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.
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
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.
Sounds like Microsoft’s embrace, extend, and extinguish
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re just not noticing that the ads are ads.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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It’s interesting to hear your take as someone experienced, because on hobbyist forums like /r/selfhosted I used to hear the complaint above all the time. Maybe people aren’t doing things correctly. I’ve never messed with my own email server and have no dog in this fight, but I’ve definitely heard that complaint a ton.
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.
You ask for donations. I’m donating to my instance for instance.
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.
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.
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.
As long as we don’t allow capitalist corporate greed to ruin the Fediverse like it has ruined (and will continue to ruin) practically everything.
Did you know that you can move to North Korea and enjoy life without capitalism and greed?
Did you know you’re commenting on a site that was created specifically because people don’t like capitalism and greed?
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.
