I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
I'm thinking about creating my own personal instance hosted on maybe a RasPi or something, just for myself.
It would cost very little (RasPi and Domain name are already laying around unused..).
It might not be the fastest, and if my internet is down then the instance won't be available (but then again I'd be the only one using it anyway).
But I'm still trying to figure out other pros/cons with that approach.
I will tell this nonstop, online advertisement (as a form of monetization) is pretty damn dated nowadays. You could give them literally a dollar every year and they would make more from you than serving you ads.
Unpopular opinion: I kinda feel like a reason ads are so popular nowadays is because it gives the user a way of feeling they are supporting a product/creator by doing pretty much nothing.
They are popular, because it's a way to squeeze out extra money out of the users (often in addition to paying for the product) and since the software is proprietary the users often can't do anything about it.
Btw notice how most youtubers turned into salesmen that want to sell you something in each video and their sponsored segments are often minutes long.
I fully support that idea. Nothing comes free and as a lemmy.world user I’m using lemmy.world resources to browse lemmy.ml pr whatever. It’s only fair that I fund this server to do it’s work in some way.
As long as we aren’t charged for getting the content itself.
How are fediverse admins currently funding their instances?
Self funding or donations
Thanks, I have another question: what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won't have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?
If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo
That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it's overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.
That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it's relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don't think that's too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
That's a good question that I'm unqualified to answer but I'm sure that !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is a good resource for this.
Beehaw was running on a 96€/month VPS and temporarly upped it to 336$/month to handle the reddit implosion.
Ooh, that's less than 5c/user/month, this can totally work without overloading with ads.
Yeah and here is how lemmy.world's owner funds his Lemmy and Mastodon instances:
He said lemmy.world could handle 1 million users and mastodon.world at some point had over 100k active users.
Just having ads is not a problem.
I don't understand why people think it's necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?
No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don't notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).
Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website.
Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.
Back in 2008 I met a bunch of the VLC devs at a KDE related open source software conference. They talked about their experiences getting approached by companies with "fuck you" levels of money with offers they couldn't refuse -- and yet refused. In 2008 it was about bundling spyware with installers, largely. I always admired their stalwart refusal to bend.
Side note: this was shortly after they'd completed their transition to Qt as their toolkit. They stole their little volume control widget from KDE's media player, Amarok. The beauty of open-source and cross pollenation. I expect Lemmy and kbin and others in the fediverse will freely cross pollenate too. In the end, open source wins.
The difference is you cited software projects, not hosted infrastructure. A person can contribute to a FOSS dev project and not incur expenses dependent on end-users activity. Hosting a fediverse application isn't like that, somebody has to pay for the hosting and the hosting expenses will scale with user activity.
The projects I mentioned weren't made for profit, but they are now so important that they are funded from donations. Both from users and corporate sponsors. With that money they are able to hire full-time developers. So they still cost our society money, but no ads or spyware is required. I think hosting could work the same way.
I am happy that lemmy.world is here for the influx of users, setup a dollar donation to both the server admins and the lemmy devs. Long term I think I would be happy to find a server that only allows membership if people are willing to contribute, as that kind of user is more likely to contribute to better discussions (in theory at least).
I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501(c)(3) status).
Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we've gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.
Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I'm sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don't need advertisements or to profit.
Advertisements are fine, as long as it's not too hard to block, or if they follow the same rule as other posts in that you can always upvote/downvote and comment on them.
I don't think many instance admin would go for it though currently, as that would be the fastest way to turn your users against you.
I would prefer that ads NOT be the same as regular posts to prevent people from mistaking promoted ads for actual content. Reddit was really bad about this, you would click a thing thinking it was legitimate only to find out it was an ad after the fact. I want my content and my ads to remain separate. They need to be clearly marked (not stealthily marked like on reddit), the ratio of ads to content should heavily favor content, and they need to be dismissible.
Maybe admins could start with opt-in ads that they ask if you want when you create an account? Very few people would accept them but some would and even tho it wouldn't cover the costs it could help a bit. You definitely shouldn't just enable ads for all tho
Not exactly. Lemmy has separated the developer role from the admin role.
From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development. Two full time developers isn't going to be enough to get Lemmy to a position it can compete against Reddit or the next Reddit. Lemmy is rough around the edges and needs work; it needs to develop ways to incorporate code from others.
From an admin role, the various servers are going to need to solve major issues, including how to fund server costs. We are also seeing the fraying of the federation model as different admins have different goals for their part of Lemmy and these goals clash with each other.
There is going to be a ton of growing pains, and some of them are going to come from the fact that there isn't a CEO of Lemmy to choose which way to resolve problems.
From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development.
No they don't. The platform is open source, so the more users they have, the more of those users will become contributors.
Yes they do. This is why some FOSS goes to places like Apache, why there's a Python foundation, Spark has Databricks, Kafka Confluent and Trino Starburst.
The good thing about open source is that it allows everyone to contribute code to the base. The bad thing about open source is thay it allows everyone to contribute code to the base.
You need repo maintainers, developers that are constant contributor, code reviewers, people maintaining CI CD Pipelines, etc etc.
Yes it's less than having proprietary, but it's nowhere near "0".
But how is the organization going to handle and review all this additional code? You can't just trust someone coded something correctly without reviewing the code.
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting.
If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.
But there will be other instances. If this one does something stupid, then we go to another one and miss almost nothing.
That's a bit like saying "Yeah so we don't care what reddit does, because you can always go somewhere else"
It's the biggest instance, so it's where most of the community and content would be etc etc.
Just like what happened with beehaw could happen to world as well. This is only true for a mature decentralized federated ecosystem with a lot of redundant communities so that if one goes down you can easily consume the same content from a different instence. Is that the case now? I would say no, so it's even less leader-proof.
Lemmy is perfectly fine with beehaw defederating.
There is certainly the risk of a single instance dominating. But even now there are a few significant instances and losing beehaw didn't ruin anything.
The main point, or why it's fine is because it's new. Losing it is not really that important right now, because being honest. We're a grain of sand in comparison. So It's not much that we lose. But extrapolate and now you have 50 million users on .world and suddenly they shut the server down. Not defederation, it shuts down. Sure you can say "oh well.. I guess time to start over" I would wager most people will be like "Nah, fuck this... I'll go somewhere else that might not implode"
right now we're on the reddit hate train and hyped the fuck up. Later on those servers will be getting bigger and more expensive. Some might cover it with donations, some might not.
If we have ~5 major instances, then yes a loss of 10 million is not good, but it certainly doesn't kill lemmy. There's no need to start over, there's no need to change anything.
If the fediverse is healthy, it can handle that kind of loss without any issue. If we get all funneled into 1 or 2 instances, then yeah, we're gonna have problems.
It's definitely good, but it isn't full proof. Nothing is.
r/boneappletea
Sorry I couldn't resist
Lol.
Guess it's my turn
RIght. It does depend on there being multiple major instances.
It depends what he's the CEO of. For example whether it's a non-profit, a for-profit, a co-op, etc. It also depends on the licensing of the data. I don't think this last bit has been tackled by Lemmy yet. Wikipedia has done it quite successfully. If the data is licensed under CC for example, and backups are published, then migration of the whole instance becomes possible like it is for Wikipedia. That would be one hell of a disincentive to fuck around, even if the company is for-profit. Non-profit co-op plus CC-licensed data is probably the most resistant.
Does not have CEO, yet ...
But I can solve that. From now on I will take that burden.
Refer to me as super cool Lemmy CEO
First order of business, I command you
lemmings to vibe.
Stay tunned for upcoming changes !!!
Lemmy.world might get a CEO, but it'll be different then the Lemmy software (which is open source) and it appears to be possible to migrate off of a given instance if this one gets unreasonable
You can chain me but I will never be silent and I will never stop fighting for a FOSS/JS-free web
Oh chain you?! Don't threaten me with a good time.
*wips you
Who is my dirty litlle Stallman?
Have you heard of Linux Operating system, I heard they are pushing proprietary code in kernel for better performance does that not sound good my boy?
NOOOOOOO!!!!!
CEO-Proof, but not Lazy-Instance-Owner-Proof. ahem beehaw ahem
Beehaw's choice was Beehaw's choice, and reading through their reasoning for it, I can understand why they'd defederate with the current influx of users seen.
And that's the point and their right- we all have the choice. If you're unhappy with a server's federatipn choices or user base, you can move to an alternative and still federate with the other servers for content.
But then you just use another instance. As long as it stays decentralized, it will be robust. If one instance takes over, then it's no different.
I still don't quite understand what happens to all the content on the decentralized instance.
Say I belong to the lemme.world but subscribe to a sub about, oh I don't know, let's say Movies, on Beehaw. Once they decentralize all that content become inaccessible, to me from any other instance, right?
I mean i know i can find another Movie sub on anther instance but it may many be as good as the one on Beehaw.
Unless I created a login on beehaw instance I'm not going to be able to access any of their content or participate in that sub on that instance.
Did I get that right?
Almost, but not quite. If lemmy.world doens't defederate from beehaw (it's a two way thing) then you can still see all their posts, and interact with lemmy.world users on those posts. But beehaw users, and users of every other instance won't see your comments, and you won't see theirs.
I'm not saying nothing is lost when an instance goes haywire. But, it's certainly much more robust against those things then reddit. How much have you lost by not being part of beehaw? Something, but, it's still a very good community.
Not CEO-proof until user and community migration by individual is possible
This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.
Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn't until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail -- donations are nice but are never enough.
As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.
We'll need someone to input that data, I guess we'll need to create a new position for that.
I shall be the CAIIO (chief AI input officer) and may salary will only be $150m.
Hey that's a lot of work for one dude. I'll be your associate. I shall be the ACAIIO and my salary is twice as much as yours because of the longer title
Guys, we can all share. I'm sure we can create plenty of management and HR positions for everyone ;)
I disagree. The Free Software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system weren't created for profit, but for user freedom. There is nothing wrong with making money in an ethical way (unlike what Reddit does), but that is not necessary for projects to survive and there are plenty of examples of this. Debian for example is a fully free operating system and it's maintained entirely by volunteers for free.
The Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Blender Foundation. They are all non-profits.
The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances
It's not quite the same, but Meta/Instagram is working on a Twitter competitor that will use ActivityPub and therefore is essentially one huge Fediverse instance that they're launching.
CEO-resistant.
This. Even Lemmy could technically get fucked over
Also MBA proof!
Well I'm not so sure about that. Just give it time, someone will find a way to monetize it. People are creative.
The problem isn’t necessarily people monetizing a platform, it’s forcing everyone to participate in the monetization whether they want to or not.
If there was a hypothetical Lemmy instance that was ad-supported or even subscription-based, that would be fine. Because we always have the choice to go to a different instance.
Every platform/service/product that is owned by a single company is eventually going to breakdown and turn into the worst form of itself. Companies are driven by this fiscal quarter being better than the last and it is inevitable that eventually quality has to go out the window to increase profits. The only sure-fire way to "reset" quality or force the company to ensure quality is to not monetarily support them. But with the internet, that is very difficult to achieve with having so few platforms that connect us all owned by companies. The only answer on keeping the internet a quality space for socialization and connecting with each other, is decentralization.
I'd say "sort of." Lemmy as a software is under a classic benevolent dictator situation. It's open source but as long as the lead devs remain two people we are kind of at their whim. Yeah someone could fork it but it's the same issue of you're now at the whim of that person keeping their fork up to date and what they want to do. Until they kind of allow more people having a say on the main repo it's up in the air what happens truly.
We've seen this same situation with Emby to Jellyfin. Where the open source project gets so good it goes close source, becomes a company and leaves everyone scrambling to get people to help work on the last bit of open source code. Meanwhile Emby just used their huge install base to upsell people. Jellyfin is still trying to get full parity with Emby despite Jellyfin having thousands of contributors and being open source. It's hard to keep up with well funded innovation compared to volunteer work.
I jumped ship from Emby to Jellyfin a long time ago. Just looked at their site now: "Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps." Pretty sure you get all that in Jellyfin already.
Sure but anyone can implement something using the activityPub spec and federate with other instances regardless of what flavor they're using.
so good it goes close source
That's what the GPL is for: preserve freedom of the users.
To put a finer point on it, that's precisely why it's important for Free Software to be copyleft rather than merely permissively-licensed. (And for it to either have a trustworthy copyright holder, like the Free Software Foundation or similar non-profit, or to have too many copyright holders to make changing the license tractable.)
Exactly. They would have to rewrite all the code in order to make it proprietary. AGPL license ensures that not even an instance owner can (legally) change the code of their own instance without releasing the modified source code.
We need to make sure that any apps that are created for Lemmy, also have a Copyleft license. At the very least they should be Free Software (which doesn't seem to be guaranteed sadly, since most people don't know what that means).
"Created for Lemmy" isn't really a thing, all you need is to implement the ActivityPub protocol. Whether or not it has any relationship to Lemmy has no bearing on if it can talk to instances using Lemmy's implementation.
I think there's a good mechanism to keep that from happening given that you can always just spin up your own instance or join a different one and still be federated with every other instance of interest.
That current state of affairs (people having content on a multitude of instances) should keep that from happening, since a bad actor would need to capture sufficient content as to have the only instance worth visiting.
I can't foresee myself years from now having a problem making a new account on some-new-lemmy.place in under 3 minutes and continuing on my merry way.
Or at least that's how it seems to me.
There is no dictator. The developers don't have any control over people's instances. They have very little power. We are the ones that have all the power since Lemmy is decentralized and Free Software.
On Reddit the users have way less power, but more than they realize. They can't create their own instance of Reddit, but they can leave the platform entirely (and probably overwrite all their content with gibberish), which would probably kill the company.
Benevolent dictator is a software development term, that's why it's italicized. It's not literal
I'd say it's still behest to the benevolent dictator but it's easier to switch to another if one goes bad. Lemmy.world is up to 150k users. It's a main instance now and Ruud is providing server space for us all to use. If he goes bad then someone else has to step up and provide server space for other instances to take up capacity.
Lemmy as a whole is at 150k, lemmy.world is at 33k right now, and is 3k behind lemmy.ml (though it seems lemmy.world has more active users).
So who is the dictator then? Ruud or the developers? :) We could call him a dictator of his own instance and it is certainly the most popular one right now.
I guess Reddit users don't want to leave their platform, because they are afraid of losing the content and the community. Most of them probably haven't seen that there is a good alternative yet. When we are using one Lemmy instance, we know that there are many alternatives, because we know that that's the whole point of Lemmy. So even if there is a big instance that has most of the users, it should be fine. It would be better if the users were more spread out though.
I'm trying out lemmy and enjoying it so far it feels more engaging (I was using baconreader and had a lot of smaller communities). I loved reddit for what it was and am pissed at corporate assholes ruining it for profits. Lemmy has made the internet feel a little bigger again.
I'd say each instance host is their own dictator, but there are so many hosts that you can always move to another if you dont like what theyre doing. It's not like you're stuck spending money to jump from one to a next and apps like Jerboa let you copy your instance accounts to eachother.
Maybe it's inevitable that every proprietary and centralized platform will end this way. They just keep getting worse. It's been exciting watching Mastodon grow and now Lemmy. We now have a chance to change something and become more independent from greedy corporations. We can have software and platforms that don't exploit us and where we, the users are the ones in control. People only need to want to make the switch. Then we can have a better Reddit here.
I didn't know Jerboa had a feature like that. That's awesome!
honestly the internet should be nationalized its the only way to ensure fair competition
So who actually owns the server this instance runs on? Doesn't it just mean they do whatever they want? So confused
There are a ton of Lemmy instances that all communicate with each other and each instance is ran on hardware by different owners. So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
My understanding is that (at present anyway) since accounts are not federated, your account on that "gone to shit" instance will be gone. Your content will still be on many federated instances, but not your account. That would be lost.
Yeah, one thing Lemmy needs to solve is account migration. Instead of creating a new account on a new instance you move your existing account from one instance to another. It won't save the account if the instance is already removed, but it at least gives an option to move if you feel like there's a better instance for you.
Ah... dope. So it's currently just running through donations I presume. Another dumb question: If an instance owner goes rogue and just nukes it are your posts gone too or is it archived somewhere?
So if a Lemmy instance goes down, all of the communities and comments go down with it? Seems almost worst than having a CEO?
Seems like the saving grace is anyone can either start or move to a different lemmy instance whenever. It's not like someone can just host their own copy of Reddit if spez ever went nuclear.
Unspezzable.
NoCEOShitification
More generally speaking, Lemmy (and other federated services) are board-proof. CEOs are not typically the actual culprit, they are the executors of the wishes of the board. Often times they have significant power, especially if they are also member of the board or a significant owner, but not always.
And with the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy which created a significant decentralised online community, we just witnessed history where human beings achieved the next level of freedom of expression free from manipulation by powerful individuals
Yes, finally!
One issue that I don't think Lemmy has tackled collectively is the licensing of the user data. Lemmy is open source and that's one crucial part of the enshittification resistance equation. The other is doing the equivalent for the user data. If the user data is licensed under the right version of the CC license, it will ensure that it can always be copied to another instance in cases of instance enshittification. As far as I know, there isn't anything about who owns the user data. That defaults to every author having copyright over their data. While this means the instance owner can't sell it without permission from every user it's also not conductive to moving bulk data across instances. Individual migration would improve this significantly but I believe we should switch to having user data licensed under some CC license too.
This is a great point. The user data needs to be enshrined in such a way that it can be easily moved in a bulk migration without requiring a direct opt-in from every user. While at the same time making it clear how it's being used/kept/sold/not sold/etc.
I'm not against LLMs using the data generated on sites like this to inform useful answers when I ask ChatGPT a question. It genuinely makes AI a better tool, but I feel like the contributors of such content should know how their answers are being used.
LLMs are likely going to scrape no matter the license. I doubt OpenAI got a copyright license from Reddit to ingest it. In fact I'm not even sure they need one if ingestion can be make similar enough to "reading the web site". And so making content CC probably won't affect LLM use of public posts.
"Welcome, I'm the CEO of email!"
Really, it should be kept more like an overplatform or protocol like what the email is. Luckily, Lemmy has the roles of developers and content admins so separated and decentralized that it shouldn't become a corpo-danger from now on
I don’t think it’s necessary “CEO proof” but it is definitely a bit better positioned to avoid the pitfalls that Twitter and Reddit have experienced. Hence the reason I am here. But there’s nothing stopping a for-profit corporation from buying out the owner of a large instance (or multiple large instances). I think the best way to try and prevent that is for people to join hyper-local, hyper-specific instances that can all connect with one another. I assume that would be the benefit of Lemmy.
You can see a good example of this in the gaming sphere as both Path of Exile and Warframe have entire instances for themselves.
i hope it stays that way. i'm sick of these ceos and their garbage :/
When we think CEO we need to think “shareholders.” Including potential shareholders as in Reddit’s case. I think sometimes we are so focused on our feelings about a “big boss” that we forget the CEO is merely an avatar for the investor point of view in a business. They answer to the board of directors who represent or are even made up of shareholders, and they are usually paid in such a way to motivate shareholder benefits, like with stock instead of a high salary.
And when we think “shareholders” we need to think “loan money.” That’s how you get to be a shareholder. You plunk down some cash to float the business.
Therefore, to really be CEO-proof, an entity needs to be fiscally independent and never need an advance of cash to keep going. It must be entirely bootstrapped, paid-as-you-go, with no one standing to gain a whole bunch or lose a whole bunch by its failure or sale. That’s kind of a lot of needles to thread when you’re building something big. It can be done but we have to know what game we’re actually playing and not get distracted by “fuck The Man” sentiments. This is about cash.
Literally this… what is happening in Reddit is the CEO attending the needs of the shareholder via the board… companies aren't the "sisters of charity". They are where they are for profit and at the very least they need to have a cash flow that allow them to pay employees and bills. There are some B Corps out there, but most of the companies are there to make the big buck.
In the case of Reddit we users are just a product that they try to keep to make the company profitable selling ads or whatever.
If you want a Reddit-kind-of platform user-centric we need to pay for it and become the customers instead the product.
But isn't reddit still a private company? They don't have shareholders in that case right? They WANT shareholders which is why they're pulling this b.s to appear profitable when they go public. I think this is just plain old greed.
To be fair, CEOs are often compensated largely through stock and are therefore incentivized to boost that stock price, at least until they have the opportunity to sell (or use as collateral on a loan with an inflated valuation, I'm not super familiar with the financial trickery played at that level).
My only concern is extremists making use of it to organize, spread misinformation, coordinate attacks, etc. and there's zero oversight. That's a serious concern that needs addressing, but I have no idea how.
Ban those communities from your instance. There's not going to ever be any way to prevent them starting their own, all you can do is defederate. There doesn't need to be any more.
I mean, if it's real bad shit like violence, that's where FBI comes in, right?
Not sure if the ACLU would be able to do anything about hate speech.
But bad actors would have to run a shell game of go between instances to recruit. And they've been doing that shit for decades anyways. Hell, it's the same thing as under 18 punk shows back in the day when nazis hung in the parking lot trying to give booze/drugs to kids.
Like, imagine if someone said we can't have phones because assholes can also buy a phone...
To be fair, it's not like those were under control on Reddit either.
I agree that the more accurate term is "board-proof" but I still think "CEO-proof" conveys the idea better to someone who is unaware of the way social media corpos work. The image of the shady CEO with his pinstripe suite and greased hair, lighting his big cigar with a wad of dollar bills is so strong in the cultural conciousness, that even my inlaws would switch to a federated plattform.
CEO proof is a good reason to describe why I want my podcasts to come via an RSS feed instead of depending on an all-in-one app. I've often said things about open gardens and interoperable services, but that preaches to the choir.
"CEO Proof" really sells it to a non technical user.
There will never be a time when you need adds to pay for a server even if you had a server with 50 million people the cost to run that server might be like 100k if just 1 million people pay 1 dollar you already have 1 million dollars a month you only need adds when your a company that needs to grow every quarter
In the Fediverse there are no Zuckerbergs, Musks, Dorseys, Huffmans etc.
There is ALWAYS the possibility to enshittify anything. Meta is trying to infiltrate Mastodon already.
Does it matter tho, couldn't people just develop tool to stop Meta so called threads from being seen across the fediverse? (I'm technologically illiterate so I really do know tbh)
Yeah they can be excluded but from what I hear they are talking about integrating advertising into the platform.
Thankfully options like this are becoming available because it's really annoying to need to continually "digitally migrate" away as these corporate controlled websites become enshittified.
CEO-proof sounds pretty, though there already exists the (perhaps broader) term “decentralised”.
Something can be decentralized and non-CEO-proof at the same time. Cryptocurrency and related technologies are decentralized, but the wealth and power imbalance between the "peasants" and the rich-get-richer "nobles (derogatory)" is massive (see: 3AC, Celsius, Terra/Luna, etc).
Compare that to the fediverse - if an instance gets spezzed up by some CEO-minded knobhead with bigger ideas than brains, that instance can be defederated. It would still be a great loss of content, but it is decentralized in such a way that one person can't take down the entire ecosystem.
P.s. "spez" is now a verb, it means "to have a passable product/service completely fucked up and its users turned against you because you wanted more money".
I like spez being a verb.
sweet summer child
One day the lemmy could just go closed source and sell to a company.
If they went closed source that would mean they would have a similar situation to Emby. They went closed source after a time which gave rise to people forking the last public build and making Jellyfin which is an excellent alternative.
Even if they do, they would not be able to force instance owners to update to the closed version. And people would take over the last available open source version and fork it. Also, a closed and open source version could co-exist, since the api is open.
Protocol is open, anyone can rewrite a federation client that pulls data off proprietary servers as a last resort. This is why federation is great. Besides, you can't close an open source project, you have to create new, closed parts to have them. That's how mariadb and galera took a chunk off mysql user base and how libreoffice became a successor of openoffice.
As a side note, I wish we could move accounts and even communities between instances, based on some kind of two way handshake agreement.
Right? Currently if an instance fails then all the communities hosted on that instance and comments are essentially 'gone' correct?
No it isn't. A company can be formed to be the steward of either or both the Lemmy source code or popular instances, which would be run by a CEO. I bet anything these corporate structures naturally form as people try to monetize the community and seek investment to gain control over the ecosystem.
The hurdle to that is much greater here since there's a common protocol adopted by multiple open source projects (of which Lemmy) which allows interoperability. If a profit-driven group would try to capture it, people could move instances/use a fork/use a different but similar activitypub project like kbin, etc.
At least I think that's correct? It seems to me there are multiple lines of defense which each have a good amount of redundancy.
You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting. If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.
You could also totally monetize hosting and build a business around that. There are already several private projects to build lemmy clients.
With federated sites you won’t have one CEO. If it takes off, we’ll have many CEOs. Trust me.
We do have a term for that, it's a little bit of a trigger-word for certain demographics, but the correct term is socialism.
Can you define "socialism"? I'm a little lost on how any social media with a hosting provider or moderator can ever be socialism.
The largest (at least well funded) socialist organization in the world is the US military...
If everyone got the shit I got as a disabled vet, we'd all be a lot better off and the only negative would be rich people have a slightly lower high score that's 100% irrelevant to how their quality of life is.
TL;DR: Yeah, I 100% agree, if everyone had a strong safety net, we'd be much better off.
When it works it works. I mean I have met several people who've expressed a lot of sincere dissatisfaction with the VA's medical services, including limited access to mental healthcare among other things. Particularly of concern is the high degree of veterans who end up on the street--many with severe mental health issues, with some even self-medicating and/or dealing with addictions.
Of course, I'm sure there are more factors that contribute to homeless veterans than limited accessibility to medical care, mental healthcare, and other social services provided by the VA--but it is important to consider.
..and of course, as you are aware, it's better to have those social systems in-place than nothing at all. Even when run to a degree of mediocrity, socialist programs can and do tend to benefit a population. While not everyone may like the Supplemental Security Income and FAFSA programs: without them, I wouldn't be able to attend a university as a future job-seeking student.
Specifically without SSI, many who are unable to pursue a degree would end up homeless and hungry, becoming a greater burden on society. In my opinion, it's unfortunate that you have to have a disability in order to qualify for this safety-net program; as I know several people who turned to less favorable means of providing for themselves, because they were rock-bottom and didn't qualify for any programs.
So, yeah, the VA program, and many other programs in the US are great examples of both some of the harms, but also the significant positive benefits that socialist policies can have for a population. Indeed, the greatest harms done by socialist programs in the US seem to be caused by their limitations and inability to properly serve enough people. Providing a everyone access to a solid safety net would do wonders for us as a society and for our economy.
The trouble with socialism, though, is that any implementation of it strips away meaning in the process of trying to help people.
Meaning comes from a person feeling responsibility for what they do. That responsibility requires exposure to risk if they don't act.
Almost any policy created to help people without a well-guarded limit will quickly become paternalism and, consequently, strip away meaning.
There are many successful and beneficial implementations of socialist policies that do more good than harm, especially outside of the US. Most government institutions in the US and abroad are fundamentally socialist in nature--and some of them work very well (especially outside the US).
While there was once some truth to what you've said, I think you're gravely over-simplifying the nature of what gives humans meaning and purpose in life. For one, it's an extremely subjective topic, but for example, what gives me meaning has very little to do with the relationship between non-action and risk. Rather, things that have meaning for me are things I enjoy doing, and things I enjoy seeing. I don't enjoy the thought of going out to hunt for food with hand-tools at the risk of hunger or death, maybe some people do--and if that gives them meaning, that's fine, but that's not how we need to live our lives.
Yes this I agree with, limits are everything. Where limits are designed is important. What I am discussing is not a program that would guarantee that everyone is capable of going out and buying a yacht. I am discussing social safety-net programs that ensure equal access to comfortable housing, enough food, good medical care, and the means to comfortably pursue a job, education, or business endeavor--and in addition, take care of those who are unable to care for themselves. At this point in our technological and social development as a species, these should be considered basics that can be guaranteed to everyone. To do this would not strip away the meaning of life, rather it would enable people to feel meaning in life and the foundation to build up greater meaning for themselves.
Some of the greatest threats to human health and life come from needs-based anxiety, and with the declining population growth rate, high degree of depression, and high rate of suicide, it's imperative that we re-frame how we think about and treat each other.
From empirical evidence we learned that no way in socialism we can enjoy this kind of freedom of expression.
Not entirely true, I sort of jest when I make hyperbolic statements about socialism being the anti-CEO. I personally believe in mixed economies that are well regulated. I know a lot of people dismiss the successes in Norway and neighboring countries on ideas of "cultural/racial homogeneity" among other things, but they do quite well with a mixed economies.
In mixed economies, you have both the right and incentive to start a small to medium sized business; and if you become too big and ubiquitous, the government can step-in to help govern your company.
It's not a perfect solution (I'm not sure if that exists), but I think it's one of the best models we have--and a lot of the governing principles are derived from socialist criticisms of unregulated capitalism. Especially in the US I think we'd benefit from this sort of economic structure; but in-order for that to happen in a meaningful and positive way for the public, we will need electoral reform.
I've never thought of something being CEO-proof, but you're not wrong. Those CEO's did shit the bed in the most diarrhea way possible.
One thing that’ll need serious consideration:
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
I'm thinking about creating my own personal instance hosted on maybe a RasPi or something, just for myself. It would cost very little (RasPi and Domain name are already laying around unused..).
It might not be the fastest, and if my internet is down then the instance won't be available (but then again I'd be the only one using it anyway).
But I'm still trying to figure out other pros/cons with that approach.
I will tell this nonstop, online advertisement (as a form of monetization) is pretty damn dated nowadays. You could give them literally a dollar every year and they would make more from you than serving you ads.
Unpopular opinion: I kinda feel like a reason ads are so popular nowadays is because it gives the user a way of feeling they are supporting a product/creator by doing pretty much nothing.
They are popular, because it's a way to squeeze out extra money out of the users (often in addition to paying for the product) and since the software is proprietary the users often can't do anything about it.
Btw notice how most youtubers turned into salesmen that want to sell you something in each video and their sponsored segments are often minutes long.
I fully support that idea. Nothing comes free and as a lemmy.world user I’m using lemmy.world resources to browse lemmy.ml pr whatever. It’s only fair that I fund this server to do it’s work in some way.
As long as we aren’t charged for getting the content itself.
How are fediverse admins currently funding their instances?
Self funding or donations
Thanks, I have another question: what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won't have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?
If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo
That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it's overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.
That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it's relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don't think that's too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
That's a good question that I'm unqualified to answer but I'm sure that !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is a good resource for this.
Beehaw was running on a 96€/month VPS and temporarly upped it to 336$/month to handle the reddit implosion.
Ooh, that's less than 5c/user/month, this can totally work without overloading with ads.
Yeah and here is how lemmy.world's owner funds his Lemmy and Mastodon instances:
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
He said lemmy.world could handle 1 million users and mastodon.world at some point had over 100k active users.
Just having ads is not a problem.
I don't understand why people think it's necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?
No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don't notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).
Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.
Back in 2008 I met a bunch of the VLC devs at a KDE related open source software conference. They talked about their experiences getting approached by companies with "fuck you" levels of money with offers they couldn't refuse -- and yet refused. In 2008 it was about bundling spyware with installers, largely. I always admired their stalwart refusal to bend.
Side note: this was shortly after they'd completed their transition to Qt as their toolkit. They stole their little volume control widget from KDE's media player, Amarok. The beauty of open-source and cross pollenation. I expect Lemmy and kbin and others in the fediverse will freely cross pollenate too. In the end, open source wins.
The difference is you cited software projects, not hosted infrastructure. A person can contribute to a FOSS dev project and not incur expenses dependent on end-users activity. Hosting a fediverse application isn't like that, somebody has to pay for the hosting and the hosting expenses will scale with user activity.
The projects I mentioned weren't made for profit, but they are now so important that they are funded from donations. Both from users and corporate sponsors. With that money they are able to hire full-time developers. So they still cost our society money, but no ads or spyware is required. I think hosting could work the same way.
I am happy that lemmy.world is here for the influx of users, setup a dollar donation to both the server admins and the lemmy devs. Long term I think I would be happy to find a server that only allows membership if people are willing to contribute, as that kind of user is more likely to contribute to better discussions (in theory at least).
I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501(c)(3) status).
Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we've gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.
Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I'm sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don't need advertisements or to profit.
Advertisements are fine, as long as it's not too hard to block, or if they follow the same rule as other posts in that you can always upvote/downvote and comment on them.
I don't think many instance admin would go for it though currently, as that would be the fastest way to turn your users against you.
I would prefer that ads NOT be the same as regular posts to prevent people from mistaking promoted ads for actual content. Reddit was really bad about this, you would click a thing thinking it was legitimate only to find out it was an ad after the fact. I want my content and my ads to remain separate. They need to be clearly marked (not stealthily marked like on reddit), the ratio of ads to content should heavily favor content, and they need to be dismissible.
Maybe admins could start with opt-in ads that they ask if you want when you create an account? Very few people would accept them but some would and even tho it wouldn't cover the costs it could help a bit. You definitely shouldn't just enable ads for all tho
It's called decentralized
Not exactly. Lemmy has separated the developer role from the admin role.
From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development. Two full time developers isn't going to be enough to get Lemmy to a position it can compete against Reddit or the next Reddit. Lemmy is rough around the edges and needs work; it needs to develop ways to incorporate code from others.
From an admin role, the various servers are going to need to solve major issues, including how to fund server costs. We are also seeing the fraying of the federation model as different admins have different goals for their part of Lemmy and these goals clash with each other.
There is going to be a ton of growing pains, and some of them are going to come from the fact that there isn't a CEO of Lemmy to choose which way to resolve problems.
No they don't. The platform is open source, so the more users they have, the more of those users will become contributors.
Yes they do. This is why some FOSS goes to places like Apache, why there's a Python foundation, Spark has Databricks, Kafka Confluent and Trino Starburst.
The good thing about open source is that it allows everyone to contribute code to the base. The bad thing about open source is thay it allows everyone to contribute code to the base.
You need repo maintainers, developers that are constant contributor, code reviewers, people maintaining CI CD Pipelines, etc etc.
Yes it's less than having proprietary, but it's nowhere near "0".
But how is the organization going to handle and review all this additional code? You can't just trust someone coded something correctly without reviewing the code.
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting.
If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.
But there will be other instances. If this one does something stupid, then we go to another one and miss almost nothing.
That's a bit like saying "Yeah so we don't care what reddit does, because you can always go somewhere else"
It's the biggest instance, so it's where most of the community and content would be etc etc. Just like what happened with beehaw could happen to world as well. This is only true for a mature decentralized federated ecosystem with a lot of redundant communities so that if one goes down you can easily consume the same content from a different instence. Is that the case now? I would say no, so it's even less leader-proof.
Lemmy is perfectly fine with beehaw defederating.
There is certainly the risk of a single instance dominating. But even now there are a few significant instances and losing beehaw didn't ruin anything.
The main point, or why it's fine is because it's new. Losing it is not really that important right now, because being honest. We're a grain of sand in comparison. So It's not much that we lose. But extrapolate and now you have 50 million users on .world and suddenly they shut the server down. Not defederation, it shuts down. Sure you can say "oh well.. I guess time to start over" I would wager most people will be like "Nah, fuck this... I'll go somewhere else that might not implode" right now we're on the reddit hate train and hyped the fuck up. Later on those servers will be getting bigger and more expensive. Some might cover it with donations, some might not.
If we have ~5 major instances, then yes a loss of 10 million is not good, but it certainly doesn't kill lemmy. There's no need to start over, there's no need to change anything.
If the fediverse is healthy, it can handle that kind of loss without any issue. If we get all funneled into 1 or 2 instances, then yeah, we're gonna have problems.
It's definitely good, but it isn't full proof. Nothing is.
r/boneappletea
Sorry I couldn't resist
Lol.
Guess it's my turn
RIght. It does depend on there being multiple major instances.
It depends what he's the CEO of. For example whether it's a non-profit, a for-profit, a co-op, etc. It also depends on the licensing of the data. I don't think this last bit has been tackled by Lemmy yet. Wikipedia has done it quite successfully. If the data is licensed under CC for example, and backups are published, then migration of the whole instance becomes possible like it is for Wikipedia. That would be one hell of a disincentive to fuck around, even if the company is for-profit. Non-profit co-op plus CC-licensed data is probably the most resistant.
Does not have CEO, yet ...
But I can solve that. From now on I will take that burden.
Refer to me as super cool Lemmy CEO
First order of business, I command you lemmings to vibe.
Stay tunned for upcoming changes !!!
Lemmy.world might get a CEO, but it'll be different then the Lemmy software (which is open source) and it appears to be possible to migrate off of a given instance if this one gets unreasonable
Fuck off CEO
mmm someone is not vibbing would you like to go to [lemmy.gulag](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9Q ?
You can chain me but I will never be silent and I will never stop fighting for a FOSS/JS-free web
Oh chain you?! Don't threaten me with a good time.
*wips you
Who is my dirty litlle Stallman?
Have you heard of Linux Operating system, I heard they are pushing proprietary code in kernel for better performance does that not sound good my boy?
NOOOOOOO!!!!!
CEO-Proof, but not Lazy-Instance-Owner-Proof. ahem beehaw ahem
Beehaw's choice was Beehaw's choice, and reading through their reasoning for it, I can understand why they'd defederate with the current influx of users seen.
And that's the point and their right- we all have the choice. If you're unhappy with a server's federatipn choices or user base, you can move to an alternative and still federate with the other servers for content.
But then you just use another instance. As long as it stays decentralized, it will be robust. If one instance takes over, then it's no different.
I still don't quite understand what happens to all the content on the decentralized instance.
Say I belong to the lemme.world but subscribe to a sub about, oh I don't know, let's say Movies, on Beehaw. Once they decentralize all that content become inaccessible, to me from any other instance, right?
I mean i know i can find another Movie sub on anther instance but it may many be as good as the one on Beehaw.
Unless I created a login on beehaw instance I'm not going to be able to access any of their content or participate in that sub on that instance.
Did I get that right?
Almost, but not quite. If lemmy.world doens't defederate from beehaw (it's a two way thing) then you can still see all their posts, and interact with lemmy.world users on those posts. But beehaw users, and users of every other instance won't see your comments, and you won't see theirs.
I'm not saying nothing is lost when an instance goes haywire. But, it's certainly much more robust against those things then reddit. How much have you lost by not being part of beehaw? Something, but, it's still a very good community.
Not CEO-proof until user and community migration by individual is possible
This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.
Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn't until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail -- donations are nice but are never enough.
As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.
We'll need someone to input that data, I guess we'll need to create a new position for that.
I shall be the CAIIO (chief AI input officer) and may salary will only be $150m.
Hey that's a lot of work for one dude. I'll be your associate. I shall be the ACAIIO and my salary is twice as much as yours because of the longer title
Guys, we can all share. I'm sure we can create plenty of management and HR positions for everyone ;)
I disagree. The Free Software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system weren't created for profit, but for user freedom. There is nothing wrong with making money in an ethical way (unlike what Reddit does), but that is not necessary for projects to survive and there are plenty of examples of this. Debian for example is a fully free operating system and it's maintained entirely by volunteers for free.
The Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Blender Foundation. They are all non-profits.
It's not quite the same, but Meta/Instagram is working on a Twitter competitor that will use ActivityPub and therefore is essentially one huge Fediverse instance that they're launching.
CEO-resistant.
This. Even Lemmy could technically get fucked over
Also MBA proof!
Well I'm not so sure about that. Just give it time, someone will find a way to monetize it. People are creative.
The problem isn’t necessarily people monetizing a platform, it’s forcing everyone to participate in the monetization whether they want to or not.
If there was a hypothetical Lemmy instance that was ad-supported or even subscription-based, that would be fine. Because we always have the choice to go to a different instance.
Every platform/service/product that is owned by a single company is eventually going to breakdown and turn into the worst form of itself. Companies are driven by this fiscal quarter being better than the last and it is inevitable that eventually quality has to go out the window to increase profits. The only sure-fire way to "reset" quality or force the company to ensure quality is to not monetarily support them. But with the internet, that is very difficult to achieve with having so few platforms that connect us all owned by companies. The only answer on keeping the internet a quality space for socialization and connecting with each other, is decentralization.
I'd say "sort of." Lemmy as a software is under a classic benevolent dictator situation. It's open source but as long as the lead devs remain two people we are kind of at their whim. Yeah someone could fork it but it's the same issue of you're now at the whim of that person keeping their fork up to date and what they want to do. Until they kind of allow more people having a say on the main repo it's up in the air what happens truly.
We've seen this same situation with Emby to Jellyfin. Where the open source project gets so good it goes close source, becomes a company and leaves everyone scrambling to get people to help work on the last bit of open source code. Meanwhile Emby just used their huge install base to upsell people. Jellyfin is still trying to get full parity with Emby despite Jellyfin having thousands of contributors and being open source. It's hard to keep up with well funded innovation compared to volunteer work.
I jumped ship from Emby to Jellyfin a long time ago. Just looked at their site now: "Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps." Pretty sure you get all that in Jellyfin already.
Sure but anyone can implement something using the activityPub spec and federate with other instances regardless of what flavor they're using.
That's what the GPL is for: preserve freedom of the users.
To put a finer point on it, that's precisely why it's important for Free Software to be copyleft rather than merely permissively-licensed. (And for it to either have a trustworthy copyright holder, like the Free Software Foundation or similar non-profit, or to have too many copyright holders to make changing the license tractable.)
Exactly. They would have to rewrite all the code in order to make it proprietary. AGPL license ensures that not even an instance owner can (legally) change the code of their own instance without releasing the modified source code.
We need to make sure that any apps that are created for Lemmy, also have a Copyleft license. At the very least they should be Free Software (which doesn't seem to be guaranteed sadly, since most people don't know what that means).
"Created for Lemmy" isn't really a thing, all you need is to implement the ActivityPub protocol. Whether or not it has any relationship to Lemmy has no bearing on if it can talk to instances using Lemmy's implementation.
I think there's a good mechanism to keep that from happening given that you can always just spin up your own instance or join a different one and still be federated with every other instance of interest.
That current state of affairs (people having content on a multitude of instances) should keep that from happening, since a bad actor would need to capture sufficient content as to have the only instance worth visiting.
I can't foresee myself years from now having a problem making a new account on
some-new-lemmy.placein under 3 minutes and continuing on my merry way.Or at least that's how it seems to me.
There is no dictator. The developers don't have any control over people's instances. They have very little power. We are the ones that have all the power since Lemmy is decentralized and Free Software.
On Reddit the users have way less power, but more than they realize. They can't create their own instance of Reddit, but they can leave the platform entirely (and probably overwrite all their content with gibberish), which would probably kill the company.
Benevolent dictator is a software development term, that's why it's italicized. It's not literal
I'd say it's still behest to the benevolent dictator but it's easier to switch to another if one goes bad. Lemmy.world is up to 150k users. It's a main instance now and Ruud is providing server space for us all to use. If he goes bad then someone else has to step up and provide server space for other instances to take up capacity.
Lemmy as a whole is at 150k, lemmy.world is at 33k right now, and is 3k behind lemmy.ml (though it seems lemmy.world has more active users).
So who is the dictator then? Ruud or the developers? :) We could call him a dictator of his own instance and it is certainly the most popular one right now.
I guess Reddit users don't want to leave their platform, because they are afraid of losing the content and the community. Most of them probably haven't seen that there is a good alternative yet. When we are using one Lemmy instance, we know that there are many alternatives, because we know that that's the whole point of Lemmy. So even if there is a big instance that has most of the users, it should be fine. It would be better if the users were more spread out though.
I'm trying out lemmy and enjoying it so far it feels more engaging (I was using baconreader and had a lot of smaller communities). I loved reddit for what it was and am pissed at corporate assholes ruining it for profits. Lemmy has made the internet feel a little bigger again.
I'd say each instance host is their own dictator, but there are so many hosts that you can always move to another if you dont like what theyre doing. It's not like you're stuck spending money to jump from one to a next and apps like Jerboa let you copy your instance accounts to eachother.
Maybe it's inevitable that every proprietary and centralized platform will end this way. They just keep getting worse. It's been exciting watching Mastodon grow and now Lemmy. We now have a chance to change something and become more independent from greedy corporations. We can have software and platforms that don't exploit us and where we, the users are the ones in control. People only need to want to make the switch. Then we can have a better Reddit here.
I didn't know Jerboa had a feature like that. That's awesome!
honestly the internet should be nationalized its the only way to ensure fair competition
So who actually owns the server this instance runs on? Doesn't it just mean they do whatever they want? So confused
There are a ton of Lemmy instances that all communicate with each other and each instance is ran on hardware by different owners. So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
My understanding is that (at present anyway) since accounts are not federated, your account on that "gone to shit" instance will be gone. Your content will still be on many federated instances, but not your account. That would be lost.
Yeah, one thing Lemmy needs to solve is account migration. Instead of creating a new account on a new instance you move your existing account from one instance to another. It won't save the account if the instance is already removed, but it at least gives an option to move if you feel like there's a better instance for you.
Ah... dope. So it's currently just running through donations I presume. Another dumb question: If an instance owner goes rogue and just nukes it are your posts gone too or is it archived somewhere?
So if a Lemmy instance goes down, all of the communities and comments go down with it? Seems almost worst than having a CEO?
Seems like the saving grace is anyone can either start or move to a different lemmy instance whenever. It's not like someone can just host their own copy of Reddit if spez ever went nuclear.
Unspezzable.
NoCEOShitification
More generally speaking, Lemmy (and other federated services) are board-proof. CEOs are not typically the actual culprit, they are the executors of the wishes of the board. Often times they have significant power, especially if they are also member of the board or a significant owner, but not always.
And with the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy which created a significant decentralised online community, we just witnessed history where human beings achieved the next level of freedom of expression free from manipulation by powerful individuals
Yes, finally!
One issue that I don't think Lemmy has tackled collectively is the licensing of the user data. Lemmy is open source and that's one crucial part of the enshittification resistance equation. The other is doing the equivalent for the user data. If the user data is licensed under the right version of the CC license, it will ensure that it can always be copied to another instance in cases of instance enshittification. As far as I know, there isn't anything about who owns the user data. That defaults to every author having copyright over their data. While this means the instance owner can't sell it without permission from every user it's also not conductive to moving bulk data across instances. Individual migration would improve this significantly but I believe we should switch to having user data licensed under some CC license too.
This is a great point. The user data needs to be enshrined in such a way that it can be easily moved in a bulk migration without requiring a direct opt-in from every user. While at the same time making it clear how it's being used/kept/sold/not sold/etc.
I'm not against LLMs using the data generated on sites like this to inform useful answers when I ask ChatGPT a question. It genuinely makes AI a better tool, but I feel like the contributors of such content should know how their answers are being used.
LLMs are likely going to scrape no matter the license. I doubt OpenAI got a copyright license from Reddit to ingest it. In fact I'm not even sure they need one if ingestion can be make similar enough to "reading the web site". And so making content CC probably won't affect LLM use of public posts.
"Welcome, I'm the CEO of email!"
Really, it should be kept more like an overplatform or protocol like what the email is. Luckily, Lemmy has the roles of developers and content admins so separated and decentralized that it shouldn't become a corpo-danger from now on
I don’t think it’s necessary “CEO proof” but it is definitely a bit better positioned to avoid the pitfalls that Twitter and Reddit have experienced. Hence the reason I am here. But there’s nothing stopping a for-profit corporation from buying out the owner of a large instance (or multiple large instances). I think the best way to try and prevent that is for people to join hyper-local, hyper-specific instances that can all connect with one another. I assume that would be the benefit of Lemmy.
You can see a good example of this in the gaming sphere as both Path of Exile and Warframe have entire instances for themselves.
i hope it stays that way. i'm sick of these ceos and their garbage :/
When we think CEO we need to think “shareholders.” Including potential shareholders as in Reddit’s case. I think sometimes we are so focused on our feelings about a “big boss” that we forget the CEO is merely an avatar for the investor point of view in a business. They answer to the board of directors who represent or are even made up of shareholders, and they are usually paid in such a way to motivate shareholder benefits, like with stock instead of a high salary.
And when we think “shareholders” we need to think “loan money.” That’s how you get to be a shareholder. You plunk down some cash to float the business.
Therefore, to really be CEO-proof, an entity needs to be fiscally independent and never need an advance of cash to keep going. It must be entirely bootstrapped, paid-as-you-go, with no one standing to gain a whole bunch or lose a whole bunch by its failure or sale. That’s kind of a lot of needles to thread when you’re building something big. It can be done but we have to know what game we’re actually playing and not get distracted by “fuck The Man” sentiments. This is about cash.
Literally this… what is happening in Reddit is the CEO attending the needs of the shareholder via the board… companies aren't the "sisters of charity". They are where they are for profit and at the very least they need to have a cash flow that allow them to pay employees and bills. There are some B Corps out there, but most of the companies are there to make the big buck. In the case of Reddit we users are just a product that they try to keep to make the company profitable selling ads or whatever. If you want a Reddit-kind-of platform user-centric we need to pay for it and become the customers instead the product.
But isn't reddit still a private company? They don't have shareholders in that case right? They WANT shareholders which is why they're pulling this b.s to appear profitable when they go public. I think this is just plain old greed.
To be fair, CEOs are often compensated largely through stock and are therefore incentivized to boost that stock price, at least until they have the opportunity to sell (or use as collateral on a loan with an inflated valuation, I'm not super familiar with the financial trickery played at that level).
My only concern is extremists making use of it to organize, spread misinformation, coordinate attacks, etc. and there's zero oversight. That's a serious concern that needs addressing, but I have no idea how.
Ban those communities from your instance. There's not going to ever be any way to prevent them starting their own, all you can do is defederate. There doesn't need to be any more.
I mean, if it's real bad shit like violence, that's where FBI comes in, right?
Not sure if the ACLU would be able to do anything about hate speech.
But bad actors would have to run a shell game of go between instances to recruit. And they've been doing that shit for decades anyways. Hell, it's the same thing as under 18 punk shows back in the day when nazis hung in the parking lot trying to give booze/drugs to kids.
Like, imagine if someone said we can't have phones because assholes can also buy a phone...
To be fair, it's not like those were under control on Reddit either.
I agree that the more accurate term is "board-proof" but I still think "CEO-proof" conveys the idea better to someone who is unaware of the way social media corpos work. The image of the shady CEO with his pinstripe suite and greased hair, lighting his big cigar with a wad of dollar bills is so strong in the cultural conciousness, that even my inlaws would switch to a federated plattform.
CEO proof is a good reason to describe why I want my podcasts to come via an RSS feed instead of depending on an all-in-one app. I've often said things about open gardens and interoperable services, but that preaches to the choir.
"CEO Proof" really sells it to a non technical user.
There will never be a time when you need adds to pay for a server even if you had a server with 50 million people the cost to run that server might be like 100k if just 1 million people pay 1 dollar you already have 1 million dollars a month you only need adds when your a company that needs to grow every quarter
In the Fediverse there are no Zuckerbergs, Musks, Dorseys, Huffmans etc.
There is ALWAYS the possibility to enshittify anything. Meta is trying to infiltrate Mastodon already.
You spoke too soon!
Zuckerberg is bringing Facebook to Fediverse.
Does it matter tho, couldn't people just develop tool to stop Meta so called threads from being seen across the fediverse? (I'm technologically illiterate so I really do know tbh)
Yeah they can be excluded but from what I hear they are talking about integrating advertising into the platform.
Thankfully options like this are becoming available because it's really annoying to need to continually "digitally migrate" away as these corporate controlled websites become enshittified.
CEO-proof sounds pretty, though there already exists the (perhaps broader) term “decentralised”.
Something can be decentralized and non-CEO-proof at the same time. Cryptocurrency and related technologies are decentralized, but the wealth and power imbalance between the "peasants" and the rich-get-richer "nobles (derogatory)" is massive (see: 3AC, Celsius, Terra/Luna, etc).
Compare that to the fediverse - if an instance gets spezzed up by some CEO-minded knobhead with bigger ideas than brains, that instance can be defederated. It would still be a great loss of content, but it is decentralized in such a way that one person can't take down the entire ecosystem.
P.s. "spez" is now a verb, it means "to have a passable product/service completely fucked up and its users turned against you because you wanted more money".
I like spez being a verb.
sweet summer child
One day the lemmy could just go closed source and sell to a company.
If they went closed source that would mean they would have a similar situation to Emby. They went closed source after a time which gave rise to people forking the last public build and making Jellyfin which is an excellent alternative.
Even if they do, they would not be able to force instance owners to update to the closed version. And people would take over the last available open source version and fork it. Also, a closed and open source version could co-exist, since the api is open.
Protocol is open, anyone can rewrite a federation client that pulls data off proprietary servers as a last resort. This is why federation is great. Besides, you can't close an open source project, you have to create new, closed parts to have them. That's how mariadb and galera took a chunk off mysql user base and how libreoffice became a successor of openoffice.
As a side note, I wish we could move accounts and even communities between instances, based on some kind of two way handshake agreement.
Right? Currently if an instance fails then all the communities hosted on that instance and comments are essentially 'gone' correct?
No it isn't. A company can be formed to be the steward of either or both the Lemmy source code or popular instances, which would be run by a CEO. I bet anything these corporate structures naturally form as people try to monetize the community and seek investment to gain control over the ecosystem.
The hurdle to that is much greater here since there's a common protocol adopted by multiple open source projects (of which Lemmy) which allows interoperability. If a profit-driven group would try to capture it, people could move instances/use a fork/use a different but similar activitypub project like kbin, etc.
At least I think that's correct? It seems to me there are multiple lines of defense which each have a good amount of redundancy.
You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting. If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.
You could also totally monetize hosting and build a business around that. There are already several private projects to build lemmy clients.
With federated sites you won’t have one CEO. If it takes off, we’ll have many CEOs. Trust me.
We do have a term for that, it's a little bit of a trigger-word for certain demographics, but the correct term is socialism.
Can you define "socialism"? I'm a little lost on how any social media with a hosting provider or moderator can ever be socialism.
The largest (at least well funded) socialist organization in the world is the US military...
If everyone got the shit I got as a disabled vet, we'd all be a lot better off and the only negative would be rich people have a slightly lower high score that's 100% irrelevant to how their quality of life is.
TL;DR: Yeah, I 100% agree, if everyone had a strong safety net, we'd be much better off.
When it works it works. I mean I have met several people who've expressed a lot of sincere dissatisfaction with the VA's medical services, including limited access to mental healthcare among other things. Particularly of concern is the high degree of veterans who end up on the street--many with severe mental health issues, with some even self-medicating and/or dealing with addictions.
Of course, I'm sure there are more factors that contribute to homeless veterans than limited accessibility to medical care, mental healthcare, and other social services provided by the VA--but it is important to consider.
..and of course, as you are aware, it's better to have those social systems in-place than nothing at all. Even when run to a degree of mediocrity, socialist programs can and do tend to benefit a population. While not everyone may like the Supplemental Security Income and FAFSA programs: without them, I wouldn't be able to attend a university as a future job-seeking student.
Specifically without SSI, many who are unable to pursue a degree would end up homeless and hungry, becoming a greater burden on society. In my opinion, it's unfortunate that you have to have a disability in order to qualify for this safety-net program; as I know several people who turned to less favorable means of providing for themselves, because they were rock-bottom and didn't qualify for any programs.
So, yeah, the VA program, and many other programs in the US are great examples of both some of the harms, but also the significant positive benefits that socialist policies can have for a population. Indeed, the greatest harms done by socialist programs in the US seem to be caused by their limitations and inability to properly serve enough people. Providing a everyone access to a solid safety net would do wonders for us as a society and for our economy.
The trouble with socialism, though, is that any implementation of it strips away meaning in the process of trying to help people.
Meaning comes from a person feeling responsibility for what they do. That responsibility requires exposure to risk if they don't act.
Almost any policy created to help people without a well-guarded limit will quickly become paternalism and, consequently, strip away meaning.
There are many successful and beneficial implementations of socialist policies that do more good than harm, especially outside of the US. Most government institutions in the US and abroad are fundamentally socialist in nature--and some of them work very well (especially outside the US).
While there was once some truth to what you've said, I think you're gravely over-simplifying the nature of what gives humans meaning and purpose in life. For one, it's an extremely subjective topic, but for example, what gives me meaning has very little to do with the relationship between non-action and risk. Rather, things that have meaning for me are things I enjoy doing, and things I enjoy seeing. I don't enjoy the thought of going out to hunt for food with hand-tools at the risk of hunger or death, maybe some people do--and if that gives them meaning, that's fine, but that's not how we need to live our lives.
Yes this I agree with, limits are everything. Where limits are designed is important. What I am discussing is not a program that would guarantee that everyone is capable of going out and buying a yacht. I am discussing social safety-net programs that ensure equal access to comfortable housing, enough food, good medical care, and the means to comfortably pursue a job, education, or business endeavor--and in addition, take care of those who are unable to care for themselves. At this point in our technological and social development as a species, these should be considered basics that can be guaranteed to everyone. To do this would not strip away the meaning of life, rather it would enable people to feel meaning in life and the foundation to build up greater meaning for themselves.
Some of the greatest threats to human health and life come from needs-based anxiety, and with the declining population growth rate, high degree of depression, and high rate of suicide, it's imperative that we re-frame how we think about and treat each other.
From empirical evidence we learned that no way in socialism we can enjoy this kind of freedom of expression.
Not entirely true, I sort of jest when I make hyperbolic statements about socialism being the anti-CEO. I personally believe in mixed economies that are well regulated. I know a lot of people dismiss the successes in Norway and neighboring countries on ideas of "cultural/racial homogeneity" among other things, but they do quite well with a mixed economies.
In mixed economies, you have both the right and incentive to start a small to medium sized business; and if you become too big and ubiquitous, the government can step-in to help govern your company.
It's not a perfect solution (I'm not sure if that exists), but I think it's one of the best models we have--and a lot of the governing principles are derived from socialist criticisms of unregulated capitalism. Especially in the US I think we'd benefit from this sort of economic structure; but in-order for that to happen in a meaningful and positive way for the public, we will need electoral reform.
I've never thought of something being CEO-proof, but you're not wrong. Those CEO's did shit the bed in the most diarrhea way possible.