I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
The fediverse is not a single database or server. It’s a protocol and standard that’s distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can’t be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they’ve stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.
Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you’re not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it’s a closed source centralized monopoly.
One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that’s something that can happen in the future
A point of caution:
A large company absolutely could come in and absorb the majority of lemmy traffic and build proprietary code and features on top of the main protocol, eventually making the open source protocol obsolete and supplanting it as a paid/closed-source service. It has been done repeatedly by tech companies, and it is the main reason many people distrust Meta’s interest in joining the fediverse.
For all the reasons you just mentioned, we should fight tooth and nail against that from happening, but we should at least be aware of the threat.
I think the email comparison is apt. We are currently in the bbs/dial-up ISP stage of the fediverse. When people had aol.com or netcom.com addresses.
That gave way to powerful centralized services such as Hotmail or rocketmail, that had the promise of never changing your email again. We then saw Gmail become the big boy on the block with amazing technology.
Even with these powerful entities, there were still hobbyists and corporate email.
I predict the fediverse will follow a similar path. lemmy.world and beehaw are like the netcoms, or even the bbs’s, basically hobbyists, and Internet communists setting things up for the common good, or simply because it’s fun.
We’re going to see instances fill up, become unstable, unreliable, etc. People will get frustrated when Lemm.ee, or their preferred instance can no longer support the volume they have attracted. We’ll see a professional service like a Hotmail that promises a forever home. You’ll likely also see vanity instances like what rocketmail offered. Given the nature of the interest based servers, we’ll likely see vanity instances come about singer than they did with email: starwars.fedi, lotr.verse, piano.lemmy, etc.
Once corporate interests start to see value in a powerful, stable instance that can collect user data and serve targeted ads (starwars.fedi is easy to target), they will dump enough money to push out the hobbyists. The hobbyists will not go away, but they won’t be needed anymore.
That’s when you’ll see the disruptor. Someone who comes into the space like Google did, and the fediverse will be an open protocol that is dominated by a few massive interests.
All in all, I’m not predicting doom, just the natural course of events, which actually will be great for the fediverse. Just like I love my gmail.com account more than my hotcity.com account, I think the future of the fediverse is bright, even if corporate interests get heavily involved, and dominate the 'verse, because there will always be room for innovations, and hobbyists, and while a single company could dominate, the protocol is still open for anyone to do their own thing, and not be bound to a single company if they don’t want to be.
I think this is spot on. It’s completely foreseeable that a well funded enterprise could stand up an instance that’s super robust and can handle a lot more traffic than current ones. They could, say, attract celebrities to do AMAs and handle the load. Or maybe they could create some communities that they stock with a giant amount of useful content.
They’d do it for free, and it would just be another instance, but it would become invaluable, with more and more communities hosted there, and more and more users making it their home instance, until the owners felt they were valuable enough that they put their content behind a paywall or they start serving ads. Sure, people could just move to other instances, but the point would be that suddenly doing without them would be painful.
But unlike Reddit or Twitter, it’s not as much as all or nothing situation, and other instances can compete in the same realm.
Sounds like Microsoft’s embrace, extend, and extinguish
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.
standing our ground means defederating any and all meta servers as soon as they’re identified
I’d be surprised if there’s more than one Meta instance, as “multiple instances” tends to make the UX more confusing for those who are unaware of it. So it shouldn’t be hard.
they’d abstract that away for their users, they won’t know or care. And if one instance gets blocked, they’ll just spin up a new one and migrate the data. Meta users won’t have to think about the whole fediverse aspect of it because it they had to, it would never get off the ground. So meta has to abstract it away or it’ll be DOA. Which means we have to keep blocking any and all meta instances when they’re identified as such
What’s the background on this?
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Yes but you need to sign their NDA to be sure.
deleted by creator
Zuck did an interview talking about how they were looking at doing a spinoff of Instagram, using Fediverse, for text based social media. Basically a competitor to Twitter. Rumor mill says it’s call Thread, or maybe he said that in the interview, I can’t remember.
I deleted the wrong comment, but responding here. I was thinking Thread like the home automation standard all the big companies are doing together. Figured Facebook was in on that. I did hear about the Fediverse entry though, just missed the name (which I bet they won’t use).
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.
Oh, I guess I’ve never noticed lol. Does Gmail have ads?
Yup! But they put them in the promotions tab so they kinda blend in with promotional emails and they’re presented very natively. The only way you can tell the difference is a little ad symbol.
They can’t over exploit their users because users have choice. Back when Gmail first came out there was a rush between companies to provide the most storage and features and that’s because email being an open standard inherently encourages competition!
I’m fairly certain ads in google search are affected by email content.
The Android app does, at least in some sections (“Social”, f.e.)
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.
…except lemmy is GPLv3, so any fork has to be released with the entirety of it’s source code, which stops companies from doing shit like that.
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 🤷♂️.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 a great idea, then each user owns their own info entirely.
Is there any community suggestions instance? Wouldn’t mind making a post with a backups functionality request if one hasn’t been made yet 😅
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).
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.
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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.
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.
I can definitely picture a lemmy.bethesda.net or whatever else
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
That’s a really great idea. Makes a lot more sense than relying on official accounts on 3rd party platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
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.
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.
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
The Fediverse SHOULD allow monetization and they don’t yet. As per Mark Bayliss:
The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining and have been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.
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 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?
Yes
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.
