So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?
I'm fairly new and don't 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
No ads, no tracking, just donations. The model proved itself when twitter went to shit and a big influx of users came to mastodon, it all worked out.
Many mastodon instances shut down. There's always a risk that at some point the donations are not enough to sustain an instance. It could be very problematic if mods lose their communities when an instance shutdown.
Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.
Yeah, especially with Lemmy which is a lot more permanent than Mastodon is. You can screenshot your old toots but you can't screenshot a userbase. There should be a way to migrate a community to another instance while keeping the subscriptions.
Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.
I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.
Hopefully it ends up like wikipedia
The fediverse is not a single database or server. It's a protocol and standard that's distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can't be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they've stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.
Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you're not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it's a closed source centralized monopoly.
One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that's something that can happen in the future
A point of caution:
A large company absolutely could come in and absorb the majority of lemmy traffic and build proprietary code and features on top of the main protocol, eventually making the open source protocol obsolete and supplanting it as a paid/closed-source service. It has been done repeatedly by tech companies, and it is the main reason many people distrust Meta's interest in joining the fediverse.
For all the reasons you just mentioned, we should fight tooth and nail against that from happening, but we should at least be aware of the threat.
I think the email comparison is apt. We are currently in the bbs/dial-up ISP stage of the fediverse. When people had aol.com or netcom.com addresses.
That gave way to powerful centralized services such as Hotmail or rocketmail, that had the promise of never changing your email again. We then saw Gmail become the big boy on the block with amazing technology.
Even with these powerful entities, there were still hobbyists and corporate email.
I predict the fediverse will follow a similar path. lemmy.world and beehaw are like the netcoms, or even the bbs's, basically hobbyists, and Internet communists setting things up for the common good, or simply because it's fun.
We're going to see instances fill up, become unstable, unreliable, etc. People will get frustrated when Lemm.ee, or their preferred instance can no longer support the volume they have attracted. We'll see a professional service like a Hotmail that promises a forever home. You'll likely also see vanity instances like what rocketmail offered. Given the nature of the interest based servers, we'll likely see vanity instances come about singer than they did with email: starwars.fedi, lotr.verse, piano.lemmy, etc.
Once corporate interests start to see value in a powerful, stable instance that can collect user data and serve targeted ads (starwars.fedi is easy to target), they will dump enough money to push out the hobbyists. The hobbyists will not go away, but they won't be needed anymore.
That's when you'll see the disruptor. Someone who comes into the space like Google did, and the fediverse will be an open protocol that is dominated by a few massive interests.
All in all, I'm not predicting doom, just the natural course of events, which actually will be great for the fediverse. Just like I love my gmail.com account more than my hotcity.com account, I think the future of the fediverse is bright, even if corporate interests get heavily involved, and dominate the 'verse, because there will always be room for innovations, and hobbyists, and while a single company could dominate, the protocol is still open for anyone to do their own thing, and not be bound to a single company if they don't want to be.
I think this is spot on. It's completely foreseeable that a well funded enterprise could stand up an instance that's super robust and can handle a lot more traffic than current ones. They could, say, attract celebrities to do AMAs and handle the load. Or maybe they could create some communities that they stock with a giant amount of useful content.
They'd do it for free, and it would just be another instance, but it would become invaluable, with more and more communities hosted there, and more and more users making it their home instance, until the owners felt they were valuable enough that they put their content behind a paywall or they start serving ads. Sure, people could just move to other instances, but the point would be that suddenly doing without them would be painful.
But unlike Reddit or Twitter, it's not as much as all or nothing situation, and other instances can compete in the same realm.
Sounds like Microsoft's embrace, extend, and extinguish
I haven't read a ton about it, but isn't this what Meta is potentially going to do with Thread?
That is the worry, yes. There's very little incentive for them to join the fediverse as a for-profit company otherwise.
I think there are benefit of killing twitter, mocking el*n and skirting europe regulation on moderation laws. But the worry is there, I hope the devs stand their ground and rejecting any doubious modification from meta on fediverse protocols.
Please don't start obfuscating words. Elon.
What's the background on this?
Yes but you need to sign their NDA to be sure.
Incidentally, Google is kinda doing this with email.
If you run your own email server for your business, they will rate limit you under the guise of spam protection, even if your emails are never caught in their spam filters. Some business reported up to 12 hour delays on their emails being delievered. They want everyone to use preferably their own service, or at least another major giant's, so they can push the smaller players out of the market.
TIHI
Yeah that's a great point. I think it would be hard to fully lock other clients out, but you could have an early internet style situation where you had some websites not supporting all browsers.
The big difference with Lemmy is that it's not really a service, it's a open protocol and standard, like email, or http. The service itself is provided by distributed instances that adhere to the protocol. Like those protocols, no one company has been able to get a monopoly on it. Some have taken over a lot of it, like Google with Gmail, or cloudflare, but if you don't want to work with them there are a ton of other options you can go with, and you will not be locked out of the system if you do.
Reddit was a centralized closed source system so if you don't have a Reddit account then you are locked out of the system completely.
Lemmy is decentralized so no one instance has or can gain a monopoly. If you want to break ties with one instance you can just switch to another one and still participate with it and the rest of the fediverse.
Not only does that give you choice in a worst case scenario, it also keeps all the instances on their toes because they don't have dictatorial control over their users.
Spez's fatal miscalculation was that he thought he had user lock in, but unlike other social networks where it's your only option to keep in contact with your real life friends, or it's the only platform your favorite creator posts on, they had neither. Almost all accounts were not connected to your real life and posts were mostly links to other platforms. Very few creators had Reddit as their sole posting platform. The interactions were ephemeral and superficial. Dropping Reddit was the easiest service I ever had to drop.
This is a great analogy. It would be like asking what happens when someone tries to monetize email.
All the users would jump ship to another one immediately.
Most email providers are monetized. For most providers you either pay a subscription or they inject ads. The important thing is if they get too greedy and start providing a bad service you can switch providers.
Email services are monetizable, but email itself cannot because it's not a tangible thing, it's an idea and agreement to follow that idea.
The concept of the Fediverse is horizontal rather than vertical growth - i.e. More smaller instances rather than increasing the capacity of the larger ones. We're also seeing that Lemmy currently only scales to a certain degree. Right now, most instances are either covered by their admin because they're so small that the cost is manageable or instances are setting up donations.
It's conceivable that a business would set up an instance and charge for it - but I think it unlikely. A year town the road, though, who knows?
Hadn't occurred to me before - I guess instances/mods can limit the number of new users they take in so it doesn't impact performance too much.
Yup - as the admin of a small instance, I plan to keep it small. I want to contribute the Fediverse but not have this become more than a hobby.
okay
Doesn’t really make sense, if they’re federated then you wouldn’t need to pay them to access their content. If they’re not federated then what are you paying for?
You're paying for reliability, continuity, possibly a domain name which may give a sense of exclusivity. By joining a "free" server, you don't actually have a contract or terms of service.
The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.
Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.
As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it's very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.
Yep. I don't get why it is so hard for people to understand that non-profits CAN sustain themselves from donations. There's so much brainwashing and gaslighting by corporations going on that people start to question everything outside of the ultra-capitalist system, even the most basic and genuinely nice human interactions are doubted
Yeah it's weird, there's plenty of examples of what people would consider "profitable" non-profits: For example Mozilla Thunderbird pulled US$6 million last year in donations alone, with the average donation being US$21, I think.
Mastodon, another non-profit, while not quite as lucrative, pulls in around £24,000 a month on Patreon donations alone, not counting any outside sponsors or Open Collective donations, and so on.
Build value, and people will happily support you.
However if reddit decided they want to plug the leak, if they offered $1 million to the admins of sh.it.just.works and lemmy.world and beehaw, if they accepted, reddit could then defederate the three largest instances from everywhere and Lemmy would basically have to start from the ground up again. A lot of users would probably not bother making an account elsewhere as they may feel it not worth it since it could happen again.
Lemmy wouldn't have to start from the ground up. They would already have all the source code and instances, a potential userbase who was already convinced not to let these people control their social networks, who already have the frontend installed on their devices, is already used to the interface and features of the app. Even if Spez were to do this, other instances would be built and in the long run it would be a financial hole.
Brave of you thinking that I don't have multiple Fediverse accounts. Buying those instances would be worthless, since users would just migrate to a different instance, even easier than moving from Reddit.
Another possibility is that a big corporate will dedicate a dev team to make their own FOSS fork of the Lemmy codebase that, due to its rich feature set and support, becomes THE version of Lemmy to use. Kinda like Meta and React (though React was originally fully internal to Meta, you get the point). Of all the big companies to do this kind of thing, Meta would be the best, imo, given how they've been with their AI models and React, but I still don't like the idea given what we've seen happen with Red Hat.
Wikipedia is probably the most important thing on the internet fight now. It also needs some amount of servers, many crawlers scan it daily, I assume its a shitton of users and logins and API hits and what not. And still it survives on donations alone.
Eventually lemmy is not a streaming services with videos and and a lot of bandwidth. Its just text and people connecting. So I assume you dont need massive servers and shit.
With that said, I'd encourage everyone to sign up to donate a dollar a month to your Mastodon and Lemmy instance. To me, a couple of bucks a month is worth it to not have to fight against a dumb algorithm or deal with ads.
And if we ever want to post videos, I imagine PeerTube links would be a good way to go?
undefined> PeerTube
This is honestly a good idea.
Link to undefined?
That was added to my post when I replied lol. Must've been a glitch 🤷♂️.
I wonder how similar Lemmy is to Wikipedia in terms of storage/bandwith requirements? It's text and pictures in both cases, but there may be nuances that i'm not aware of as a noob
One big difference right now is that it's a ton of small people donating their time and servers for this. So the costs aren't as centralized and are spread over many people.
I saw a thread of instance owners talking about why they host, and some actually get free server usage through their work or run servers already and Lemmy only uses a small portion of that.
Wikipedia's page serves simple. The documents get edited and processed into html when submitted.
Lemmy dynamically builds the html for every single http get.
That's a very different cost for a server.
Umm, no? Lemmy UI is a PWA/SPA and all the html "building" happens in your browser.
It doesn't really matter that much if the Lemmy protocol itself doesn't build the html - there is still a process that involves multiple steps that may or may not be server side in order to build the comment trees that we see.
There's a node, yea! Oh hey... that node has children! Awesome! All of those exclamation points are either server side or client side lookups. Hurray! Oh look it's a wikiepedia article. No exclamation point lookups allowed.
How many hobbiests running miniature train sets in their garage have monetized those train sets? How many backyard gardeners sell their crops.
In most cases people who choose to develop and administrate an instance of their own are largely just hobbiests of another type. Sure it costs them some money. Many hobbies cost money, it doesn't stop people from building things or growing things for fun.
I've tried to explain this to people before, without success. I'm starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.
For me it's building boats. I've only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I've got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.
I'll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.
It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it's a pretty foreign concept for some folks who've bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.
Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.
I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.
Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.
But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it's not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.
Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you're not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what's the point?
Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that's your whole motivation it's going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.
There's a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.
Exactly. Federation means no single instance needs to serve millions of users. If one gets too big and becomes too commercialized, you can move to a different one that shares your values. If large instances cost more per user as they scale up, we just need more instances.
I also think people are vastly overestimating the cost to serve users on Lemmy/kbin. Last time I calculated it, lemmy.world costs were around €0.01/mo per monthly active user. That can be maintained with 1% users donating €1 a month.
Yes, the concept of the Fediverse has so many inherent advantages over classical, corporate monolith social media that I hope that in the end, after all the desperate attempts of current sites (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) to finally become profitable have failed, it will lead to a freer and better Internet.
If I move to a different instance, what changes about my experience?
Depends how successful we are in fending off Zuck from trying to muscle his way in. That's probably the first challenge.
Otherwise this is a non-issue, as there will simply always be both kinds. Nothing is stopping you from simply Self-Hosting your own Lemmy server.
I'm lazy. Checkmate!
For real though, lots of money is a great motivator.
Yes, which is why you should pick your server with care. If you do not pick one that suits your desires, that is on you.
This will not be as effortless as reddit any time soon, so if that is your goal, you may prefer it over there.
Nope, no way I'm going back. However, I'm still fairly new so I haven't really "researched" which instances I should be joining. Except for lemmynsfw...for obvious reasons. LOL
If they want to crate a Lemmy instance so badly, why don't they? It's open source, everyone can host an instance if they want to.
The only thing I can imagine is that they're restricted from monetizing it due to some rule of the license
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
I think most people are assuming we'll have the ability to fend off anything. All it's going to take is Zuck creating a new fediverse-enabled platform and just giving everyone with an Instagram account access using their already existing accounts. We'll be outnumbered by the millions.
We don't need to become more successful than Meta in order to fend him off, so to speak. We merely need to still be here, and independent.
This is a big part of the shift in mentality that needs to happen. Something doesn't have to be the biggest to be better. We don't need millions of concurrent users per server to enjoy connecting with other people and sharing ideas and art.
Like, a local cafe doesn't need to beat the profit margins of a Starbucks, it just needs to make ends meet. And it's probably a lot better experience in the process.
Besides all the discussion of nonprofits and donations, fedi server hosts have way less overhead. They're not generally trying to profit, so they only need to break even (or run a deficit small enough to deal with out of pocket). A corporation is trying to give 6 or 7 digit salaries to CEOs and/or shareholders. So they need to extract more than the cost of hosting.
Also, a site like Reddit wants something like 99.9% availability: roughly 8 hours of downtime per year. Lemmy instances are probably satisfied with 99% availability: roughly 3 days of downtime per year. If one instance is down, but the rest of the fediverse is up, it's a bit annoying, but not devastating. Users of that instance might have to create alt accounts on another fediverse instance, and certain communities would be offline for days. But, as long as the entire fediverse itself doesn't go down, it's not the same as a Reddit outage.
Getting that extra "9" of availability means having engineers on call, it means having a technical staff that creates and maintains monitoring systems, does capacity planning, runs disaster preparedness scenarios, etc. It's expensive.
Some fediverse admins might run monitoring systems, either because they really care about their instance, or because doing it is interesting and fun. The ones that don't might just have to do reactive maintenance when something breaks. But, because you're only aiming for 2 nines, it doesn't have to be a full time job.
"Generally not trying to profit" - but we're all humans. If someone offered (hypothetical amount) $2M to "buy" an instance, which admins would sell?
But why would you as a user stay on that instance?
If you start seeing ads and you don't want to, you move to another instance. If all instances start to serve ads and you don't want to see ads, you have to start your own instance.
But who would stay on an instance with ads or something when there are thousands of options?
Hell, I made accounts on the top handful of instances just for situations in which one goes down for maintenance, or the admins do something weird (like defederating from big communities).
I think about this a lot. Lemmy fully deserves to have a lot of users, and a lot of users means a lot of opportunity to profit one way or the other, so the potential for profit-seeking behavior is there. So if we imagine a future where one instance has 500k users, it's easy to imagine the owners trying to take it beyond the break even point and making it as profitable as possible. Anyone who puts themselves through the trouble of hosting an instance deserves to make a good living, but we don't want predatory greedy policies.
The question is, how easy is it to migrate your account from one instance to the other? I haven't tried yet
I'd like to know that too. The solution I've seen mentioned is to just create your own instance to host your own account which is... easier said than done, lol.
It would be cool if we could keep offline backups of our accounts and "sync" them to an instance of our choosing. Migrating would be as simple as syncing up the backup to another instance. And importantly, it would be way easier than setting up one's own linux server, most people wouldn't even know where to start.
That's true, an instance would be very tempted by that. I was referring more to the day to day, there's no incentive to squeeze users.
I’m going to tell you a secret…. Yes.
All those things could happen. Some people could run a site that has ads. Some people could run a site that charges a membership. Some sites could have a Patreon membership. Some sites could do subscriptions….
And some sites could be completely free.
The funny thing is, because of the federation, no one will be harmed. Let’s say I startup a site and all I do is pass through the cost of the site to each user. No profit, just what it costs to maintain the server is shared among the members.
Is that unreasonable?
I wonder how much that comes out to per user. Im sure its not negligable, but I have a hard time believing a few hundred text posts and images actually take $8/mo (lookin at twitter) to store on a server.
Yeah, that’s not how the math works. Cost of server + cost of maintaining = X. Divide X by the number of users. Example, my time is worth $60 an hour. I spend two hours a week working on the server ($120). I spend $30 a month on the server rental. $150. I have 20 users. $150/20 is $7.50…
Hmmm interesting points. Those numbers do look pretty steep for a server with only 20 users, but I can see how there's more too it than just the costs of a server. Im sure its also harder if you have a server that ends up hosting big communities but has few users.
Yeah you could easily run a 20n user instance on a $3 or $5 server. (Hell, even a "free trial" host if you don't care about the amount of extra time that would require!)
I was curious about Beehaw after hearing about them defederating and looked to see what was over there and what their content looked like. They have a stickied post at the very top that goes over the numbers if you're curious what they're saying it costs to run that instance. I feel like numbers could be totally variable based on a number of factors but that might give you a good idea. A smaller instance might be less and a larger one with the best hardware might be more but they're probably all playing in the same general ballpark.
There already are sites with Patreons set up for them, right? Not that you get anything out of being a member (i think). Having a Patreon (or similar) available seems like a good way to support an instance to me.
Agreed. But I wouldn’t say you get nothing out of being a member on Patreon. I run lemmy.ninja. If I had a paying customer (Patreon) ask for something, and I had a non paying user ask for something…
Who do you suppose gets my time first? Now, it may be that I have to tell the paying customer that what they are asking for is only possible if code is changed. In that case I can put a request in on their behalf. However if it is a thing I CAN do, then my time goes to them first, right?
Realistically every instance can monetize in whatever way they see fit but I highly doubt this'll be a thing. Mastodon is way bigger and more expensive than Lemmy and it runs just fine through donations. No reason why the same won't work here.
Lemmy itself is also likely to follow in Mastodon's path by getting money from sponsorships and fundraisers. See https://www.investopedia.com/how-mastodon-makes-money-7482865
Sponsors want something in return though, surely?
For many people, myself included, paying $10 a month for some VC schmuck to buy another pina coloda while he’s resting on the beach smoking a Cuban cigar laughing about how much money he made from exploitation is a no-way. On the contrary, paying $10 once every few months to cover hosting costs for a service we all enjoy using and is not misusing our funds is something a lot are happy to do.
When I purchase something or subscribe to a service (the only subscription services I have are servers I rent sooo..) I think twice about whether I wanna spend this money because I can find a loophole around it, donating to keep my instance alive is something I’m ready to do.
And that's really the only sustainable way things like this can exist. The Internet has been having it's free lunch for so long we've forgotten how to buy our own.
I'd say it's more that we've been paying out the nose in the form of offering up our data and digital autonomy, and by allowing not only the Internet but our societies at large to degrade and polarize. We've paid dearly for our 'free' services, in the case of the US with everything from our reproductive rights to our connections with our own families and communities.
I'd much rather pay the price of an extra latte now and then for real internet communities than deal with actual Nazis and orbital Teslas for some shitty undermoderated ad feeds infested with trolls, AI, and literal societal saboteurs on the payrolls of Putin and Winnie the Pooh.
Just a shoutout on the main website or github. Not much else, they tip in to support the project.
This might work for now, but I'm skeptical how well this would work in the long run. Do those company pay a monthly fee to be there? What happens when there's a hundred companies on that list? What happens if a company pays a substantial amount to be there and threatens to stop paying if xyz doesn't happen?
The power here is in the hands of users and admins. We just have to be careful not to let a company like Google or Facebook/Meta take control over a substantial portion of the fediverse. See also: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
Good to know!
if any corporation tries to get in on it, you can count on them trying to monetize it
considering the offers facebook were making, it wouldn't be very surprising if some instances caved. It's a good thing that anyone can make their own instance for that reason.
It's already monetised. Just click on the links under Donations in the main sidebar or straight to the OpenCollective page for a glimpse. We pay for it with our money. That's how we know we're not the product.
As soon as Lemmy instances are unsustainable out of pure interest for the concept of the Fediverse. I doubt there will be subscriptions, first it'll be donations, and then some instances may have ads. It's an inevitable that both will happen (either on the same instance, or some instances opting for donations to stay up, and others opting for ads to stay up). No one can run the servers necessary for this platform out of pure charity; the bill for the Fediverse is going to be due someday, and it has to be paid.
But it’s sustainable if it’s non profit.
Most third party Reddit users were happy to pay in the range of $5 a month. The reason everything is shutting down now is because they don’t just want to break even, they want profit, and a shit ton at that.
The fediverse makes social media non-profit by default which means that we can all share the cost.
Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in the world and is still non-profit. It shows that it’s sustainable.
But even non-profits have costs that they need to cover somehow. If they don’t, they’re still not sustainable.
You ask for donations. I'm donating to my instance for instance.
If something is free then 99% of users won't spend a penny. Anyone who ever did any business knows that. You either make 1% pay for everyone (just like "free" games on mobile phones do), force everyone into subscription or sell your users to advertisers. Choose your poison.
Yes, but that's not the point.
The point is to keep the servers relatively small so that the non profits can keep breaking even on nothing but donations, even with an influx of new users entering the fediverse.- bigger instances should ideally only be trying to grow when their donations are more than covering the costs. (That being said I wouldn't be surprised if the bigger instances started having problems what with their seeming ability to continually accept new users without closing once)
In the grand scheme of things the bigger instances having 20K users isn't a whole lot, and can be done using smaller servers - the thing with social media is that usually only about 20-25% of people are actually "active" - the rest are lurking or dead accounts and maybe occasionally commenting.
The smaller instances (like the one Im on) have anywhere from 1-1000 users and are highly unlikely to fall outside the range of the low cost of a little bit higher than a hobbyist side project, and what with the tendency for smaller instances to have more % of their members also be donators probably never have to fear running out of money
It really only becomes an exponentially expensive problem when you reach twitter and Reddit levels of users on the same instance - as you end up needing more and more expensive custom load balancing and caching solutions in order to keep up with the demand - basically it's more sustainable for a few thousand people to support the costs of a 1000 instances with 100,000 total members than it is for a company to try to make a profit off of a single monolithic structure supporting the same number of users.
The fediverse splits this load across servers, even segregates it. There are areas of the fediverse that I will never see due to a lack of direct connection through the nature of how your feed works, this helps as not everything is needlessly routed through a single point.
Also Wikipedia faces the same issues and still manages to get through - sure they put up banners asking for donations when margins are getting in to what they consider the "danger zone" but usually the danger zone is more than what's required.
Exactly right. I never had a problem with Reddit wanting to make money for their services. If you give me exactly what I want, I will pay.
This is inevitable as well.
A user base as large as Reddit has an infra bill in the tens of millions. And that's mature, with cost optimization at all levels to reduce compute, static content costs, more effective caching....etc
Lemmy instances are probably an order of magnitude more expensive to run on a per-user basis, at least.
This means the bill for the Lemmy fediverse if it had the active user base of reddit could be conceivably be near or over a collective $100mill/y with the majority of that just being a result of fragmented, high cost, infrastructure running a (at scale) low performance application.
That's easy to fix. There's a ton of new fediverse apps popping up. Just charge them an API fee.
This is miles away from how the Fediverse works.
You can't do that, the fediverse and Lemmy software doesn't work that way.
What about some sort of equity load balancing shenanigans? Small instances take on some load roughly equivalent to what they use from other instances or something. In another comment I was talking about funding instances and being able to rapidly iterate funding methods. One issue is they get value from the federation, so contributing all or some portion of what you use may be fitting.
The cost will be spread out on an instance by instance basis due to which the cost per user will be low and if not they can also host their own instance which doesn't cost a lot. If it's something around $5 a month I wouldn't mind paying to support a service I plan on using everyday.
That's not how cost/user works. The cost/user actually goes UP the more small instances you have as a result of more expensive, smaller scale, and severely less optimized infrastructure. Infrastructure gets cheaper on a per-user basis as it consolidates, there are lots of technical reasons for this, but it can be summed up with scale (infra per "unit" is cheaper the more you can guarantee you'll use, and LOTS of cost optimization paths open up the larger you get).
My point is that the community is going to hit a growth barrier, and that barrier is money and efficiency. Would you be willing to donate $5/m to 50-100 instances? Since to support that kind of scale they would need to whittle down to one instance per community for large communities, and massive communities (think 10-50 million users) might not even be able to exist with the current Lemmy hosting model. I wonder if even 1-5million user communities would even function without dedicated engineering to support the infrastructure and custom tools/services to make it work.
....etc
It's a real problem. One that will be felt sooner than you might think, and one that will limit the growth, stability, and longevity of communities.
Tl;Dr: economies of scale are an economic reality. Lemmy will likely go like email, with large centralized private companies running the most popular servers.
Donations are already happening in the Fediverse. Lemmy,world is funded by donations to the Mastodon.world instance. Many Mastodon users donate to their instance. I give $3 per month to my instance (sfba.social). They put out a quarterly report breaking down how much cam in and went out.
I donate in order to have an ad-free experience. If the admins separate the finances of Lemmy.world and Mastodon.world I will donate here as well.
If anyone puts ads on an instance it's not really a good encouragement for someone to join, and what with the nature of the fediverse it's more likely to make people try finding a better deal elsewhere.
I would definitely move to a different instance if my instance started using ads to fund itself - I'd rather the instance mandated a subscription than doing that.
Also another thing to consider is how other instances started spewing ads all over the fediverse - the ones that have managed to get by without advertising would probably defederate from those that did so that they don't end up showing another instances ads. Meaning it makes no sense to support ads in the first place if you want to stay federated.
That said if it got so unsustainable that I had to pay a subscription I would probably consider moving to a smaller instance anyway or hosting one myself for myself.
The Fediverse SHOULD allow monetization and they don't yet. As per Mark Bayliss:
I'm not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.
I'm not sure this is what the community wants, or what we should want. The server operators should be able to get enough money to afford operation and cover some of their time investment, but I don't think competing with businesses that obsess over large growth is a worthy goal.
I understand what you’re saying but I do fear that we risk relegating Mastodon and Lemmy into niche apps the same way desktop Linux never got popular. As the linked author noted above, most people don’t care about “free as in speech” or whether a site is open source or not, they just want working social media where they can talk to others.
I am, somehow, on both sides. I do think monetization is necessary, but would also like to keep part of it out of it.
I guess that I see monetization a bit idealistically, like having non tracking ads and sponsorships, or having separate instances with paid accounts that is also financing others... stuff like that. But that might not be enough anyway, as it is not for reddit, twitter, fb, yt... even with all of their data harvesting and selling.
So maybe donations are the way to go? Wikipedia is one of the biggest sites of the world and is managing to collect enough money through donations.
Lemmy/Mastadon is even easier, country/cities can have their instances to allow their citizens access to social network, companies can have their instances for their users and potential users or just as giving something to community.
And we can have this kind where we donate to individual administrators.
I think that even if I would enable adds they would get less than 1USD per month for me, let's say I donate 10USD per year for lemmy+mastadon?
Maybe tutanota, protonmail can have their instances? They are already hosting stuff, so would be a big problem (except moderation).
I can see all of this fail, but I also see it can succeed.
Totally agree. Really do not want this to become too popular, because then you get bots, fraud, fake news, trolls and shitposting. Being too small to interest those guys is a good thing.
I think you're missing that point.
If you're paying to provide a free server, and along comes another server owner who wants to peer with you. Only they're charging their users for the same thing you're giving away for free. Why wouldn't you be a little bit miffed that they want to take your freely-given service and sell it to their users - because that's what would be happening in that situation.
Monetising something that's intended to be free is very, very difficult. Not impossible (see open source software and the businesses that grow around that), but it's a lot harder when it's a service.
I think the best solution to this whole monetization issue is to just make sharing bandwidth as easy as possible on the fediverse.
If hosting can be done by everyone using an instance, no one entity has to bear overwhelming costs, so there's no excuse to demand money.
That's an interesting idea - have a special tier on one or more cloud providers paid for out of that source, or even a flat payment to any server provider based on number of users/activity or something like that?
I don't think I would have joined my server if it required a fee to join but now that I'm on it and enjoying the experience and administration I'd gladly throw a buck or two a month their way for servers/maintenance.
cheap subscription is probably overboard for my instance
Why would we want to compete
Subreddits have 10 million subscribers, I haven’t seen a Lemmy group with more than a few thousand people. I don’t know about you but I’d like Lemmy to be as rich in content and discussion as Reddit was. Unless you like social media when it’s empty of users.
Were you on reddit 10+ years ago?
Well, then you're free to go back to there. I do happen to prefer fewer more thoughtful users.
I could see a legitimate service being made out of something like an extra private lemmy, or a lemmy with additional features. Sort of like you'll see these suites of services from Proton or Nord. Yeah, i can set up my own SMTP server, even encrypt my data, but it's a lot easier to pay a few bucks to have a reliable service do it.
With federated services eventually becoming mainstream, i wouldn't be surprised to see some companies offering packages that do things like provide additional privacy or larger amounts of storage.
Or like I'd imagine sustainable video hosts will have to monetize somehow just to pay for the storage space.
For me, never. I will always move to a server that is run by donations.
Give it 15 years.
I've been online since 1990; 10-15 years seems to be the maximum time a community can live without shitting itself over greed or something new and better coming along to scoop up users.
That said, things like Usenet and IRC still technically exist... They're just niche now. The way this shit works is more like those, so it will likely never fully disappear.
To be fair, there is a line between greed and monetization. Monetization can be simply to fund servers costs and labor. Especially as the community grows, it's just going to get more and more expensive. I think a donation page or a toggle-able ads option (off by default) would be great ways for users to support the site to fund the costs without it being greedy. Both options could give some sort of donor badge as a thank you, because there's no features involved with it so people don't feel forced to donate/support.
I think the key really is transparency. I'm not going to throw money into a black hole and hope it does some good, but if there is some level of transparency showing running costs plus deficit/surplus towards those costs then I wouldn't mind contributing.
There will probably eventually be some commercial Lemmy sites. I honestly think it would be awesome if large game studios, and software companies, and anyone else who has need for a forum, made their own federated Lemmy instances as their official support forums.
Man I'd never considered anything like that, but being able to see activity across multiple official forums at the same time. That'd be amazing
I can definitely picture a lemmy.bethesda.net or whatever else
As long as a company can't outright buy the whole network or something like that, I don't think it could get fucked over in the same way that something like twitter or tumblr can.
The fediverse is the coolest thing that could happened, freedom is what all people should seek for, creating their own spaces and not supporting corporations that only want to make money out of people's lives, data, attention, mental health, etc ...
It's better to support the instance you are in with donations for sure.
People could monetize individual instances. They can't monetize the whole thing because its open source software.
I'm kind of shocked how many young kids don't get this.
It is okey not to understand it. Don't be rude. You were also not born with knowledge of the principles of free software and fediverse.
Yeah its more that I assumed each generation would get naturally better at tech, but its more like cars where the first generation knows how to fix them and subsequent ones don't, because the cars get so good that you don't need to
Shockingly- I’ve heard from a few of my teacher friends that the upcoming generation isn’t that computer savvy. (EDIT- “traditional” computers that is).
We’re starting to see the “tablet kids” grow up. They were raised with iPads and iPhones. And they didn’t have to deal with figuring out how to “deal with the inner workings” to download a bunch of computer programs. Their typing skills are apparently not that great as well for the same reason.
This is the consequence of so many years of idiot-proofing things. While not necessarily a bad thing most of the time, having shit that "just works" absolutely ruins troubleshooting skills. I see it all the time with my nieces and nephews.
Can confirm. I've heard the exact same thing from several teacher friends as well.
I confidently told my retired parents that I thought we were approaching a world where self-hosting and open source would be far more common, I'm disappointed that it sounds as if I overestimated computer literacy in the new generation :(
The average person is just as unlikely as ever to understand the processed behind the tools (conputers) they use. But the nerdy kids of each generation have more access to knowledge that lets them nerd out even harder. And the connectivity of the internet gets ideas shared easily. If someone is interested in a hobby these days they have a knowledge base that only the most dedicated nerds had back in the day.
Everybody has to learn everything some time.
I may be a minority. But I would gladly join a server that is paid and I get stability, but also a better stronger fight against the inevitable onslaught of shit - in return.
I would too. But only now that I’ve gotten a little familiar with how the fediverse works in practice. For entirely new users, asking them to pay for the Lemmy learning curve is a lot.
I think that Lemmy Gold, Silver & Bronze are inevitable, with say a 90/10 cut to instance/lemmy-devs.
It would be best if the developers and the biggest instances agree on a standard payment system to implement into the Lemmy UI.
I've already donated to my instance as it's a regional one, I didn't buy Reddit Gold, but Lemmy Gold/Silver/Bronze is appealing to me given the money goes to a much smaller local group.
I am fully for this form of payment. Along with that, the instance can also have monthly donor/subscribers badge of some sorts. The hardware costs for maintaining an instance is not something astronomical like the Twitter/Reddit API (something like $500 per month for thousand+ active users). So just having like 50+ monthly subscribers should cover this.
Edit: My instance already has donations and the owner is quite happy with the setup.
It depends on the instance in particular. Someone could self host for them and their friends and just cull storage every now and again.
I would be up for these kinds of things as long as it doesn't restrict functionality behind paid tiers. if it only provides cosmetic enhancements like badges or whatever else that'd be cool
Why? If you need to pay money to have a badge so that you can feel superior to others, maybe you should stick to reddit instead of polluting the Fediverse.
didn't mean it like that just that if we start restricting functionality behind paid tiers it could get to the point where Reddit had that weird turbo thing like discord nitro that you could only post embedded GIFs and stuff if you had it
fully agree though
Because there will always be rebels running small to medium size instances based off of donations. It was the very first thing to happen at the birth of the internet, and will continue to happen today. Will there be a few major instances that eat up the majority of the fedi? Yeah, probably, but the design of the fedi is that the experience of decentralized social media will stay the same regardless of what's going on with instances of the network.
Let's just hope it doesn't go the way of email, it started the same way: federated service controlled by no one. Nowadays big corporations influence banlists to enforce a protection racket and non-compliant instances are both banned and filled with spambots.
I'll be honest with you, I would rather have the ban lists than not. No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous. If someone gets on an IP blocklist because they either can't or don't know how to secure their system, then no one should trust anything from them. Having a way to identify them before they cause a problem is enormously helpful.
There is already a project underway to identify federated servers that just spew spam, and I am all for it.
Okay you do have a point. The thing is they get abused for email where it's pretty much a racket. I just really hope Lemmy doesn't end up the same way, since if some bad faith powerful actor starts having control over a list then they get to dictate which servers can federate and which ones not, which is pretty much a walled garden.
I do get the need to identify malicious instances preemptively though, spambots are a threat wherever we go and some instances are just insufferable like exploding heads.
what's the project called? instance admin here, i've defederated from a few problem instances i've found so far but i just can't read through all of it
You know, I'm sure I came across one earlier, but I can't find it now. I did find https://git.sr.ht/~kline/firebee now though, but I don't think that's what I had found before.
After getting into an IT job and dealing with poorly managed email domains with non existent DNS records. I can completely agree with you, it's necessary.
Open-source projects have always been sustainable by donations. Just look at Wikipedia; it's been around for 22 years. Linux has been around for even longer.
If lemmy.world ever sold out, I'd probably just move to reddthat.com. Problem solved.
Especially how Lemmy is right now, only a small portion of users would be needed to sustainable keep an instance running. Maybe from every 1.000 users, only 1 would be willing to pay 10$ a month and it should be more than enough.
Shit changes quickly when somebody thinks it would be a good way to start allowing video-uploads. It can get expensive fast with that amount of storage and bandwidth needed. I can see instances selling small "premium" subscriptions for videouploads. You could still host your own instance and get videouploads completely free for yourself, but if you don't wanna go that route, it would make sense (and would be totally fair)
Well that's the nice thing about a decentralized platform. If someone tries to "take over" Lemmy, they would have to take over all 1,100 Instances on separate servers in different countries to ruin it.
Email became mostly centralized without any company buying thousands of independent email servers.
The same could (and probably will) happen with other federated services.
Email is a shitshow, but its far from centralized. There are 100s to 1000sof email providers out there.
Self hosting is hard, but not out of the question.
If one or two instances ends up larger than the rest, can they not exert influence? They would have all the content and all the users and can threaten to break off. The infrastructure would still exist, but not the content.
fewer users is only a problem when you're profiting off of it
Yeah good luck meaningfully using a Lemmy instance with barely any users.
There’s a reason both Lemmy and Mastodon only really started taking off when the equivalent proprietary platforms drove users away - a service like this needs users to create content.
Also the guy you’re replying to is right, stuff like this already happened in the past; look at the centralization of email (which is also federated) for example.
A big instance threaten to defederate, but that's something that will cost them.
If you're running an instance you're basically getting free content from the other instances through federation. By defedearting you're saying "no thanks, I don't want that free content on my server!" So it's a little self-destructive.
Combine that with the fact that users can more easily switch to another instance than they could moving from Digg to Reddit, or Reddit to Lemmy, there's more downsides to defederating than upsides.
So it's like a hostage situation where you have the gun pointed at your own head. Nobody wants to see an instance kill itself, but that's not enough to give them significant leverage.
There will be more disagreements over moderation than anything else. We've seen this happen already. "The users from your instance are shitposting in the communities on our instance, so we're cutting you off." But that results in a case where site that's blocking gets less content than the site that's not. But it solves the shitposting problem for the users of that instance, but it's a blunt tool that has negative repercussions for the site that's blocking.
I think there probably just needs to be more ability for users to block content themselves to avoid tensions over defederation over moderation disagreements. But I'm not sure how that would work.
Honestly, we really don't know. mastondon.world and lemmy.world are run by donations and that's worked so far. Ruud and his folks have been pretty upfront about their finances.
The general temperament I've gotten is people around here are opposed to a corporate like monetization. I agree with that. Usually, at least what I've observed, is that when a service monetizes it becomes enshitified.
We'll find out eventually what happens.
Infosec.Exchange, Infosec.Pub, and Fedia.io (and all other Fedi projects run by Jerry) are funded by donations too. AFAIK, it is working well for the moment.
Would be pretty trivial to set it up as a non profit for anyone looking to seriously raise money but support community values.
I am more of a business person than a developer, so I approach it from that perspective.
I suspect that we will see different instances using different ways of paying for the service. It wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if there might be an ad supported instance, donation supported instance, subscription instance, etc. I think this is great because it puts power in the hands of the user to choose the experience they want. It should strongly encourage the design of a platform that prioritizes the user.
Right now things feel hacked together, but its inevitable that at some point performance issues, onboarding friction, and UX issues will be addressed. I really think its only a matter of time before decentralized platforms talking to each other take over.
100% and I actually love this about the fediverse. Everyone can experience it within their own rules.
I mean, it is possible that instance admins will be able to show advertising on ones instance, but you will be able to find dotation based, ad-free instance instead. Lemmy as a whole won't be monetized, only a particular instance. But it's only my guess
I am fully open to people running everything collecting donations. Or even sponsorships are cool. Straight up monetization through making users pay for shit that doesn't give anything in return is not cool. Let alone the fact that users make all the content to begin with
This is pretty transparent https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
That looks great. Thank you for sharing.
And everyone should donate to their servers. Every little bit helps!
Think of the Fediverse much more like Wikipedia than anything else. It is run in donations and volunteers. It is not for profit and for the benefit of all people.
Fediverse is, well, federated. This means that it's spread across multiple servers that are independently run by their admins, but have agreed to work together and share communities between each other.
For example, lemmy.world is a site operating several communities, as are beehaw.org and lemmy.ml. One of them could choose to monetize, and that wouldn't affect the other sites. If new site pops up that is full of ads and spam, then other sites could decide to block communities from them on their site.
The problem is that a community could be screwed over because their specific instance either runs out of money and goes offline, or gets blacklisted for doing iffy things to make enough money to stay afloat.
Sure their existing content will be backed up on other instances, but the users will then have to create accounts elsewhere and work out which instance will host their new community.
As long as we don't allow capitalist corporate greed to ruin the Fediverse like it has ruined (and will continue to ruin) practically everything.
Capitalism is relatively good, gives performance & frugality incentives. Unrestrained late-stage capitalism... not so much. Think of it like oxygen. At 21% you're great (and need it to live), at 90%+ you spontaneously combust.
That's up to the instance owners, really. I don't think the Lemmy software currently has ad support or anything like that but we could see that in the future.
Currently, most instances operate on the generosity of others. For instance, the one I'm on is mostly paid for by its owner/operator with some help with donations.
At some level they start taking so much resources that they'll need a way to be sustainable anyway. Personally, I'm hoping we see a horizontal spread out, where small groups and individuals start running their own instances. Seems more sustainable than only having like 3 large ones everybody uses.
Yup, and this is a good thing IMO. Ad supported instances, subscription based instances, and donation based ones all can coexist, and users can pick whichever they prefer.
Much better than the alternative of “you get stuck with whatever the current CEO thinks is the best strategy”.
This is a great question. To add to this, what happens if/when/eventually there's enough users to warrant big players (celebs/fortune 500) wanting to dip their toes into Lemmyverse? I don't see this happening soon, but with enough growth, SOMEONE is going to want to reach this audience right? It'll start slow but if the trend continues, it's inevitable. Which is ok I think. The way I imagine it, celebs might have their own preferred curated/verified Lemmy instance. Maybe they'll use affiliate links for merch and promos?
Think it’d end up being astroturfing if anything - forum bombing positive sentiment, opinion etc
If we're talking the fediverse in general, I believe Zuckerberg is launching his twitter clone very soon and it has ActivityPub integration.
That's very concerning! Sounds eerily similar to how Google killed XMPP back in the day. Honestly we probably shouldn't allow any federation with them to stay safe.
There was a really good writeup I saw recently either here in Lemmy or on Hacker News somewhere, can't seem to find it. In short though, Google adopted the decentralized standard, built it into Gmail so everyone uses their client, then eventually dropped support for talking with other XMPP clients.
This is the first I'm hearing of this, interesting
https://fedipact.online/
I think if a instance owner decides to try to profit, it can happen. They could let advertisers have an account that promotes products and allow such posts to bypass community rules and disregard vote counts. You could theoretically profit from running a lemmy instance. But now your instance risks defederation and user might start leaving.
Edit: I think the smarter thing could be just asking for more donations than is needed to run the server, and pocket the excess funds. That could go on undetected as long as you falsify your operating costs to make it seem as if more funding is required. I mean I don't know if someone could actually make a living of asking for absurd amounts of donations.
While this is true, some of the bigger instances are explaining in detail how much they’re paying and for what on their Open Collabarative pages. If it doesn’t add up someone will notice eventually.
IMO whatever comes next needs to be decentralized from the get go, like a torrent system where the network sort of automatically scales with the user count. The fediverse is pretty cool right now but it's bound to get shitty real soon as people get tired of fronting the costs purely out of goodwill. Either the cost need to be spread around such that the individuals paying it really don't mind, or there needs to be an incentive to pay / way to monetize that is aligned with the common goal of a decentralized social network. Otherwise we'll end up with either a network of insignificant size (arguably what this is now) or a monetized shit hole like what Reddit has become
I keep thinking about how a system like that could work but I'm sure someone smarter than me has already figured out that it can't
Even with these servers being paid for that's kind of rough. It's very hard to decentralize something reliable with solid data retention without paying.
RemindMe! 1 year
you have no power here
Sorry, I'm not allowed to upvote you.
I will be messaging you in 1 year on 2024-07-02 19:06:19 UTC to remind you of this link
CLICK THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
^(Parent commenter can ) ^(delete this message to hide from others.)
Almost fell for it, checked the profile, opened a link, was not disappointed.
Most servers already seem to have Patreons or similar donation platforms running, and subscriptions would not surprise me as everyone starts to settle into this thing. It would make a lot of sense to help spread the load and since content wouldn’t be gated behind the subscription, I can’t see why it would be bad.
I think I have similar thoughts on ads. If an instance wants to run ads to support itself, I don’t see an issue as long as those ads aren’t “federated” out and sent to other places.
I think the ability to have all of these different setups, without restricting any access to content, is the beauty of the fediverse. At least as I understand it.
Facebook is makikg their own Twitter aoternative apparently based on Mastodon, so at least that instance will be monetized probably.
I'm not really clear on the way the networking works with federated systems.
Say that an instance decided to charge a subscription fee, would they then have to defederate from free instances on a cost basis alone? To handle server load for requests from those instances?
Or, say that subscription was sustainable, would there be anything stopping someone from making a free instance to give users full access to that subscription-based content? The answer there is defederation right?
Trying to work out in my head how this system could be scalable without communities becoming walled gardens and thus removing part of the appeal of federation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I could see someone trying to sell ads on their instance. But ya I can't imagine many people would join unless they had some other features that are better than other instances.
Monero.town has a donation address and while you can prove you are human by linking an existing social media account during signup, you can also do this anonymously by donating a small amount of Monero. So far this model seems sustainable :)
I think long term someone will come up with something. How hostile the community they arrive to?
Entirely up to how well we remember how it went the last time.
I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Imagine inge a stable commercial service with high quality moderation (hopefully paid for by the operators) but with an option to follow other instances and transfer your data to another instance. That could be pretty good for drawing in people who just want something that works and refuse to leave reddit.
I could see both ads and subscriptions work (although, the former might be "useless" for those using adblockers, after all, so I'd see persistent/static sponsorship ads similar to how some FOSS projects do it to be more likely).
Especially the latter, for certain services that focus on providing value. A friend of mine mentioned Misskey for example, apparently being used by some Japanese artists. Considering Twitter's on its way out by being harmful to commission artists, I could see someone spin up such instance and ask X amount for providing a marketplace for commissioned goods.
I'd be happy to pay like $5/mo for a subscription to a stable, ad-free, and appropriately provisioned instance so I can use a third-party app that doesn't try to harvest all the data it can off my mobile. If reddit offered API access with premium to be cash flow positive I would have had no issues with that.
That said, I'm glad they didn't. Fedeverse feels more like the way it should be!
Hmm. In the old days, pretty much every ISP ran a Usenet server. The cost was covered as part of your internet connection bill, it was just part of the service.
I could see a potential future where running a Lemmy instance became table-stakes for ISPs, like Usenet used to be.
This would run counter to the principle that lemmy should remain detached from corporate control, though. Especially considering most places (in the US anyway) live under ISP monopoly. Comcast/NBC would end up owning like 40% of lemmy.
I predict corporate interests trying to run their own lemmy, branding it as something else, extending it to include features they don't push back to the upstream projects, then federating with other instances to maximize the amount of user data that can be collected.
I hope the f not. Let's keep ISPs greasy hands away from the cool stuff please.
That would mean losing your Lemmy account when switching ISP, no thanks.
remembering passwords or storing them
That depends on how the admins decide to run their instances. After several crises and dramas, etc., I can say that those who decide to monetize eventually will; but so far people have been supporting their admins through crowdfunding.
The really big instances are deciding to be open to Facebook in exchange for big money. A lot of folks in other instances don't like it, and some instances have already decided to defederate from them in advance (search for the hashtag #FediPact). Yes, there's lot of drama involved.
Text-only forums aren't super expensive to run unless you are doing it on the scale of reddit (or do stupid expensive things like have video hosting)
Another topic, I've seen people here are super hardline about keeping Facebook out of the Fediverse, and I just don't think that's going to work, Now Lemmy Explain how I think this is all going to go down:
If I were Facebook, I'd pay a bunch of big celebrities, say, a certain very talented Academy Award nominated Australian actress, a lot of money, to use Facebook Threads exclusively for a while, and give them the Checkmark. The most difficult part of getting a new social network started is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting that initial audience, which is the problem that Federation solves. So, although some instances will reject anything Facebook related completely, there will be plenty of instances where the userbase would want to interact with their favorite celebs directly a la Twitter, so there will always be instances that wants to federate with this Facebook instance.
But then, those media companies and talent agencies are going to realize, as they did against Netflix, "Hey, wait a minute, why are we paying these middlemen like Zuck and Musk so much money to host a cheap forum? They don't own the userbase on the Fediverse, so is it just for a Checkmark?", and they are going to start their own instances of Mastodon/Lemmy where everyone on their instances is verified celebs, to be used as these celeb's official account with no shitposting allowed, so they can control everything those celebs posts on their server instead. And THAT would be the downfall of Twitter/Facebook.
So, the best path for Facebook to move forward with is to offer easy cloud hosting of federated social media software for a subscription: Pay them 10 bucks a month, they'll handle all the server and upgrades, and even moderation, which will become the easiest way to setup "your own server", and that will be much more resilient to the anti-Facebook pact that is going on right now, because instead of one Facebook instance, now you may have to block hundreds of different Facebook hosted instances instead.
That’s super interesting and unfortunately would work well with the classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook
It's definitely possible to see scammy for-profit strategies pop up.
A more likely outcome is Big Tech coming in and fragmenting and dissolving ActivityPub servers like all the Lemmy servers. It will most likely be Big Tech incorporating the big tech websites/servers (Meta, Twitter, etc) into ActivityPub and then creating a closed Big Tech ActivityPub-like system where the artifically popular servers/instances (Meta, Twitter, etc.) migrate from FOSS ActivityPub to a closed for-profit system and essentially close off FOSS Lemmy. And most people wont understand FOSS ActivityPub vs Big Tech ActivityPub-like system thereby rendering OG Lemmy useless.
I prefer the idea of have separation; one whole server(s) for bots, one for for‐profit big tech, etc. Big Tech can play but won't interfere with the heart of the AcivityPub.
But who tf am I?
How? If, say, Facebook built a Lemmy-compatible instance, the worst they could do is eventually defederate it from other Lemmy instances, in which case we're right back where we started.
Don't know exactly, but it's what happened with Google and XMPP.
Same thing can happen here.
But I'm imagining that Big Tech starts to post from their own server with content that is interesting to the the masses, rather than us nerd, then they market to all the other servers to get a bunch of sign ups (maybe with exclusive content or features, idk), then federate with their own other websites and servers using their own proprietary ActivityPub, then bam OG ActivityPub never takes off, withers and become even fewer nerds like me, and and a bunch of bots with little content.
hopefully the cost of running it is not so much and all users chip in to a degree to keep it going.
I think there should be some monetization. Otherwise how will people pay for the server costs. Maybe small ads placed in the platform across the fediverse?
Advertising is poison. It corrupts everything It touches.
Users can donate to instances they wish to support.
Reminds me of anti-piracy perceptions. People are always like 'i bought the album to support the artist' which is great, sure, but they act like torrenting the album and just sending the artist the price of the album directly isn't an option when it always is. Artists will always accept a donation.
100% correct. Incentives matter. Advertising delights no one and skews incentives hard.
I'm donating $2 a month for Lemmy.world. It's not much, but it adds up if enough people pitch in a dollar or two here and there.
It IS monetized - right now by donations/crowdfunding.
What we need is for people to be more open to supporting what they want via micro-payments, regular donations, because that's the way to say NO to advertising which brings in virtually no income for the amount of time and bandwidth it consumes.
Municipal👏 Social👏 Media👏
In the old days of forums, it wasn't uncommon for a forum to ask for some small donations. which was never a problem (a good forum had a lot of good will and people willing to contribute). Remove the profit incentive and websites are not eyewateringly expensive to maintain.
nostr has bitcoin zaps now
I'm not opposed to operators trying to make money, if some server brings some feature that I find valuable, I won't begrudge them trying to make money off it. I think the hopeful thing with federation is that when one feels that an individual server is being abusive or doesn't like their monetization approach or is unhappy for some other reason they have the choice to go elsewhere. Competition is good.
As someone who also doesn't fully understand stuff yet, best comparison I've seen is email.
I'm sure there are emails that cost money, but for the most part you can just. Move to a different email. If a group is on a server that's asking for money they can just change to another server, right?
The Fediverse will never be monetized. It's open by nature, instances are maintained by donations and out of the administrator's pocket. Why? Because they have a passion for it.
Even if someone chooses to monetize one instance, people will move to another that isn't monetized. It's free and open by design, and will always be that way.
I do have a question about how the instances and federation would work. If you are in an instance like lemmy.world, and it is federating with any other instance, then the content is being loaded from some other server, right? so if there is a large server with millions of users, could that server federate with a small server that isn't ready to handle the traffic of millions of users and basically kill it? or the server has a way to prevent being federated into another instance?
i am still trying to learn about fediverse
Nah, that's not quite right.
Tiny federates with huge - nothing happens, they just exchange metadata. Dancer@tiny subs to something on huge - now you have one community, with a lot of updates, coming at tiny. Maybe it drops some. Still not an issue
Hugo@huge subs to something on tiny - now something@tiny is cached on huge, still not a problem.
Now something@tiny is in the feed on huge. A million people comment. This is a problem... For huge mostly. Over at little, people are commenting on something@tiny. They might see doubled up comments or orphaned comments, but mostly they just don't see most of the stuff from huge
So generally, it's not an issue. In certain situations, there will be hiccups, but it will keep chugging along
I think the small instance can temporarily defederate to reduce the load. kbin.social had to do this during the first reddit exodus because they grew too much too fast and couldn't handle the load.
I’ll bet money that multiple people will successfully monetize parts of it.
At the very least, my guess is some small shops will build businesses around apps that offer enhanced users experiences, but for fees. I’d be willing to pay for premium experiences that were well maintained.
And if they somehow manage to do that, people will download their data and move to another instance or spin up their own, and they'll get the exact same content. It's the open nature of the Fediverse, it's impossible or at least incredibly difficult to monetize.
Time will tell. People seem to be pretty down to support devs and studios that are using the money to enhance the user experience and pay the developers fairly. Apollo, Twitterific, Tweetbot, etc. lots of good examples of this.
It already is. As soon as something like this is internet facing, you get search companies and now AI companies mining data to use for commercial applications.
In terms of the sites themselves though, it'll vary and depend. As it grows in populatity, there will be monetised content in plain sight (think all those secretly sponsored and advertising posts on reddits used to try and push products subtly - the bigger the user base, the more attractive it is to target users with hidden advertising), and then there will be what the servers do themselves. Some may exist on donations, but others may chose to try to place adverts, others may go for subscriptions.
Ultimately there does need to be money coming in from somewhere to keep the services going. There are many free success stories: Wikipedia continues to be free, without adverts, thanks to donations from users and sponsor organisations. Mozilla continues to produce a free open source browser through a mix of donations, sponsor organisations, and paid search deals. Linux is a huge free open system, with a mix of donations, sponsor organisations and commercialisation of the ecosystem.
There isn't really a reason why social media can't also be "free" for consumers, but we don't know yet how that will play out. On traditional social media, the user is the product - our data is mined, we're marketed at, we're advertised at, our data is sold on. The fediverse breaks alot of these methods - or more accurately it opens up these methods to everyone as anyone can access much of the data, removing the value companies have in monopolising and gate keeping the data. It's a double edged sword, but be in no doubt even in the fediverse companies can and will monetise whatever data they can get their hands on.
Surprised no one else mentioned this... the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.
There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.
Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances...
To answer the second question... I don't know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I'm aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.
I doubt we'll see ads in the form we know them from places like Twitter and Reddit. We may start seeing instances being sponsored by (or even operated by) businesses, and people can federate with them or not as they choose.
I also think paid subs will be a growth area and honestly this is the model I'd be most comfortable with, although I acknowledge the risk of excluding people who don't have disposable money to spend on such things.
It probably will be, but it doesn’t matter, because there is no lock in, so no admin can hold you hostage with their policies.
There's word that Eugene has plans to integrate some monetization features into Mastodon after the meeting with Facebook.