So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?

ryan213@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 599 points –

I'm fairly new and don't 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?

Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.

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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.

With that said, I'd encourage everyone to sign up to donate a dollar a month to your Mastodon and Lemmy instance. To me, a couple of bucks a month is worth it to not have to fight against a dumb algorithm or deal with ads.

And if we ever want to post videos, I imagine PeerTube links would be a good way to go?

I wonder how similar Lemmy is to Wikipedia in terms of storage/bandwith requirements? It's text and pictures in both cases, but there may be nuances that i'm not aware of as a noob

One big difference right now is that it's a ton of small people donating their time and servers for this. So the costs aren't as centralized and are spread over many people.

I saw a thread of instance owners talking about why they host, and some actually get free server usage through their work or run servers already and Lemmy only uses a small portion of that.

Wikipedia's page serves simple. The documents get edited and processed into html when submitted.

Lemmy dynamically builds the html for every single http get.

That's a very different cost for a server.

Umm, no? Lemmy UI is a PWA/SPA and all the html "building" happens in your browser.

It doesn't really matter that much if the Lemmy protocol itself doesn't build the html - there is still a process that involves multiple steps that may or may not be server side in order to build the comment trees that we see.

There's a node, yea! Oh hey... that node has children! Awesome! All of those exclamation points are either server side or client side lookups. Hurray! Oh look it's a wikiepedia article. No exclamation point lookups allowed.