and rejecting any doubious modification from meta on fediverse protocols.
Zuck did an interview talking about how they were looking at doing a spinoff of Instagram, using Fediverse, for text based social media. Basically a competitor to Twitter. Rumor mill says it’s call Thread, or maybe he said that in the interview, I can’t remember.
Incidentally, Google is kinda doing this with email.
If you run your own email server for your business, they will rate limit you under the guise of spam protection, even if your emails are never caught in their spam filters. Some business reported up to 12 hour delays on their emails being delievered. They want everyone to use preferably their own service, or at least another major giant's, so they can push the smaller players out of the market.
TIHI
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, especially with Lemmy which is a lot more permanent than Mastodon is. You can screenshot your old toots but you can't screenshot a userbase. There should be a way to migrate a community to another instance while keeping the subscriptions.
Hopefully it ends up like wikipedia
You mean promotion. Not all promotion is bad. When a game developper posts a content update about their game, that's promotion. And I think most subscribers of that community will be pretty happy to see that kind of promotion. It's opt in.
No, I mean ads. "Hey Kbinlets, what's your favorite fast food? I just love how crispy KFC is!"
I wonder if the mod who deleted my comment is in denial, or trying to cover their ass.
You're just not noticing that the ads are ads.
Nonsense. This place is refreshing, like the bold taste of New Coke.
That's been always the case on other platforms on top of the official ads. Damn every now and then you'd see what's clearly an guerilla ad campaign hitting the front page of reddit.
Oh shit was I the ad the whole time??
Reddit got WAY worse in the last 5-7 years though. I think corporations got more ok with it after best practices were both cemented and more publicized after the 2016 presidential election. Previously astroturfing was there for political campaigns and state actors, but more shady. Then Russia went off the rails with agitprop, Cambridge Analytical was all in the news, and everyone realized how pervasive and easy it was. Now everyone does it, and often.
Nonsense, "No, Stupid Questions!" is actually sponsored by "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
There are no ads, just as there are no added flavours in McDoubleBeef 100% flavour and 200% beef!!!
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.
This is a great analogy. It would be like asking what happens when someone tries to monetize email.
All the users would jump ship to another one immediately.
Most email providers are monetized. For most providers you either pay a subscription or they inject ads. The important thing is if they get to greedy and start providing a bad service you can switch providers.
Email services are monetizable, but email itself cannot because it's not a tangible thing, it's an idea and agreement to follow that idea.
Oh, I guess I've never noticed lol. Does Gmail have ads?
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?
okay
Yep. I don't get why it is so hard for people to understand that non-profits CAN sustain themselves from donations. There's so much brainwashing and gaslighting by corporations going on that people start to question everything outside of the ultra-capitalist system, even the most basic and genuinely nice human interactions are doubted
However if reddit decided they want to plug the leak, if they offered $1 million to the admins of sh.it.just.works and lemmy.world and beehaw, if they accepted, reddit could then defederate the three largest instances from everywhere and Lemmy would basically have to start from the ground up again. A lot of users would probably not bother making an account elsewhere as they may feel it not worth it since it could happen again.
Brave of you thinking that I don't have multiple Fediverse accounts. Buying those instances would be worthless, since users would just migrate to a different instance, even easier than moving from Reddit.
Lemmy wouldn't have to start from the ground up. They would already have all the source code and instances, a potential userbase who was already convinced not to let these people control their social networks, who already have the frontend installed on their devices, is already used to the interface and features of the app. Even if Spez were to do this, other instances would be built and in the long run it would be a financial hole.
Another possibility is that a big corporate will dedicate a dev team to make their own FOSS fork of the Lemmy codebase that, due to its rich feature set and support, becomes THE version of Lemmy to use. Kinda like Meta and React (though React was originally fully internal to Meta, you get the point). Of all the big companies to do this kind of thing, Meta would be the best, imo, given how they've been with their AI models and React, but I still don't like the idea given what we've seen happen with Red Hat.
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.
Depends how successful we are in fending off Zuck from trying to muscle his way in. That's probably the first challenge.
Otherwise this is a non-issue, as there will simply always be both kinds. Nothing is stopping you from simply Self-Hosting your own Lemmy server.
Yes, which is why you should pick your server with care. If you do not pick one that suits your desires, that is on you.
This will not be as effortless as reddit any time soon, so if that is your goal, you may prefer it over there.
If they want to crate a Lemmy instance so badly, why don't they? It's open source, everyone can host an instance if they want to.
The only thing I can imagine is that they're restricted from monetizing it due to some rule of the license
I think most people are assuming we'll have the ability to fend off anything. All it's going to take is Zuck creating a new fediverse-enabled platform and just giving everyone with an Instagram account access using their already existing accounts. We'll be outnumbered by the millions.
We don't need to become more successful than Meta in order to fend him off, so to speak. We merely need to still be here, and independent.
This is a big part of the shift in mentality that needs to happen. Something doesn't have to be the biggest to be better. We don't need millions of concurrent users per server to enjoy connecting with other people and sharing ideas and art.
Like, a local cafe doesn't need to beat the profit margins of a Starbucks, it just needs to make ends meet. And it's probably a lot better experience in the process.
Realistically every instance can monetize in whatever way they see fit but I highly doubt this'll be a thing. Mastodon is way bigger and more expensive than Lemmy and it runs just fine through donations. No reason why the same won't work here.
Lemmy itself is also likely to follow in Mastodon's path by getting money from sponsorships and fundraisers. See https://www.investopedia.com/...
This might work for now, but I'm skeptical how well this would work in the long run. Do those company pay a monthly fee to be there? What happens when there's a hundred companies on that list? What happens if a company pays a substantial amount to be there and threatens to stop paying if xyz doesn't happen?
The power here is in the hands of users and admins. We just have to be careful not to let a company like Google or Facebook/Meta take control over a substantial portion of the fediverse. See also: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
For many people, myself included, paying $10 a month for some VC schmuck to buy another pina coloda while he’s resting on the beach smoking a Cuban cigar laughing about how much money he made from exploitation is a no-way. On the contrary, paying $10 once every few months to cover hosting costs for a service we all enjoy using and is not misusing our funds is something a lot are happy to do.
When I purchase something or subscribe to a service (the only subscription services I have are servers I rent sooo..) I think twice about whether I wanna spend this money because I can find a loophole around it, donating to keep my instance alive is something I’m ready to do.
I'd say it's more that we've been paying out the nose in the form of offering up our data and digital autonomy, and by allowing not only the Internet but our societies at large to degrade and polarize. We've paid dearly for our 'free' services, in the case of the US with everything from our reproductive rights to our connections with our own families and communities.
I'd much rather pay the price of an extra latte now and then for real internet communities than deal with actual Nazis and orbital Teslas for some shitty undermoderated ad feeds infested with trolls, AI, and literal societal saboteurs on the payrolls of Putin and Winnie the Pooh.
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?
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've tried to explain this to people before, without success. I'm starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.
For me it's building boats. I've only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I've got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.
I'll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.
It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it's a pretty foreign concept for some folks who've bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.
Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.
I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.
Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.
But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it's not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.
Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you're not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what's the point?
Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that's your whole motivation it's going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.
There's a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.
Exactly. Federation means no single instance needs to serve millions of users. If one gets too big and becomes too commercialized, you can move to a different one that shares your values. If large instances cost more per user as they scale up, we just need more instances.
I also think people are vastly overestimating the cost to serve users on Lemmy/kbin. Last time I calculated it, lemmy.world costs were around €0.01/mo per monthly active user. That can be maintained with 1% users donating €1 a month.
Yes, the concept of the Fediverse has so many inherent advantages over classical, corporate monolith social media that I hope that in the end, after all the desperate attempts of current sites (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) to finally become profitable have failed, it will lead to a freer and better Internet.
If I move to a different instance, what changes about my experience?
There will probably eventually be some commercial Lemmy sites. I honestly think it would be awesome if large game studios, and software companies, and anyone else who has need for a forum, made their own federated Lemmy instances as their official support forums.
Man I'd never considered anything like that, but being able to see activity across multiple official forums at the same time. That'd be amazing
Besides all the discussion of nonprofits and donations, fedi server hosts have way less overhead. They're not generally trying to profit, so they only need to break even (or run a deficit small enough to deal with out of pocket). A corporation is trying to give 6 or 7 digit salaries to CEOs and/or shareholders. So they need to extract more than the cost of hosting.
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.
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.
As soon as Lemmy instances are unsustainable out of pure interest for the concept of the Fediverse. I doubt there will be subscriptions, first it'll be donations, and then some instances may have ads. It's an inevitable that both will happen (either on the same instance, or some instances opting for donations to stay up, and others opting for ads to stay up). No one can run the servers necessary for this platform out of pure charity; the bill for the Fediverse is going to be due someday, and it has to be paid.
But it’s sustainable if it’s non profit.
Most third party Reddit users were happy to pay in the range of $5 a month. The reason everything is shutting down now is because they don’t just want to break even, they want profit, and a shit ton at that.
The fediverse makes social media non-profit by default which means that we can all share the cost.
Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in the world and is still non-profit. It shows that it’s sustainable.
But even non-profits have costs that they need to cover somehow. If they don’t, they’re still not sustainable.
If something is free then 99% of users won't spend a penny. Anyone who ever did any business knows that. You either make 1% pay for everyone (just like "free" games on mobile phones do), force everyone into subscription or sell your users to advertisers. Choose your poison.
That's sustainable for now, because instances are microscope. If at some point in time we expect lemmy to become a mainstream platform for communication with tens or hundreds of millions of users in their respective communities. It will become unsustainable long long before then IMHO (I'm happy to be wrong only time will tell)
The cost/user for Lemmy instances is through the roof, and the grand majority of people will not be willing to make donations. Perhaps awards like what Reddit did is a good option?
What about longevity. Who is going to pay for the storage for the hundreds of petabytes of storage for comment and media history? What about replication between instances? Do you have a retention period and delete history, losing knowledge to time?
I worry :/
Edit:
Maybe I worry too much, but now after Reddit maybe I'm just gunshy and am afraid of finding and contributing to new communities that end up being wiped due to sustainability issues.
I hope this problem gets solved, or worked around in some capacity.
They also wanted control over the user base, so they could do more intrusive bullshit to push more ads onto users. With the fediverse there's no monopoly on the platform so no one instance can get full control and abuse their power. With Reddit the only choice was to either submit or leave completely. With Lemmy all you need to do is swap instances.
But it's sustainable if it's non profit.
I think this is something that's hard to organize with our current economic system, but very much worth experimenting with.
The neat thing is we can try any concept we can dream up and federate. People can run through funding concepts and structures and failure isn't all that bad.
Im still wrapping my head around the concept but FOR EXAMPLE could someone create an instance that requires a subscription fee, link it to their own app (like a retooled RIF) and offer a curated and managed experience?
Vs
Join a free instance, use what free software you want and have to figure out the nuts and bolts yourself?
This is inevitable as well.
A user base as large as Reddit has an infra bill in the tens of millions. And that's mature, with cost optimization at all levels to reduce compute, static content costs, more effective caching....etc
Lemmy instances are probably an order of magnitude more expensive to run on a per-user basis, at least.
This means the bill for the Lemmy fediverse if it had the active user base of reddit could be conceivably be near or over a collective $100mill/y with the majority of that just being a result of fragmented, high cost, infrastructure running a (at scale) low performance application.
You can't do that, the fediverse and Lemmy software doesn't work that way.
What about some sort of equity load balancing shenanigans? Small instances take on some load roughly equivalent to what they use from other instances or something. In another comment I was talking about funding instances and being able to rapidly iterate funding methods. One issue is they get value from the federation, so contributing all or some portion of what you use may be fitting.
Just... a reasonable one.
This is miles away from how the Fediverse works.
The cost will be spread out on an instance by instance basis due to which the cost per user will be low and if not they can also host their own instance which doesn't cost a lot. If it's something around $5 a month I wouldn't mind paying to support a service I plan on using everyday.
That's not how cost/user works. The cost/user actually goes UP the more small instances you have as a result of more expensive, smaller scale, and severely less optimized infrastructure. Infrastructure gets cheaper on a per-user basis as it consolidates, there are lots of technical reasons for this, but it can be summed up with scale (infra per "unit" is cheaper the more you can guarantee you'll use, and LOTS of cost optimization paths open up the larger you get).
My point is that the community is going to hit a growth barrier, and that barrier is money and efficiency. Would you be willing to donate $5/m to 50-100 instances? Since to support that kind of scale they would need to whittle down to one instance per community for large communities, and massive communities (think 10-50 million users) might not even be able to exist with the current Lemmy hosting model. I wonder if even 1-5million user communities would even function without dedicated engineering to support the infrastructure and custom tools/services to make it work.
....etc
It's a real problem. One that will be felt sooner than you might think, and one that will limit the growth, stability, and longevity of communities.
Donations are already happening in the Fediverse. Lemmy,world is funded by donations to the Mastodon.world instance. Many Mastodon users donate to their instance. I give $3 per month to my instance (sfba.social). They put out a quarterly report breaking down how much cam in and went out.
I donate in order to have an ad-free experience. If the admins separate the finances of Lemmy.world and Mastodon.world I will donate here as well.
If anyone puts ads on an instance it's not really a good encouragement for someone to join, and what with the nature of the fediverse it's more likely to make people try finding a better deal elsewhere.
I would definitely move to a different instance if my instance started using ads to fund itself - I'd rather the instance mandated a subscription than doing that.
Also another thing to consider is how other instances started spewing ads all over the fediverse - the ones that have managed to get by without advertising would probably defederate from those that did so that they don't end up showing another instances ads. Meaning it makes no sense to support ads in the first place if you want to stay federated.
That said if it got so unsustainable that I had to pay a subscription I would probably consider moving to a smaller instance anyway or hosting one myself for myself.
Of course, but the important part is you have choice and instances will keep each other in check because you can always switch. With a centralized system like Reddit there's only one provider and if you don't use them you're locked out of the system entirely. This gives them a monopoly on the platform and the power to do anti user bullshit.
Email is also a protocol with distributed servers and compared to that I think each fediverse instance has far less lock in. With email I can switch providers but it's a big hassle to have to change all my accounts and tell people to use the new address and set up forwarding etc. With my Lemmy account I don't really care that much about my user history since it's all anonymous anyways and it's not connected to anything that's central to my life so if I have to switch instances it's not a big deal. It would be nice to have some kind of account linking to show that the different instance accounts belong to the same person, and that should definitely be possible to implement, but honestly it's not even that big of a deal to me.
In a quest to kill spam, email has become somewhat unhealthy and centralized. Setting up a new email provider is a lot more difficult today than it was years ago. Sending a message to the established providers from a new provider will often end up in spam.
You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards.
You can, but as I said, because you aren't a know provider every message from your server will end up in the spam folder of everyone using Gmail.
You won't have a functional system unless you back it with either Gmail or Outlook.
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.
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.
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.
For me, never. I will always move to a server that is run by donations.
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.
I think that Lemmy Gold, Silver & Bronze are inevitable, with say a 90/10 cut to instance/lemmy-devs.
It would be best if the developers and the biggest instances agree on a standard payment system to implement into the Lemmy UI.
I've already donated to my instance as it's a regional one, I didn't buy Reddit Gold, but Lemmy Gold/Silver/Bronze is appealing to me given the money goes to a much smaller local group.
I am fully for this form of payment. Along with that, the instance can also have monthly donor/subscribers badge of some sorts. The hardware costs for maintaining an instance is not something astronomical like the Twitter/Reddit API (something like $500 per month for thousand+ active users). So just having like 50+ monthly subscribers should cover this.
Edit: My instance already has donations and the owner is quite happy with the setup.
It depends on the instance in particular. Someone could self host for them and their friends and just cull storage every now and again.
didn't mean it like that just that if we start restricting functionality behind paid tiers it could get to the point where Reddit had that weird turbo thing like discord nitro that you could only post embedded GIFs and stuff if you had it
fully agree though
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.
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.
Honestly, we really don't know. mastondon.world and lemmy.world are run by donations and that's worked so far. Ruud and his folks have been pretty upfront about their finances.
The general temperament I've gotten is people around here are opposed to a corporate like monetization. I agree with that. Usually, at least what I've observed, is that when a service monetizes it becomes enshitified.
We'll find out eventually what happens.
Would be pretty trivial to set it up as a non profit for anyone looking to seriously raise money but support community values.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why male models?
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.
Can confirm. I've heard the exact same thing from several teacher friends as well.
Everybody has to learn everything some time.
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 choose 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.
Capitalism is relatively good, gives performance & frugality incentives. Unrestrained late-stage capitalism... not so much. Think of it like oxygen. At 21% you're great (and need it to live), at 90%+ you spontaneously combust.
This basically
"I don't actually like pizza"
"Yeah well you could just eat horseshit instead"
people who argue about politics always seem to unyieldly defend extremist views
hasn't human cooperation always been about making compromises, finding a balance, and understanding each other? smh...
This is a dumb comment
And just to add to my previous reply - creation of Lemmy IS an act of capitalism! The author of Lemmy decided he didn't like Reddit. So he made the most capitalist decision in their life - to create a competition. Lemmy is an actual flagship of capitalism and free market: when even people who dislike capitalism turn to capitalist tools to improve their lives.
I'm sorry, but Lemmy would not exist without capitalism. And you won't be typing angry comments on your phone in the loo without it. You would, most likely, work in some mines right now and a slice of bread for lunch would be your best achievement in life.
Wow, news flash, you must participate in capitalism while living in a capitalist society. Though I fail to see how creating a free open-source distributed alternative could be construed as a "capitalist" move. Maybe look into the lemmy developers and their personal politics before assigning motivations to their actions.
You actually can't just move to North Korea lol.
If there was an English-speaking Socialist country with a liberal immigration policy, I honestly think we'd see a lot of Americans and Brits moving to it.
Sure thing buddy, "If, if, if". It's almost charming how naïve your idea is. An English-speaking socialist utopia with open doors? Let's get real. Maybe the lack of such a place screams less about market demand and more about the failures of socialism. Have a look at history before making such wishful statements. The luxury of musing such fantasies? Courtesy of capitalism.
I mean, it is possible that instance admins will be able to show advertising on ones instance, but you will be able to find dotation based, ad-free instance instead. Lemmy as a whole won't be monetized, only a particular instance. But it's only my guess
Fediverse is, well, federated. This means that it's spread across multiple servers that are independently run by their admins, but have agreed to work together and share communities between each other.
For example, lemmy.world is a site operating several communities, as are beehaw.org and lemmy.ml. One of them could choose to monetize, and that wouldn't affect the other sites. If new site pops up that is full of ads and spam, then other sites could decide to block communities from them on their site.
The problem is that a community could be screwed over because their specific instance either runs out of money and goes offline, or gets blacklisted for doing iffy things to make enough money to stay afloat.
Sure their existing content will be backed up on other instances, but the users will then have to create accounts elsewhere and work out which instance will host their new community.
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld/expenses
I think this includes mastodon + Lemmy but the costs are rising slowly.
Facebook is makikg their own Twitter aoternative apparently based on Mastodon, so at least that instance will be monetized probably.
It's definitely possible to see scammy for-profit strategies pop up.
A more likely outcome is Big Tech coming in and fragmenting and dissolving ActivityPub servers like all the Lemmy servers. It will most likely be Big Tech incorporating the big tech websites/servers (Meta, Twitter, etc) into ActivityPub and then creating a closed Big Tech ActivityPub-like system where the artifically popular servers/instances (Meta, Twitter, etc.) migrate from FOSS ActivityPub to a closed for-profit system and essentially close off FOSS Lemmy. And most people wont understand FOSS ActivityPub vs Big Tech ActivityPub-like system thereby rendering OG Lemmy useless.
I prefer the idea of have separation; one whole server(s) for bots, one for for‐profit big tech, etc. Big Tech can play but won't interfere with the heart of the AcivityPub.
But who tf am I?
and this is why we must FIGHT BACK!!!! I recommend the best way is to make the entire messaging system, twitter included, government owned and regulated. Who pays for it? The top 10% of all wealth and income earners in each country. BAM!!! Simple and QED.
We can privatise it again later, when the rules and environment for regulation are more settled.
An article covering similar issues to what you brought up.
much thanks!
A more likely outcome is Big Tech coming in and fragmenting and dissolving ActivityPub servers like all the Lemmy servers.
How? If, say, Facebook built a Lemmy-compatible instance, the worst they could do is eventually defederate it from other Lemmy instances, in which case we're right back where we started.
Don't know exactly, but it's what happened with Google and XMPP.
Same thing can happen here.
But I'm imagining that Big Tech starts to post from their own server with content that is interesting to the the masses, rather than us nerd, then they market to all the other servers to get a bunch of sign ups (maybe with exclusive content or features, idk), then federate with their own other websites and servers using their own proprietary ActivityPub, then bam OG ActivityPub never takes off, withers and become even fewer nerds like me, and and a bunch of bots with little content.
It’s definitely possible to see scammy for-profit strategies pop up.
There's not inherently bad about there being a profit motive. Servers are expensive, developers are expensive. There are costs to be paid, and if I am going to do something full time I'm going to have to pay my bills, too.
That said, there's definitely a line where it's taken too far and it loses what originally made it great cough cough.
I think otherwise, only because being profit driven always ends up hurting the consumer. Whether it be squeezing out every penny from us and them not caring about leaving us destitute, to actively obliterating the environment, to stealing our data because "hey, you have nothing to hide right? Also, we'll only use it for marketing ;) . Don't ask why it's so expensive to sell."
It's up to you as a consumer to make those choices.
But would you do your job if it didn't pay you and you couldn't pay your rent? If I decided to really put effort into running an instance, developing a nice frontend, paying for the servers, should I not be able to pay my rent?
What amount of money is acceptable for me to have to spend, since it's immoral for me to try to get any of it back?
what is activitypub?
this is why all these concepts fediverse, kbin, lemmy, activitypub etc etc needs to be publicly disclosed in an internationally accessible wiki so that no single entity can ever take control. the fact there is no public and clear disclosure means people out there are CONTROLLING these technologies and have BAD INTENTIONS. Disclose them NOW.
Slow down man. Activity Pub is just the system that lets Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, etc.communicate with each other. Pretty sure it's open source and not some evil scary monopolistic thing like Chromium that every uses begrudgingly. Not everyone on the internet is a bad actor, even Kbin itself is developed by one guy in an apartment working 24/7 to try to keep everything afloat.
I believe all the information is publicly available. The problem though, is as you say: it's not easily accessible to us laymen. It's all in very specific technological terms and codes. In the name of federation, accessibility, and transparency, there definitely needs to be a single database that describes all this, just like your wiki idea.
Recommend researching what the Fediverse is. The whole concept is that there's no single entity controlling the service. Literally impossible-ish.
much thanks!
Hey, I responded to some of your questions earlier. I don't know if you saw my most recent response to clarify a few more things.
I have to say, seeing you on this thread being somewhat militant has me thinking you might be concern trolling? I'm trying to help you out, but you're jumping straight to conclusions like Kbin is going to cause WW3.
For anyone curious, this is the previous thread in question: https://kbin.social/...
there is nothing about being a troll if legitimate concerns are being raised. these concerns need to be raised now. it's good helldiver pointed some replies, but im guessing they will not be complete enough. people need to stop thinking the current state of information disclosure is enough. it isn't enough. look at the way crypto is disclosed. 50% of users have no clue wtf is going on. info needs to be disclosed in clear and concise and non-technobabble ways. github is horrible. it's full of geekspeak. we need to do better if we are to save humanity. we cannot wait till 500 years to solve hyperspace. we need to solve it now. that is why this is not being a troll. because we need to push ourselves. harder, faster, better than ever! look at fusion power. should have been solved 10 0 years ago. wtf is humanity doing? just scamming and cheating their way around. geezus. no wonder alien civs are not interested in talking to us. get real.
All of these things have already been disclosed.
ActivityPub is a public standard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
kbin is open source. https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
Lemmy is also open source. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Google is your friend.
I'm not sure about your last sentence. Google likes to collect cadavers. But I know what you mean :)
much thanks!! i will have a look at them :P thank you fo taking my concerns seriously :p actually there are huge groups of us high tech high AI high IQ people on discord who all feel marginalised and hated (many many incels here), and having people like you explain and open up really helps stop us from being suicidal and hating the world. we're all struggling. pls help. much thanks!
I think long term someone will come up with something. How hostile the community they arrive to?
Entirely up to how well we remember how it went the last time.
This is a great question. To add to this, what happens if/when/eventually there's enough users to warrant big players (celebs/fortune 500) wanting to dip their toes into Lemmyverse? I don't see this happening soon, but with enough growth, SOMEONE is going to want to reach this audience right? It'll start slow but if the trend continues, it's inevitable. Which is ok I think. The way I imagine it, celebs might have their own preferred curated/verified Lemmy instance. Maybe they'll use affiliate links for merch and promos?
That's up to the instance owners, really. I don't think the Lemmy software currently has ad support or anything like that but we could see that in the future.
Currently, most instances operate on the generosity of others. For instance, the one I'm on is mostly paid for by its owner/operator with some help with donations.
At some level they start taking so much resources that they'll need a way to be sustainable anyway. Personally, I'm hoping we see a horizontal spread out, where small groups and individuals start running their own instances. Seems more sustainable than only having like 3 large ones everybody uses.
Yup, and this is a good thing IMO. Ad supported instances, subscription based instances, and donation based ones all can coexist, and users can pick whichever they prefer.
Much better than the alternative of “you get stuck with whatever the current CEO thinks is the best strategy”.
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.
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.
While this is true, some of the bigger instances are explaining in detail how much they’re paying and for what on their Open Collabarative pages. If it doesn’t add up someone will notice eventually.
IMO whatever comes next needs to be decentralized from the get go, like a torrent system where the network sort of automatically scales with the user count. The fediverse is pretty cool right now but it's bound to get shitty real soon as people get tired of fronting the costs purely out of goodwill. Either the cost need to be spread around such that the individuals paying it really don't mind, or there needs to be an incentive to pay / way to monetize that is aligned with the common goal of a decentralized social network. Otherwise we'll end up with either a network of insignificant size (arguably what this is now) or a monetized shit hole like what Reddit has become
I keep thinking about how a system like that could work but I'm sure someone smarter than me has already figured out that it can't
well it kind of works for piracy, but that's because there are some very based people out there who take a lot of pride in seeding content that they want to keep available. Sort of like how the fediverse currently rests upon the shoulders of a few dedicated people who work hard to keep their instances alive under the onslaught of reddit refugees. I'd much rather have a system that doesn't depend on people's goodwill to survive though
Municipal👏 Social👏 Media👏
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.
Monero.town has a donation address and while you can prove you are human by linking an existing social media account during signup, you can also do this anonymously by donating a small amount of Monero. So far this model seems sustainable :)
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.
Text-only forums aren't super expensive to run unless you are doing it on the scale of reddit (or do stupid expensive things like have video hosting)
Another topic, I've seen people here are super hardline about keeping Facebook out of the Fediverse, and I just don't think that's going to work, Now Lemmy Explain how I think this is all going to go down:
If I were Facebook, I'd pay a bunch of big celebrities, say, a certain very talented Academy Award nominated Australian actress, a lot of money, to use Facebook Threads exclusively for a while, and give them the Checkmark. The most difficult part of getting a new social network started is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting that initial audience, which is the problem that Federation solves. So, although some instances will reject anything Facebook related completely, there will be plenty of instances where the userbase would want to interact with their favorite celebs directly a la Twitter, so there will always be instances that wants to federate with this Facebook instance.
But then, those media companies and talent agencies are going to realize, as they did against Netflix, "Hey, wait a minute, why are we paying these middlemen like Zuck and Musk so much money to host a cheap forum? They don't own the userbase on the Fediverse, so is it just for a Checkmark?", and they are going to start their own instances of Mastodon/Lemmy where everyone on their instances is verified celebs, to be used as these celeb's official account with no shitposting allowed, so they can control everything those celebs posts on their server instead. And THAT would be the downfall of Twitter/Facebook.
So, the best path for Facebook to move forward with is to offer easy cloud hosting of federated social media software for a subscription: Pay them 10 bucks a month, they'll handle all the server and upgrades, and even moderation, which will become the easiest way to setup "your own server", and that will be much more resilient to the anti-Facebook pact that is going on right now, because instead of one Facebook instance, now you may have to block hundreds of different Facebook hosted instances instead.
Which is why I'm expecting it to be their playbook if federated social media ever takes off. But there really isn't a solution I can think of for that.
I'm not really clear on the way the networking works with federated systems.
Say that an instance decided to charge a subscription fee, would they then have to defederate from free instances on a cost basis alone? To handle server load for requests from those instances?
Or, say that subscription was sustainable, would there be anything stopping someone from making a free instance to give users full access to that subscription-based content? The answer there is defederation right?
Trying to work out in my head how this system could be scalable without communities becoming walled gardens and thus removing part of the appeal of federation.
In part you can see this already - there are a bunch of servers that most lemmy instances have defederated from. In these cases information flow is one way - f.e. lemmmy.world doesn't get any updates from foo.baz, doesn't provide search results, communities, etc.
Subscription would make sense when the added value you provide is 1) availability guarantees, 2) performance guarantees, 3) membership guarantees, 4) moderation / content filtering options
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.
This would run counter to the principle that lemmy should remain detached from corporate control, though. Especially considering most places (in the US anyway) live under ISP monopoly. Comcast/NBC would end up owning like 40% of lemmy.
I predict corporate interests trying to run their own lemmy, branding it as something else, extending it to include features they don't push back to the upstream projects, then federating with other instances to maximize the amount of user data that can be collected.
remembering passwords or storing them
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.
Surprised no one else mentioned this... the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.
There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.
Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances...
To answer the second question... I don't know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I'm aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.
It IS monetized - right now by donations/crowdfunding.
What we need is for people to be more open to supporting what they want via micro-payments, regular donations, because that's the way to say NO to advertising which brings in virtually no income for the amount of time and bandwidth it consumes.
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.
Maybe one day some applications may open their own Server. I think that only on this server, the application will work, and the server and other expenses can be provided with the subscription system in the application.
In the old days of forums, it wasn't uncommon for a forum to ask for some small donations. which was never a problem (a good forum had a lot of good will and people willing to contribute). Remove the profit incentive and websites are not eyewateringly expensive to maintain.
Bitcoin with lightning is the future
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.
Ask yourself these questions..
How long until http protocol is monetized?
How long until POP, IMAP and SMTP (collectively referred to as 'email') is monetized?
How long before torrents are monetized?
The answer is, quite nearly from the start you could .. but anyone can still do everything you could with those protocols by themselves, for free, without any strings. Still people monetized all those things early.
Because those are all just protocol, or a digitized agreement on rules of communicating fixed sets of information. Sets like an email, or a website, or a collection of files. No one owns any of these rules they just exist and any two computers can agree on them and use that to exchange information.
Fediverse is a protocol. Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, and the others are all just programs talking the same protocols. No one allowed any of them to do so, they just agreed to. All the entities that make up the fediverse agreed to the same thing, so all of them can talk to each other, in theory. In practice each one can choose which others it wants to talk to. Just like you can build an email client that just will not send emails to Gmail. It's not because it can't but because it doesn't want to.
Ah yes, Facebook, where all the users on activity hub are from.
Wait. That's not correct at all.
Just because it happened a once or even twice does not mean it can't succeed despite that. Facebook doesn't have some core of active users using there activity hub protocol that they can unplug and snuff out the protocol for. Also every implementation like Lemmy and kbin and even mastodon have custom implementation allowing additional features beyond just what the protocol itself has.
At this rate mastadon, lemmy and Kbin themselves are more likely to hinder the growth of activity hub as FOSS. They're the ones implementing bunches of features the others have to either keep up with or defederate from. But a hundred walled gardens is still better than the one.
There's also a lot to say about the mindset of the users. Reddit still exists. Twitter does too. So does Facebook, etc etc etc. The users here chose this over those. These are distinct differences that make the argument of the article a bit weightless. The warning isn't weightless, and people need to be adamant that new users use different instances in order to block all this from being effective. But again, the fact that that article is shared over and over here shows the mindset of the users. We can't stop them from federation. Protocols are protocols. That's the point.
As someone who also doesn't fully understand stuff yet, best comparison I've seen is email.
I'm sure there are emails that cost money, but for the most part you can just. Move to a different email. If a group is on a server that's asking for money they can just change to another server, right?
All donations right now. I like the idea of adding awards to subsidize server costs.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I doubt we'll see ads in the form we know them from places like Twitter and Reddit. We may start seeing instances being sponsored by (or even operated by) businesses, and people can federate with them or not as they choose.
I also think paid subs will be a growth area and honestly this is the model I'd be most comfortable with, although I acknowledge the risk of excluding people who don't have disposable money to spend on such things.
It's up to the instance owners and the users. I can see some instances running on donations, some will run adverts and everything in between. Users will choose instances they prefer. That's the beauty of federation.
I'm game for a mixed model with some advertisements, but it cannot become reliant on ad revenue to exist. Beyond that, some kind of cheap membership model could work.
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.
@lemmy.world
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
That's it.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Let everyone have their own content.
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@lemmy.world
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
That's it.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Let everyone have their own content.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
go to feed...
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
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