Why do instances not run ads?
It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.
Is running ads really that taboo?
EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of "millions of users", which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that. And not for profit, but solely for sustainability.
I'm gone if there is ads even though I'd block them. I'm sick of ads. They have ruined the internet .
If they add a gold like feature that splits between the instance and the project that would be useful in addition to community donations.
I'm here because its not like the rest of the internet. I run tor relays to help the network, I contribute to foss projects and I seed distros too for the greater good. There is enough of us here to keep it going.
I've been chipping in for my mastodon server for over a year. The admin there posts the finances so we all know when it's time to kick in again, but if we went to a paid rather than donated set-up, then I'd be OK with that. If my admin decided that he needed to run ads that were like printed newspaper ads then I wouldn't mind so much. But ads that track me, ads that change size, ads that show up and block some or all of the screen, ads that play video and audio, pretend to be content etc are the ads I dislike and I would flee.
Couldn't agree more.
There should be somewhere a constitution in the federation within which advertisements are banned. Completely.
undefined> If they add a gold like feature that splits between the instance and the project that would be useful in addition to community donations.
This seems like the best solution, IMO.
Or, we could donate and not have to see ads. I'm sick of ads. Are you running or planning on running an instance with ads? I'd love to follow along and see how your journey would go.
Most Mastodon, Friendica, Calckey instances accept donations.
It is likely that kbin/Lemmy instances will likely follow the same model.
Advertising would not work on the Fediverse as the adverts would be blocked by other instances so the spread would be very limited so not attractive commercially.
That is one of the beauties of the federated model.
Also, as there is no algorithm or data about user interests there's no scope for advert targeting which advertisers would want.
The whole ethos of the #Fediverse is anti commercial.
This! Ads aren't really good and have become malicious, manipulate and just bad in all kinds of things.
I'd rather have the instances communicate that they X amount of money for the moderation + servers costs. Since the communities on an insurance are closely connected, they'll rather be happy to do that.
Add regular donations via patreon and it's solved. To make transfers even more neutral, you could also accept cryptos for payments.
the same can be said about instances with millions of users uploading and downloading millions of images and videos. I'd love to follow along and see that journey would go. I mean, I hope I'm wrong but I just don't see it being sustainable if you want to compete with reddit for example.
The solution is to lean into what Lemmy (and the Fediverse) was designed to do - be decentralized.
If we have more instances running, it would lighten the load on the larger instances (smaller instances can still subscribe to the larger one's communities and such).
I think ads isnt a great idea. Firstly, generic ads don't pay much, for actual good income you need to target ads, which now digs into users privacy and from there we have a slippery slope.
True, but the Fediverse doesn't need to make a profit. If generic ads are enough to (mostly) cover server costs then I don't think there'd be a huge issue
I don't think I agree with it being a competition.
it doesn't need to be. I'm just saying that it may not be even possible to compete, if you were to want that.
Ads? Hard pass.
I'd rather set up my own server and federate.
You should set up your own server no matter what happens. That's my plan.
Who's going to see them when everyone here uses adblocks and VPNs? Who's gonna click on them when everyone here is a world-wary anti-consumer? Who's going to buy anything when everyone here knows very well what they want and where to get it?
Finding advertisers, billing advertisers, and collecting from advertisers is all work you can avoid of your users just give you money.
I'm talking about the possibility of it growing and reaching the larger populous. They do not have adblockers. They will therefore finance the instance. Not for profit, but for sustainability. But even now, there are people here who do not mind small and non-intrusive ads if it's for a non-profit instance. Not everyone here, even now, is a world-wary anti-consumer, whatever that is.
Why do we want a single instance to be as large as reddit?
narrator: We don't.
Weren't ads the ruination of Reddit in the first place? When social media companies get hungry for advertising, it's the users who suffer. Not just from the ads themselves, but from the advertisers' expectations for the content on the site to conform to their standards.
It comes down to whether the owners have a spine.
4chan runs ads. Pornhub runs ads. They have most certainly said goodbye to a large number of advertisers who were uncomfortable with the content they host.
It became a problem because it meant they were forced to bow down to advertisers instead of leaning into user funding. Discord has leaned into user funding very heavily, but I don't know of any other social media that is more funded by its users than it is by ads and is regularly used/promoted, at least in the US.
I run my own instance and I don’t run ads because I frankly hate seeing them myself. They clutter up the web view, cause lag on the webpage, and frankly are annoying and ugly to look at.
I’d rather pay out of my own pocket to keep my instance going rather than run ads. Donations would be ideal to help keep it running for longer. As sad as it is, if I couldn’t keep paying the server costs and there weren’t any donations.. I’d just shut the server down. I personally will never run ads on an instance I run. I don’t want to perpetuate or support the lifeless corporate greed cycle.
How much money does it even cost running an instance?
If it is just a single person private instance, relatively cheap (like a few USD). As you scale it up though it does quickly get pricey. I think mine is around 20-25ish/mo plus 4/mo for backups. I know some of the bigger instances are closer to 50-100/mo and it’s only going up as their users go up.
If donations work, it maybe a good way to finance it. Does it require loads of work and moderation? Or is it easy
Donations seem to be plan for instances in the fediverse, I’ve heard of some other efforts to monetize instances either through advertising or subscriptions but apparently those instance were quickly defederated with.
There was a bit of technical work to stand up my own instance but developers are working on making setting up an instance easier. I haven’t had to moderate anything on my instance yet as it is <10 users at the moment but it is definitely something you have to keep in mind as your instance grows.
Defederated means isolated more or less? Good luck with your instance!
I use https://1984.hosting (for privacy) to run my instance on a VPS. I'm using 1 core 2GB RAM VPS and that costs 10 dollars a month. So far everything looks to be running pretty well.
There probably are cheaper VPS providers as well, so you likely will be able to go cheaper.
And how many users can that host? With that price there maybe not really a need to actually run ads. What work is involved with running an instance?
"Donations can bring us far"
Why do you believe donations won't be enough? I dont think there is any evidence (yet) to support that.
wikipedia has survived off of just donations
although some models are going to be more expensive than others. hosting a reddit clone and a youtube clone require totally different levels of bandwidth and infrastructure
Wikipedia gets donations from famous people and large corporations.
I chip in a few bucks here and there, as well 🙂.
and me too. I'm neither of those things.
Fuck ads
Why should it be ads?
There are so many different ways to have some form of monetization that is not intrusive.
Running Ads is not the only way to keep the lights on.
Just curious, what are some? I've no experience hosting any sort of website or anything. I assumed ads were pretty much the best bet?
On that note I highly suggest you read EFF's "To save the News" articles, where they also go over why targeted ads don't work. It's a great read
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising
Ads pretty much are the best bet.
That said, they aren't the only option. Donations are a big alternative. That's why Wikipedia is ad free, for example. The other big one is subscriptions, but you basically have to offer a lot to convince anyone to subscribe. And a lot of "subscriptions" are actually just a convenient way to donate, which should be viewed differently from non-donations, since far fewer people are willing to donate, due to being completely optional.
There's also sponsored content, but that's just deceptive ads. I'd rather ads be 100% transparent and obvious about being an ad.
Finally there's angel investors, but those aren't typically paying out of the goodness of their heart. They usually want to grow a business that they'll later commercialize. They'll get a great period of time where everything just magically gets paid for, but odds are, they're gonna do something terrible later to monetize.
An obligatory mention that ads don't have to be scummy. That's the norm, yeah, but it's entirely possible to serve only ethical, clearly marked ads that don't utilize deception or are scams. It doesn't make as much money as accepting scummy ads, which is why we usually end up with ads being scummy, but it is an option.
ads are shit. They make everything smelly and gross, and it has to be scrubbed.
Wikipedia gets a lot of funding from billionaires and corporations. It's not going to be easy for most instances to be funded entirely by user donations long term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia\_Foundation#Wikimedia\_Endowment
edit: removed "most"
I have contributed money repeatedly to Wikipedia and will continue to do so (I have no interest in editing). I'm not rich.
If you want to really measure the support for Wikipedia, you have to include the editing. That's hard to measure in dollars but I'm sure it dwarfs the 'billionaire' contributions.
The point of Lemmy is NOT to have a single instance compete with Reddit! That would just be Reddit V2 then. There just needs to be more instances to distribute the user load more evenly. Running a small/medium sized VPS costs about as much as a Netflix subscription.
Sure, but couldn't you still have a 30 million user community in a single instance? Or would you also like that community to be spread out over multiple instances? Probably not because that would splinter communities. But having such a big community in a single instance, is still hard to host. Expensive. And donations may not suffice.
This isn't reddit. Stop trying to make it a centralized place.
What you call splintering communities is a feature of federation and helps everyone out.
Yeah forgive me for not understanding, but I thought the decentralisation is the distribution of different communites, not of the same communities. Or perhaps you are in fact talking about different communities, but then you have to make that clear.
But even so. There may be many instances, adding to the total cost, which would still increase, and so the number of people needing to pay. This may not scale. I'm very doubtful.
There was still decentralization of same communities on Reddit. There are multiple subs for gaming, anime memes, tech news, etc.
Well I think that's part of the point of the Fediverse: No single server has to scale that much. Sure, the big ones are going to get big and stay big, but no one Lemmy server is ever going to have as many people using it as Reddit does. That means the cost of each instance is going to be tiny in comparison to what Reddit spends to keep one big monolithic site running (which is easily in the millions). Fediverse will distribute users across many instances/platforms which also distributes the cost. Not only do users have many Lemmy instances, they've also got kbin, and mastodon, plus any other platform that joins ActivityPub.
Reddit/Facebook style monolithic sites are not viable. You see time and time again these platforms desperately trying to monetize because it's so expensive to run. Fediverse can have millions and millions of users, but no single entity will have to foot that bill.
So many new users completely missing the point of the Fediverse. We want to avoid having one big instance with one person in control. At that point you may as well name them the CEO.
Someone who even takes the step into getting into the fediverse is probably using ad blockers for the purposes of security alone on a daily basis. I don't see them disabling it.
I am very much certain that once there is a lot of users here, corporations will show up to run ads. Then I‘ll go to an instance which defederates from them, cause I‘m not dealing with this.
Most will defederate them, others will spam them with porn and worse. They probably won't come here.
Most instances don't even accept donations to themselves...
I like where your head is at, I wouldn‘t even have thought of spamming them with porn lol.
There are instances (like burggit.moe) that allow borderline child porn... If they come here, they will get flooded with that... They will be associated with this. They will either be super based and say "fuck it, let's advertise our products to these people" (wich i would actually respect very much as long as it isn't spam / scam) or they just leave and do like they have never seen this place...
Some corporations already market to pedos too, they certainly market to nazis on twitter. They just do it in a covert way until someone from the media notices and points it out and then pretend it‘s all a big accident. Or they don‘t give a fuck cause their reputation is trash anyway, like say for example scam organisations like shitcoins and this whole "alternative medicine" bullshit. I can‘t even blame them for it, stupid people like neo-nazis are an easy demographic to market to, just have some white guy say it‘s good and they‘ll buy it.
Either way, I‘d rather be here with some of that which I also dislike than on some corporate website again. Especially with defederation, as long as I choose a good instance I hopefully won‘t encounter it too much.
Never seen a big company do that, its mostly very related stuff as well. Only retarded Idiots by retarded idiotic products...
I would lough my ass of if I'd see a McDonald's ad on pornhub...
Oh and burggit explicitly allows lolli hentai, its not legally child porn whee they are located and the word is very stretchable, but its basically anime drawings of short or flat chested characters mostly, so gladly not outright pedo shit.
Ah I see I thought it was like jailbait. Loli, I wouldn‘t want to see myself, but I don‘t think it should be illegal as maybe it could keep people from trying to find or even worse create the real thing.
Nah jailbait was just on reddit who's ceo moderated it...
And same, if its not involving real people it's ok for me to exit, even if i don't want to see it, i can block it myself.
Ads on Reddit were one of the reasons that third party apps were so popular... They didn't show them.
The whole point is to get away from Reddit, not just make several smaller copies. No thanks. I've donated already, and I'll donate again (to Jerboa, Lemmy devs, and instances if they prove their worthiness.
If they start running ads it's only a matter of time before they become shitty like Reddit. Ads is where it starts.
sorry, I block all ads by default. if I get popups indicating that I need to whitelist, I block elements until I never see that crap again or the site is unusable, after which I find a different site.
no ads. never
Preach!
Before the internet (yes, I'm old), it seemed like there was broad opposition to advertising in general. Some eschewed television altogether, while others stuck to pbs and public access only (believe it or not, back then public tv had no ads!). With the rise of the dotcoms came a simultaneous resurgence of the false notion that advertising is essential to "capitalism", by which people really meant " entrepreneurship". Now so many people are ready to accept advertising, believing that we can't have good things without it.
I will never accept advertising as a necessary evil. It is just evil.
I'm there with ya, internet was available to me in ~94 when I was 15. it sure was a simpler time all around - I grew up running around in the forest, barefoot, floating rivers on inner tubes.
I dont hate advertisements - but I'll do everything in my power to avoid viewing them
I think what would be useful would be a transparent system where the instance owners would keep a record of how many users / interaction they're getting and how much it's currently costing.
That way if they say they're supporting 20,000 users and we need a VPS instance that costs X a month for the current number of requests, you can somewhat forecast the need for expansion
I get the idea isn't to make mega servers like Reddit, but if people like the UI / experience of a single instance it's hard to tell them to go elsewhere. Having transparency about actual costs would be useful, you could have a little widget on the sidebar or footer showing how much it currently being donated.
I think the instances themselves don't feel much different (for example the UI for lemmy.world and lemmy.studio is like exactly the same), but I feel like maybe there needs to be some quality of life tools to help a new instance succeed with more ease.
Text is cheap. It doesn't cost a ton of money to run these instances at least not yet, so people can do it as a hobby or with a few supporters.
It does however pay to ask your instance admins what their plans and policies are for moderation, defederating, finances, backups, having a money buffer in case things need to be spun down, and having multiple admins in case of disaster.
The image hosting might cost a bit though. Maybe instances can farm them off to places where storage is cheaper, or have premium membership options that includes image hosting. I would happily pay an instance a small amount to cover the convenience of being able to add images to posts and comments directly.
Sure! Reddit survived for a good long time without their own image hosting though. We'll see how the Fediverse handles it.
Because these instances are often run as hobby projects and out of passion, not to be sustainable.
The Fediverse isnt corporate, we're a community and nothing will change that. We don't want to make money, we want to bring back what social media was supposed to be.
Additionally, it has become part of the culture of the Fediverse to regularly remind your peers to donate to your instance, as they're who are running this all for our benefit.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone will do an ad-supported service. Or just do a straight-up subscription service -- I mean, Usenet providers do that. Means that you don't risk having your instance just vanish, someone handles security updates and load issues and so forth. Different models could coexist at different levels of reliability and performance and whatnot.
On the reliability issue, from my very quick skim, my kneejerk reaction is that I do think that the Fediverse might need some improvements in dealing with resillience due to instances going down permanently. As it is, that happens -- due to hardware failure or financial concerns or God knows what -- the accounts aren't available.
One possibility might be providing a pubkey method to prove that a user is legitimately a user on an instance that went down. Publish a pubkey prior to an instance failing, and then permit a "transition to a new account" mechanism where a user can prove to the system that they are an older user. Key management -- storing and retaining a private key -- might be a bit of a pain without a third-party app, as I don't know if there's a convenient way to do that in browsers today.
Another might be having some mechanism to deal with node failure. Freenet deals with having a fundamentally-unreliable distributed storage mechanism by having a level of forward error correction and then distributing some redundant data around the network so that it's possible to regenerate a certain amount of lost data when a node leaves the network from the data on remaining nodes.
As it stands, I don't think that lemmy/kbin have something like that. They must retain copies of some of the data -- hence the "The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance" message that kbin shows if I'm looking at a community on lemmy.world from kbin.social. But unless it's cryptographically-signed by lemmy.world, if lemmy.world vanishes forever, kbin.social cannot prove that its copy of data originating from lemmy.world is authentic, so it cannot be made re-available to other lemmy/kbin instances.
Yes something like this should definitely be implemented. Mastodon has the feature of "moving your account" from one instance to another, but I haven't tested it yet. Don't know if it has anything like you mentioned like key management.
That was one of the things that I very-briefly skimmed, and why I mentioned the pubkey thing, as it sounded to me like doing a migration on Mastodon involved having the source and destination instance both active. Like, you wouldn't use it in the aftermath of an instance being lost forever, which I'm pretty sure is gonna be a use case that is gonna come up before too long.
This is the one thing that bugs me the most with ActivityPub - identities are tied to instances. Hopefully folks are still working on nomadic identities.
I'm guessing that ads/sponsored posts would probably take the form of companies setting up their own Lemmy instances and pays to federate with other instances, and my could-be-unpopular opinion is that it's fine as long as it's fair, since if they have to abide by upvotes/downvotes as everybody else it forces the companies to make good contents, and that if they get too annoying/spammy they'll just get defederated or people will vote with their virtual feet and go elsewhere.
And the good thing about this approach is that you can make sure you get real interactions with real people at these companies for tech support, otherwise the ads would be completely useless.
The epitome of a reddit user...
I would be very curious to see the cost of running an instance, especially as the user base grows
You can see the costs for lemmy.world on the blog for the associated mastodon instance mastodon.world.
I think I'd rather have an optional membership to support the instance with perks or something. Not reddit gold though. Lemmy silver?
Personally as a uswe I think running ads is not a bad idea, just if I would pay already (through donations for example), I prefer to have the option to show no ads.
I can imagine the current server owners either be decently supported by donations and/or see hosting a lemmy server currently more as a hobby.
Uswe?
Would ads be of much value on a lemmy instance? Almost nobody using lemmy would not be using an ad blocker. And if an instance integrated ads, other instances would have access to their communities without ads unless you do some kind of "native content" scheme where some of your posts are ads which I don't think anyone would tolerate.
I could see maybe sponsorships with locally hosted shout-outs in the sidebar working for some people.
The advertisement model needs to die. No one wants to have their experience corrupted by panels trying to sell you something. We can find other ways to fund the network
Instead of ads Lemmy operators should be paid for hosting. Users should be asked for funding on a periodic basis (perhaps a small number of subscribers could fund the entire hosting for all.)
No one should assume this is all free forever.
I can imagine an instance having a fundraising goal and different communities competing for how much they can raise.
Who are these imaginary users you think assume this is all free?
The numberless masses that run adblock and refuse to donate.
The point of the fediverse is that hosts can pick their own business model - free, freemium, ad-supported, subscription. Just like e-mail, you sign up with the provider who provides the type of service you think best meets your needs. If they piss you off, you move to a different provider.
If the fediverse demands hosting for millions of users, someone will make a server to host millions.
I personally think "big" instances should focus on user/identity management, while communities live in small groups on small instances. This lets the identity providers include/exclude with much better granularity (compared to the beehaw mess) making the communities much less susceptible to being collateral damage.
I'd like this to be avoided as much as possible. But I am a bit weary about the fact that even small instances have to copy everything else on the Fediverse and thus will be very strained. Or do they copy the stuff only when their user wants to view it? Not sure how it works.
AO3 is a huge website that makes money purely off of donations. They often get like quadruple the amount they ask for every time they ask for money. Wikipedia comes to mind as well, although I'm not sure if they only make money off of the donations. Instead of donating to a third party service, Lemmy should build in the ability to donate into the website.
Ads is what's ruining everything that's good on the internet. If you have two similar platforms and one is run by ads and one by a subscribtion model the latter is going to give you way better experience.
I'd be absoloutely fine with some unobtrusive side bar adds, its only when adds make it difficult to actually use the website that add block turns on.
I’d probably be fine with Old-Style Internet Ads: A Div that displays a bit of text or a small image that suggests an interesting product for the user, possibly related to the page content they’re viewing.
But new style internet ads demand things like iframes, numerous scripts, user tracking, user anti-tracking circumvention, and attempts to weasel their way out of the small sidebar they’ve been scripted into. If there was any way for an advertising network to ban/blacklist any advertisers that do things like that, or even offer them a limited model for what they can add to a page, I’d be a little more okay with them.
Maybe something like DuckDuckGo's ads that respect DNT?
I think it's reasonable for some instances, where there's good alignment. There was a thread I replied in a few days back around how/if TTRPG creators(who are mostly small enthusiasts themselves) could advertise in related magazines, and legitimizing that business wouldn't really pose a conflict for the hobby - that's how it was built in the first place! It's just a matter of finding a place for it and defining the technical solutions.
As a general "let in all the advertisers and promise riches for someone" measure, it does cause known problems. There is some freedom to figure out what works in a specific case here, it's not defined top-down since it isn't centralized.
I'd rather have a smaller/cheaper platform with no ads than a bloated mess like reddit with ads and data mining.
A small community is perfectly ok.