And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?
ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they’re using. Oh, the humanity.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 12 Jun 11:36
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So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
That’s a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by… asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
If they haven’t done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Jun 12:15
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The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.
If it was an exceptional case, I’d be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.
then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve
This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don’t find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?
I’ll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:
You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:
Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.
The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.
You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing
This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money
And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.
The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small
i was thinking you could do ads for people not signed in, then no ads for people logged in
then for people logged in/signed up you could do discord style nitro benefits, fancy name tag, just extra stuff that supporters can get to show their support for the place
but in isolation no good because what’s to stop another instance just giving it away all for free? it’s like the place is self undermining, it’s the most cut throat environment to be in while being worse to work for than any it slave pen, at least at the end of the work week you get paid, here you’d be expected to work for free :\
Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have
But isn’t the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?
You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can’t “get rid of open registration instances.” That’s just stupid.
I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
That I can agree with. But I think it’s just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they’ll find that free instances just aren’t an available.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Jun 13:20
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Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say “Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own”? I’m not going to say zero, but I really doubt it’s going to be “more than 3”.
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new sucker enthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 12 Jun 14:39
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The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new sucker enthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.
Interesting… the more time passes and your previous arguments fall along with the instances that you supported, the more you are resorting to tone policing.
I didn’t insult anyone. You are putting names out there of admins of existing instances when I was talking about the general story of about how there are constant wheel of new people coming up.
You are gasping as straws, as if ostracizing me would ever validate your arguments. This is getting tiring.
Lemm.ee didn’t shut down because it was financially unsustainable though. It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.
Plenty of people have offered to take lemm.ee on and AFAIK nothing has progressed, but handled in a different way there could have been continuity and no need for users to transition away.
Given that the issue wasn’t one of finance and rather one of effort/will, how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.
It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.
how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you’ll be getting.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 18:17
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Then all the Fediverse is, is just a bump in the road for Reddit and Twitter.
rumimevlevi@lemmings.world
on 12 Jun 12:54
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You can’t ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments
Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
rumimevlevi@lemmings.world
on 12 Jun 13:26
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I don’t know how this dismise my point. Small instances dies all the time. I am more preoccupied by death of instances on oixelfed though
rumimevlevi@lemmings.world
on 12 Jun 13:45
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My point still stand. People won’t go to small instances that have change of shutting down thr most. Like i said in my very first comment we need better migration tools to encourage people to join small instances
There will always be “First we need this, then we will start supporting it” excuse. If you think better migration tools are needed, support the developers so that they can make it happen.
rumimevlevi@lemmings.world
on 12 Jun 19:39
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You just said in another comment that lemmy devs have limited time and budgets to implement better migrations tools. If i find a dev who promote a project lime that i would donate
If we all donate a little bit to the project, their budget will be larger. If their budget is larger, they can get more steady collaborators.
And even if they can’t get more people, by helping them we show we value all the work they have done already.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 18:15
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If the devs care about that part of the software (or any dev who's got the time and interest since it's open-source), they would be working on it. They've signalled to users that they don't care. Let those who care do it. And if no one cares, then it doesn't need to be done.
This is absurd and shows some ridiculous entitlement.
Software development is not just a drive-thru restaurant where people just make an order with their preferred menu, and 30 seconds later it is handed it out to you. Developers have to balance a bunch of priorities, deal with bugs, make sure that new features being added can be maintained in the future adequately. It’s also not easy for anyone to just drop by and submit a huge piece of functionality without making sure things works as expected. And they are doing this all while getting basically no money in donations (~3000€/month, for 3 developers is less than minimum wage for pretty much all of Northern Europe).
If you think it’s just a matter of “they don’t care”, go ahead and write the code yourself.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 18:35
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If you think it's just a matter of "they don't care", go ahead and write the code yourself.
There's one big issue with that: I don't care enough either. It's not a priority for me.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world
on 12 Jun 13:18
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Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.
It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say… Just like an email address or URL.
Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.
We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.
But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.
I think it’s the best starting point. University and government resources can handle the volume and will motivate widespread adoption. In one sense, it is only kicking the can down the road, but it is kicking it into a future that will be better prepared for these questions.
I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 14:12
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If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you'll immediately lose huge amounts of users back to Reddit or whatever alternative is free to them. The echo chamber will be even more pronounced, and whatever success Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed have had will dry up.
Most people don't want to self host. And most people aren't willing to pay. So you have an issue in front of you. Do you actually want users and interactions? Or do you just want a place where very dedicated nerds can crow to each other about whatever self-hosting tricks they pulled off while occasionally backed by an addicted whale (who, upon noting the monotony and small userbase, will probably move on quickly)?
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else. It's a mix between addiction and community-building instincts. Right now, said whales are the server hosts and a handful of users. Because of the desire to lead a community, and the addiction of social media, it keeps going. You say it isn't sustainable. I say it's a cycle. The specific instances don't matter until it becomes a corporate situation. All that matters is that there's at least one instance with enough people active to provide the gratification to the whale.
If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you’ll immediately lose huge amounts of users
That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don’t have to be completely open registration.
Most people don’t want to self host.
You don’t need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else.
Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.
Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden
on 12 Jun 13:16
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The reason is easy: one likes the fediverse, wants to contribute for it and wants to enabled people to use it even if they can’t afford to pay for it.
On a smaller scale, that’s not much of a problem. I’m glad I can host for some people who don’t have money at all. Some of the others donate and some don’t and that’s fine as well.
I am not sure if the “he” reference is me, but I did ask and people did step up to support the costs of running the instance.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Jun 11:46
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@jerry@infosec.exchange , I’m sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?
If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don’t you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?
Maybe the problem is that they are using ridiculously overpriced enterprise services like AWS or Azure, which provide their own solutions for a lot of common things like backups, replicas, logging, etc, but cost 100x more than what you can get with DIY on some cheap VPS if you’re fine with spending 1.25x more time.
Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.
because cheap VPS will not give you enough bandwidth, or they oversubscribe their datacenters and their advertised speeds are far from real, or they have terrible support and if something goes down you are going to have a hard time to bring things up while having to explain to 10-15k people why things stopped working, or because the reason they manage to get such low prices is because they are selling user data on the side…
I’m not saying that the only correct alternative is to go to the big cloud providers, but there is a reason why “cheap” is not the sole criteria to choose a service provider.
Yes, the cheapest ones might have some risks, I mostly presented it as an example of what the opposite extremity looks like. There is a lot in-between, something a bit more expensive is even more guaranteed win. For example last time I used Hetzner, I had a server with 64gb RAM, 2TB SSD, and 16 cores Ryzen for something like €34/month. Hetzner support is very decent and they’re very well known, have decent reputation and been providing their services for a long time.
I’m currently watching the interview (quite interesting, to be honest, funny to watch an interview about Fediverse services). Could you please share the timestamp when Jerry talks about finances and costs?
Ok, so you are not taking anything out of pocket at all? That’s better than most, I suppose.
Still, during the interview you touch on the subject of how the donation model is not sustainable and it can only works at the scale that Fedi is right now. Wouldn’t you consider then switching to a different model?
@rglullis I think the donation model is working ok at this scale, but I don’t believe it will scale up to the hypothetical future we were discussing on the show where the fediverse became the social media platform for the masses. There are somewhere around 1 to 2 million active fediverse users, depending on how you count. If that were 100x or 1000x larger, we would simply crumble - I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage that we end up paying for across various instance) and generally, people who use social media are far less concerned with the core value propositions of the fediverse, like privacy and whatnot. I know that’s hard to accept, but we’re here because that’s how we think. So no, I don’t think we will have a future where a 500,000,000 active user fediverse can be operated off of donations from members. I also very much doubt that people would pay a fee to be here when corporate social media alternatives are “free” to them
I think “hundreds of thousands and even millions” is a bit of a stretch. Wikimedia’s annual report mentions donors at a level of “$50,000+”, and I’m guessing most of those are probably closer to 50,000 than to 100,000. Tbf I suppose that’s over just one year, so perhaps your statement isn’t entirely inaccurate.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 12 Jun 17:26
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I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage …
That’s my hunch too, although haven’t studied in detail - so I wonder how we can fix it ?
Is there an forum that discusses this scaling issue (in general, across fediverse) ?
I suppose this community is as good as any. But it’s difficult to talk in general about this as each fediverse app has different performance needs/characteristics, so I’m not sure if you can extrapolate anything in general. But perhaps?
Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral.
So it’s good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years.
I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer ‘hot’, and folded away …
Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.
Well, that’s the nature of link aggregators. Lemmy’s and Reddit’s style is a link aggregator, not really what you would consider an old-fashioned forums. It’s a different sort of use case with different pros and cons. A con is that you don’t get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. A pro is that… you don’t get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. :P
Sort of, but doesn’t it just sort by the latest comment? I.e. any thread would be bumped to the top by a single comment? I might be wrong. But that makes it kind of less than ideal if true.
Yes, but that doesn’t scale. If there are thousands of comments being submitted constantly, the All feed would just be a new page every time you refresh for the new comments sort. It would be chaotic.
It should instead be based on a recent rate of comments for instance. Much like normal votes but comments instead and not based on the age of the post.
Yea it’s still only a partial solution. Even those feeds could get very active over time (we can hope 😅). The way Piefed implemented feeds is interesting but seems almost overengineered? Sharing feeds could have been done via a simple query parameter I feel like.
Feeds can be personal, so you can decide how granular to you want them. So far I’m able to follow every conversation on the different topics I like, so I would say it works quite well so far.
They can be public too, but personally I prefer to customize my own.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 14 Jun 18:29
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Storage Duplication is I think not necessarily an issue of ActivityPub, it’s an issue of implementation of it. Because all posts can technically live on their respective servers. And rendered directly or almost directly. Like it can be copied over for the time it is relevant, and then discarded to be available only from the original server.
That makes sense, to store only popular stuff, or temporarily - especially for ‘heavier’ images (although as we see with lemm.ee, that leads to issues when an instance dies). Yet I also wonder about the scalability of just the minimum meta-info, whose size does depend on the protocol design.
For example with Lemmy every upvote click propagates across the network (if i understand correctly, mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency, but this can make it seem ‘empty’). Maybe such meta-info could be batched, or gathered by a smaller set of ‘node’ instances, from which others pick up periodically - some tree to disperse information rather than directly each instance to each other instance ?
As the fediverse grows, gathering past meta-info might also become a barrier to new entrant instances ?
mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency.
It is not a matter of efficiency, but solely of how AP works. All it takes is someone one an server to to follow a community for that server to receive every vote/post/comment, while to get a whole conversation thread on Mastodon you’d need to be on the same server as the original poster or your server would need to have at least one person following every server involved in the conversation.
Thanks, that makes sense if I think about it, but maybe users shouldn’t have to - i.e. the Mdon part-conversation way still seems confusing to me (despite being a climate modeler and scala dev), although haven’t used Mdon much since I found Lemmy. And I still feel that both ways seem intrinsically inefficient - for different reasons - if we intend to scale up the global numbers (relating OP).
I agree with most of what you say. I’m a long-time fan of calculating more complex things client side, as you can see from my climate model (currently all calcs within web browser, evolved from java applet to scalajs).
Also, in regarding social media, keeping the data client side could make the network more resilient in autocratic countries (many), and thelp this become truly a global alternative.
On the other hand, some ‘trunk’ server interactions could also doing more not less, bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json, and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?).
bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json
Seems like an optimization that is not really needed. The data format is not really the bottleneck, there are ActivityPub relays that can send messages in bulk and ActivityPub is built on LinkedData, which means that there plenty of powerful libraries in most languages that can parse and produce JSON in a way that keeps application developers with a consistent semantics. The more people try to change the data format in the sake of “efficiency”, the less portable and useful it would be.
and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?)
Yes and no. Most of the current software do authentication by using HTTP Message Signatures, so after you fetch the actor’s public key every request is authenticated by seeing an HTTP header, which makes it no different most common authentication schemes.
I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I disagree on the solution. I think that us insisting on the donation model is putting an artificial limit on further growth. It “works” for this 1M-2M MAU, but these numbers are not enough to attract other players and who might be willing to try different approaches.
I think we need to change the general mindset that we “need” the donation model to keep the people around, and flip to a system where every user is expected to pay a little bit. And yeah, you might argue that not everyone is able to afford it, but it would easier to come with systems where not-paying is the exception instead of the rule. We can have a system where every N paying subscribers guarantee one free spot, with N=2, 3, 5, 10, up to the admin. We can have a system (like I have in Communick) where customers can buy “multiple seats” and invite whoever they want. Alternatively, we can set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 14 Jun 18:27
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You are misunderstanding the main idea behind the whole system. It is fork-able. So people can always change things they personally find they don’t like about it. You can not have anything where everybody has to do. Because those who don’t agree have all the technological and legal right to ignore you and do what they want instead. And this is the point with libre platforms ( or libre software in general ).
Whatever solution we find needs to take this fundamental thing into consideration.
Sorry, I don’t see how what you are talking about relates to my comment. At all.
I am not saying that people should be forced to pay, at least no that they need to pay to any specific admin. What I am saying is that we should stop to hand wave the total operational cost of an instance. Keeping the servers running, developing fixes and improvements to the software, dealing with moderation issues… these are all costs that need to be covered by someone.
Some people are willing to do all this work just to avoid “paying” someone else, but they end up paying with their own labor, their own server, their own time. If they are willing to do all of this, good for them. But for the majority of people who are simply looking for a social media alternative that is more ethical, it will be better for them (and everyone else) if they just go on to contribute with direct financial support and give a a few bucks every month.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 15 Jun 12:15
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We need to make it easy to check the financial health of an instance. And things like costs and money made from donations should be visible, and rendered as progress bars or charts. So people would know when and to whom to donate.
These things would be good but they wouldn’t change the general incentive. There are still plenty of instances that are properly “funded” but still go under, lemm.ee being the most recent example. The problem is that these donation-funded instances are bound to hit a ceiling even when they hit their raising targets.
Mastodon instances that have good transparent reporting of their status (hachyderm, fosstodon, mastodon.social) are all receiving enough donations to support the hardware, but no one accounts for the labor of the admins and moderators and these are the real operational costs for the instances - and no one wants to pay for those.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 15 Jun 22:50
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no one accounts for the labor of the admins and moderators
These need to be part of the report. We have to fund not just hardware, but good life ( worthy of envy ) of those people. If their lives aren’t worthy of envy now, the fediverse isn’t healthy and we need to donate more.
Take a look at Mastodon’s Patreon and their OpenCollective page. The largest project in the Fediverse gets 16500€/month from Patreon + $10k/year on OC, and that money is meant to support an instance with ~ 280 thousand active users (mastodon.social), another with 9.600 active users (mastodon.online) + the salary of ~5 developers. And we are not even counting the tens of moderators who are doing a lot of stressful work and have to deal with all sorts of issues that arise from being the largest instance out there.
An instance like mastodon.social should be pulling at least $1.5M/year in donations to make this work for the admins and moderators alone. Double that if we also used to fund the work of the developers. Which means that they would need an average donation of $4-$8 per user/year. Now, going by Jerry’s number where he says around 4% of his users donate, this would mean that each donor would have to contribute $100-$200 every year.
And this is for the flagship instance, which has all their “please donate” narrative (deservedly) on their favor. Imagine how much harder would it be for other instances. Do you really think that we would be getting 4% of every instance contributing $100/year, or 8% contributing $50/year, or 20% contributing $20/year?
Now, let’s compare with a different funding strategy, where we have independent service providers providing a service. Each one of them is working with different levels of investment, ROI expectations, etc. None of these instances would be getting hundreds of thousands of users (which makes operational costs per user higher), but at least their growth would only come if they have enough people willing to pay the asking price, and none of these users would be expected to pay $100-$200/year.
For example: my magical number with Communick is to get 10 thousand customers, each paying paying $29/year. That’s $290k. Minus a reasonable salary for me ($180k/year), that’s $110k. Minus my operational costs (let’s say I can make things run with $25k/year) that’s $85k. Minus my 20% pledge to the underlying Fediverse projects on the profits (20% of $85k is $17k). The remaining $68k would be used to reinvest in the business, hire people to help, etc.
Can you realistically make the case where someone with ~10k users could be getting $15k/month in donations? Not as an one-off kickstarter (like the Pixelfed devs did), but consistently enough that people can actually make long-term plans around this revenue, treat it like an actual job?
Do you think that all that is missing for the “open registration instances” (the .world servers, the infosec servers, fosstodon, hachyderm.io…) is “transparency”? All these people are already doing very good work and they are transparent about their costs. Do you think if the admins start also including other costs on the list, that the donations will keep coming forever?
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 16 Jun 12:58
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I think that we need to have a panic making notification when some instance is below a comfortable ( of it’s operator ) level of money. So that people could direct their money into stopping the panic. Basically I want automatic sense of urgency when and where it’s needed. FSF does it well. When they are low on money they just make a progress bar on every page they operate, with a link to a donation page. It works amazingly for them, because it immediately creates a sort of soft panic about the health of the FSF.
I still feel like you are talking about one “ideal” scenario, but all your examples fall short of it. I’d really have a hard time to see anyone working on any of the projects from the FSF that is “worthy of envy”.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 16 Jun 17:36
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That is because the problem is not solved yet.
Again “We have to solve the money problem!”
That means it is nowhere near being solved. It will be solved when FSF staff ( from donations ) will have a life worthy of envy. And any fediverse admin too. And any libre software developer too.
Right, so the problem is not solved and you are talking about “solutions” that have been tried before and do not work.
You know that quote about “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”? This is what is happening here.
Expecting to fund commons infrastructure through donation do not work in the long run. It’s that simple. You can try to come up with all sorts of flashy gimmicks to make the issue more visible,.but the issue will continue to exist.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 16 Jun 22:20
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If there is a new gimmick there is, by definition, a change of some kind. Which means maybe all we need to do is tweak a few very easy to tweak parameters and that will unclog the flow of money. I don’t know if that is what going to help. But not just try and see what happens?
Because it has been tried before, and there are no significant results to show.
Because these types of changes take time and effort that would be better spent elsewhere.
Because it is solving the wrong problem. The problem is not “how to unclog the flow of money”. Sending money around has never been easier. The problem is not the flow of money, the problem is that most people are not willing to give money for something unless they absolutely have to, so there is not a lot of money to be sent around.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 17 Jun 00:15
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Maybe I am just overly optimistic. I don’t know. But it seems like with enough gimmicky advertising tricks we could get enough people excited about giving money.
Again, I’m sorry. This is not “optimism” but baseless wishful thinking.
If you want to talk about actual strategies to get people to see the value of a free Internet and how to educate them, I’m all ears. But I’m not interested in continuing the conversation if you are just arguing what you wish would happen.
The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.
There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.
ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world
on 12 Jun 12:07
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Provided there is an “upper limit” on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn’t private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.
I realize this isn’t exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we’re trying to “solve” the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance’s server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.
This kind of distributed “load balancing” on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a “federate” form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.
Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Jun 12:19
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This is not how the fediverse works. Each server keeps a whole copy to themselves of all that they’ve accessed in the federation.
Cost of hardware is only a fraction of the total cost. Even if we solved the issue of running the Fediverse at scale with negligible costs, we still are not accounting for all the labor of volunteers, instance admins and developers.
ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world
on 12 Jun 15:52
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I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I’m not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.
That’s why I’m saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.
My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.
I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That’s where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their “free” idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.
That’s not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn’t very scalable.
ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world
on 12 Jun 16:03
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I responded above, but my point kind of was that it doesn’t work that way, but as we rethinking content delivery we should also rethinking hosting distribution. What I was saying is not a “well gee we should just do this…” type of suggestion, but more a extremely high level idea for server orchestration from a public private swarm that may or may not ever be feasible, but definitely doesn’t really exist today.
Imagine if it were somewhat akin to BitTorrent, only the user could voluntarily give remote control to the instance for orchestration management. The orchestration server toggles the nodes contents so that, lets say, 100% of them carry the most accessed data (hot content, <100gb), and the rest is sharded so they each carry 10% of the archived data, making each node require <1tb total. And the node client is given X number of pinned CPUs that can be used for additional server compute tasks to offload various queries.
See, I’m fully aware this doesn’t really exist on this form. But thinking of it like a Kubernetes cluster or a HA webclient it seems like it should be possible somehow to build this in a way where the client really only needs to install, and say yes to contribute. If we could cut it down to that level, then you can start serving the site like a P2P bittorrent swarm, and these power user clients can become nodes.
Kierunkowy74@piefed.social
on 12 Jun 22:46
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Something similar is available for PeerTube:
- Platform redundancy by P2P, and
- offload of transcoding and transcription to Remote Runners
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 13:52
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Most people are only willing to pay with non-monetary resources (PII, ad data, etc.). You can't approach this with charging money in mind, because people will just go back to the places where they aren't expected to pay. Start charging for Mastodon? The majority will go to Bluesky, Twitter, and Threads. Lemmy would just feed back to Reddit. Either that or they'll drop off social media altogether.
We've already got proof of this: PeerTube. Most PeerTube instances either charge a fee to upload (call it a 'donation' if you prefer, but if you're gating an action behind money, that's a fee), or simply don't allow any users not connected to the admin to upload. YouTube, Twitch, Dailymotion, and a few other sites are free. The sites where it's free to perform the core activity will keep winning, especially as we see rising inflation and increasing costs.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Jun 14:42
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Do you know that the person you just responded to is one of the first subscribers of Communick?
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 15:11
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No, I stopped looking at instance or software a while ago. The threadiverse has seemingly matured enough that the average user doesn't have to care anymore.
It’s not about the software. I am just pointing out that Communick’s instances are only available for paying customers, so his argument (everyone should pay a little bit) is at the very least backed by his own actions.
Regarding Peertube: I see the problem of Peertube on the other end of what you are saying. People are not using that much because even those that have a presence on PeerTube still depend on YouTube to make money. If PeerTube had a way to help with monetization, then more creators would be interested in publishing exclusively on PeerTube, even if they had to pay something to upload/distribute videos.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 18:09
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Fair point about his actions, and I'm glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us. I disagree strongly about everyone paying. We 'pay' by adding content and being members of the community. We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit. Money shouldn't need to change hands.
See, I get your point on PeerTube, but I counter with the fact that we did have video online before YouTube. That wasn't the revolution. It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut. Same with streaming before ryan.tv. Before it was free, it was extremely niche. When monetary investment stopped being needed, it hit the mainstream. If the monetization of video content comes directly from viewers, you will go back to dedicated hobbyists and those who are certain that videos will be funded in advance.
I’m glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us.
What “whale”? Communick costs less than $2.50 per month. It is less than the average donation people send around.
We ‘pay’ by adding content and being members of the community
No one can use your content to pay their bills.
We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit
The network is not expanding. It is stuck in this 1M-2M monthly active users (if you count all of the Fediverse) and Lemmy/kbin/piefed is hovering around 50-55k/MAU for two years already.
Meanwhile, Reddit’s revenue has grown 62% in 2024 (from $800M in 2023 to to $1.3B last year). Do you really think they care about losing a few thousand users who are all talk but no bite?
It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut.
There were other platforms offering free video and free hosting as well. There were even p2p alternatives. Remember Joost? It’s not that people didn’t have a choice then and YouTube was better. It’s that could Google leveraged its capital to run Youtube at a loss for as long as needed until there was no competition left.
If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There’s no reason instances can’t use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I’ll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 17:58
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The reason they can't show ads is actually pretty simple: if I'm going to have ads in my feed, I'm just going to go back to Reddit for the same experience. Plus, when you consider dbzer0 et al, you're going to come to the conclusion that ads will either be a waste because everyone is using a strong adblock on Firefox or a browser that doesn't care about Google manifest standards, or the people who see them will be incredibly pissed, leave the instance, and either return to Reddit (or an alternative) or move instances and make a lot of noise toward defed'ing from the ad-ridden instance.
For me, I would rather just run an adblock and an anti-adblock-blocker on a different service than go through the frustration of ads on a non-corp platform.
It sounds like you’re thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren’t ads and it’s free?
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 12 Jun 23:16
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That's basically correct, yes. I don't see the fediverse platform(s) as being "special" compared to others. Sure, there's political and social momentum that keeps people here, especially due to anticorporate causes. People are here because they got ticked about the Reddit API changes, the ads, and the monetization (Reddit Gold, etc).
If any of those things change, people will see that they're not getting the value they were looking for, and will go back.
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
There are a lot of people who aren’t that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it’s their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don’t think it’s appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.
Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can’t afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.
The thing is that ads pay almost nothing. I’d be very happy to pay 4x what an ad would pay. But the problem is I can’t sent 0.12 to someone when I watch their video because 50% of that is gobbled up by transaction fees. So the only option is to bulk donate which either requires pooling money in a 3rd party or the user donating a bulk amount ($10). Users really dont like giving away $10 when it feels like they get nothing in return. Its all mental but its a very real problem. We will pay for $10 of dogshit food but not $10 for a software product we’ve used for 100s of hours.
rglullis@communick.news
on 12 Jun 12:23
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Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let’s say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.
I’m already paying my instance and lemmy and kinda loyal to it. I’d alsp like to properly support the software i use before trying to support content creators. One day in the future something like communick would be appealing.
The website says 20% of the profit is donated? Does that mean to charities?
This is separate from the Communick Collective. The collective is just a way for people to support creators directly. My pledge of 20% is for the underlying projects. I am pledging to donate 20% of the profits to Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix Foundation, Funkwhale, GoToSocial, Pixelfed, etc.
For that to happen Communick needs first to turn a profit, though.
Most people think of crypto as a scam, but there are actual useful products being built on Ethereum, and this is a great illustration on where it is a useful tool
It has been around USD 0.001~0.008, but they are scaling aggressively so fluctuations aren’t as significant in the future regardless of usage. Details here: www.growthepie.com/fees
i know most of ao3's budget goes to server costs. they get by with volunteer labor and donations, but they mostly host text. i genuinely have no idea what a sustainable model would look like for the fediverse, that doesn't just treat volunteers like disposable rags we toss when they get inevitable burnout.
If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don’t hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don’t do another one until I get the feeling “it’s been a while”.
I joined my instance’s patreon and donate $1 / month. I know it is not a lot, but so far the admin says he is doing fine on cash flow, should that change I will up my donation if able.
they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance … or go somewhere else entirely
ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip
on 12 Jun 13:59
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Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket.
Wtf!?
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 12 Jun 14:57
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I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
There are a lot of people who aren’t that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it’s their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don’t think it’s appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.
No questions from my side, just a big thank you to mention Mbin, Lemmy, the Fediverse in that interview. It’s probably the first time for me where I watch a video talking about all of this, which is curious with how part of my daily life it is.
I still haven’t watched everything, but one of your quotes sounded resonated with me “We’re only here for a short time. Why should we be a-holes to each other, and not just try to enjoy ourselves?”
The Mastodon instance I'm on has around 200 people (not all of them active), and received around €800 in donations last year,. Total costs were less than €300.
I think the problem of scaling kicks in when we go after demographics that are less charitable on average.
lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Jun 15:16
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Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.
I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
on 12 Jun 16:13
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Time to start putting ads in.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
on 13 Jun 00:07
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I support ads.
Oh, calm down. I don’t support the ad level of Facebook, nor the targeted ads, nor the algorithm.
And we, as users, get to decide when too many ads are too many, with our feet.
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org
on 13 Jun 06:43
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Abso-fucking-lutely not. People need to be able to exist without having hypercommercialism forced on them everywhere.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
on 13 Jun 09:07
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I’d rather have a… gags… Subscription.
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org
on 13 Jun 19:40
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No ads and no donations, they’ll put wishful thinking into the skillet and eat that I guess
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org
on 13 Jun 19:39
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Donations, subscriptions, etc are definitely fine. They are not invasive fuckery that inflict themselves on people without consent, nor do they seep into the space in a commercial manner. Ads do not respect consent and they fundamentally force commerce into every place that they touch.
dangling_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 12 Jun 15:44
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Freemium is the way to go. All the essential features are free; you can pay for extra stuff like special emojis, coins(like Reddit silver/gold), or customizable profiles. It could be either a subscription or à la carte.
Simply giving something in return would incentivize people to donate more.
Unlike Reddit, the profit should give back to the communities by adding more features, paying developers to maintain open source projects, giveaways etc.
nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip
on 12 Jun 16:48
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Misskey is probably the only fediverse software that actually allows admin instance to put ads.
Its flagship instance, misskey.io (which also the second/third (?) biggest instances on fediverse), use freemium scheme for running the server.
They have to do this as they have 600K users, with 20K visits per day.
Their paid tier upgrades are mostly adding non-essentials stuff, such as drive capacity from 5GB to 30-100GB, profile and avatar decoration (similar to Discord stuff), or more webhook.
They runs community ads, from indie games, vtuber promotion, comic release, or local art event.
They also have one corporate backer, Skeb.jp, which an art commissioning platform.
Not saying that all instance should do this, but it could be a great learning.
Feddit.dk is not a huge Lemmy instance but I’ve managed to not have to pay anything so far due to generous user donations. It works quite well I think. I think Mastodon is just not quite as effective in gathering people like this to donate, that’s my guess at least.
suswrkr@discuss.tchncs.de
on 12 Jun 22:43
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start a nonprofit that hosts services, gather donations for equipment and other stuff.
what is so difficult here?
suswrkr@discuss.tchncs.de
on 13 Jun 03:22
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omg and do NOT do fireside chats like you are a bunch of enlightened executives. no wonder you need to beg for donations.
Probably that people have jobs, families and lives. Otherwise, why haven’t you already started a nonprofit that does that and donates to them?
suswrkr@discuss.tchncs.de
on 14 Jun 15:30
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Everyone has jobs, families, and lives. What is your point?
We did start a nonprofit this year, electronica.repair. We don’t have a lot of money so we do our due diligence on who we support.
mesitoispro@ttrpg.network
on 12 Jun 23:23
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Bro, what fucking project ever solves “the money problem?”
As soon as they get more, they spend more and then it’s back to square one.
mesitoispro@ttrpg.network
on 12 Jun 23:26
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Why the fuck should we be paying admins to have control over our data and be able to arbitrarily ban us because they feel like it?
No. Their reward for having users is that they’re in control. Expecting users to then pay them for that control is fucking stupid, but I don’t expect most people to realize it.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
on 13 Jun 00:05
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No. Their reward for having users is that they’re in control. Expecting users to then pay them for that control is fucking stupid,
You DO realize that not everyone works to attain power over other people, right?
but I don’t expect most people to realize it.
The reason people don’t realize that site owners’ reward for forking over half a salary in hosting costs for some nebulous power to hold other people in their clutching fists and cackle maniacally is because that’s not the motivator here.
I look forward to when you can see that.
mesitoispro@ttrpg.network
on 13 Jun 00:15
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Bro, why do you just trust these people when they tell you what their expenses are?
Even if some dumbass is spending $5000/month (which sounds like a load of bullshit if you’re not a moron) to host a fucking lemmy instance, why do you trust that they need to spend that money in order to provide the instance?
Have you noticed how most people buy things they don’t need just because they can? If not, then you need more life experience and it makes sense that you would take admin’s word at face value when they try to sucker you out of money.
As always, when money is involved scumbags and useful idiots come out in droves to justify each other’s existence.
thats because its thier site, instance they get set rules like it. just like reddit bans you force certain things. dont use the site then.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 08:52
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I think one of the biggest obstacles in donations is lack of transparency of what’s going on with the donated money.
Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.
I don’t know if it’s the case as the presented case is not an instance I use. But on general before donating any money is the first thing I look up, and if it’s not clear I just hold my money.
But it is known that donations usually cannot sustain projects, specially “user donations”. For a project to be able to have a steady and sizeable influx of money there need to be whale donators or corporations that donate to it. Relying on user donations will always mean a very little amount of money, and I don’t think that’s going to change as most people don’t have that much disposable income anyway.
I think p2p and true decentralization is the way to go. Don’t get me wrong, fediverse is great, but is not as much decentralized as “less centralized”, truly decentralized model should be p2p. I’ve said several times that the ess centralized" model have a critical failure point and that is that instances are under a lot of pressure, economic, legal and administrative. And we are burning people out and spending all their money, because it’s a model that relies in a few number of people taking that big burden.
I think a model that the burden is smaller and more spread among the user base will be more resilient, at least on this aspect.
Also I take the chance to put up a critique on domain costs, it’s not much, but it’s part of this topic and surely they should be cheaper, as domain cost is 90% speculation and very little labor cost. I don’t know if there’s any project to democratize domain names in the clearnet, but there should be one.
Yep, cant even see how much they got a month or anything like that as far as im aware, there are some piracy sites where the donation number stays at like 200/350 goal forever and it feels like you really never kniw if they’re just making bank and pretending to be in need lol
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 19:55
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Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.
If you believe he’s spending $5k/mo to run the server, even if you send him $20 and he blows it on blackjack and hookers, it means he has to spend $20 of his bj/h money on the server. So I don’t really see an issue. Does that make sense?
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 Jun 23:04
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The transparency is needed to know if the server is actually costing $5000
Not that the server cost only $500 and the rest go to cocaine and hookers
I don’t need to keep track of my bill precisely, what I want is budget transparency.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 14 Jun 00:09
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If somebody says it costs $5000/mo, how could they say it in a different way that you would define as “transparent” - do you want receipts?
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
on 13 Jun 19:50
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The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven’t even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the “server” is a hive of users’ computers all sharing the load? I’m a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area, but since BitTorrent works it certainly seems feasible. Comments?
Personally I think self-hosting (Docker containers and stuff) would be a good solution, but for the Fediverse that would mean making a ‘family size’ edition of the server software.
I imagine if it became a common hobby and every geek interested supported ~4-25 friends, it might work.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 14 Jun 22:53
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The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone
We have to think about that a lot of people on the fediverse today ( and that number only grow the more people join ) that are normies. They expect it work the same exact way anything else works. And they won’t know or care to know any of the underlying technical things about it.
blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud
on 14 Jun 18:39
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I brainstormed with Chatgpt (i know evil chatgpt) and will hopefully not be banned for presenting the idea.
Alright, let’s push way past the usual and synthesize a radically creative, scalable, and totally on-brand Fediverse funding solution—one that would not only fix the “who pays?” problem, but make the network more resilient, social, and even fun. This is going to blend a bit of tech, social engineering, game theory, transparency, and maybe even a touch of “digital folklore.”
🚀 Fediverse “Co-op Cloud Commons” Model
(A new take on digital mutualism and collective intelligence funding)
The Vision:
A network-wide, federated cooperative where every user, moderator, developer, and instance is a “member-owner.” Funding, decisions, and rewards flow not just by usage, but by a mix of social trust, verified contribution, and creative cooperation—and the entire process is public, auditable, and playful.
1. The Heart: The Commons Ledger
Every instance runs a lightweight, open-source “Commons Ledger” plugin.
The ledger tracks:
Actual resource usage (server costs, moderation time, bandwidth, storage)
If the network ever wants to dabble in lightweight tokens (not as a currency, but for tracking contributions), use an open, federated, non-speculative “Proof-of-Play” or “Proof-of-Help” chain:
Each badge, quest, or meaningful action gets an on-chain badge.
You can export your contribution record anywhere—for jobs, bragging rights, new instance migration.</
Doesn’t sound too insane except for the social contributions tracking and realtime dashboard. Maaaaybe all of the social data could somehow magically not end up as a ton of traffic just for metadata, but a realtime dashboard would exponentially exacerbate how much data would have to flow around.
It would be very unwise to make the gamification of financial support end up being a significant % of the overall traffic required to run a service, though I guess as long as it stays a low %, it could be worth it.
Post receipts or something official to back up your claims.
Saying it costs $5000/month to host infosec.exchange radiates bullshit like a nuclear explosion. You must be doing something very wrong, or lying about the requirements.
Don’t trust people when they want to take money from you. Money brings out the worst in people.
threaded - newest
Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?
ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they’re using. Oh, the humanity.
So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
That’s a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by… asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
If they haven’t done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.
If it was an exceptional case, I’d be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.
This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don’t find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?
I’ll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:
You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:
<img alt="" src="https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/3d79d02b-8ac1-4ebc-8c32-dd5787d0e270.png">
Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.
The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.
You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing
This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money
<img alt="" src="https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/6c40ab0f-6713-4545-a84c-dad557fa98da.png">
And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.
The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small
they will have to enshittify to stay afloat, like allowing ads into instances, thats the reality if they want to grow.
i was thinking you could do ads for people not signed in, then no ads for people logged in
then for people logged in/signed up you could do discord style nitro benefits, fancy name tag, just extra stuff that supporters can get to show their support for the place
but in isolation no good because what’s to stop another instance just giving it away all for free? it’s like the place is self undermining, it’s the most cut throat environment to be in while being worse to work for than any it slave pen, at least at the end of the work week you get paid, here you’d be expected to work for free :\
Let’s get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
How?
Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have
But isn’t the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?
You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can’t “get rid of open registration instances.” That’s just stupid.
I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
That I can agree with. But I think it’s just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they’ll find that free instances just aren’t an available.
How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say “Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own”? I’m not going to say zero, but I really doubt it’s going to be “more than 3”.
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new
suckerenthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.Not the nicest way to talk about @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, @Shadow@lemmy.ca or @Demigodrick@lemmy.zip
Interesting… the more time passes and your previous arguments fall along with the instances that you supported, the more you are resorting to tone policing.
If avoiding insulting other people is tone policing, sure.
I didn’t insult anyone. You are putting names out there of admins of existing instances when I was talking about the general story of about how there are constant wheel of new people coming up.
You are gasping as straws, as if ostracizing me would ever validate your arguments. This is getting tiring.
Lemm.ee didn’t shut down because it was financially unsustainable though. It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.
Plenty of people have offered to take lemm.ee on and AFAIK nothing has progressed, but handled in a different way there could have been continuity and no need for users to transition away.
Given that the issue wasn’t one of finance and rather one of effort/will, how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.
Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you’ll be getting.
Then all the Fediverse is, is just a bump in the road for Reddit and Twitter.
You can’t ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments
Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
I don’t know how this dismise my point. Small instances dies all the time. I am more preoccupied by death of instances on oixelfed though
Small hobbyist instances die all the time. Just like the medium ones and the large ones.
Small instances a lot more
Because there are more of them?
My point still stand. People won’t go to small instances that have change of shutting down thr most. Like i said in my very first comment we need better migration tools to encourage people to join small instances
There will always be “First we need this, then we will start supporting it” excuse. If you think better migration tools are needed, support the developers so that they can make it happen.
.
Suggest me devs who are willing to make such a tool to support it
The Lemmy devs themselves.
You just said in another comment that lemmy devs have limited time and budgets to implement better migrations tools. If i find a dev who promote a project lime that i would donate
If we all donate a little bit to the project, their budget will be larger. If their budget is larger, they can get more steady collaborators.
And even if they can’t get more people, by helping them we show we value all the work they have done already.
If the devs care about that part of the software (or any dev who's got the time and interest since it's open-source), they would be working on it. They've signalled to users that they don't care. Let those who care do it. And if no one cares, then it doesn't need to be done.
This is absurd and shows some ridiculous entitlement.
Software development is not just a drive-thru restaurant where people just make an order with their preferred menu, and 30 seconds later it is handed it out to you. Developers have to balance a bunch of priorities, deal with bugs, make sure that new features being added can be maintained in the future adequately. It’s also not easy for anyone to just drop by and submit a huge piece of functionality without making sure things works as expected. And they are doing this all while getting basically no money in donations (~3000€/month, for 3 developers is less than minimum wage for pretty much all of Northern Europe).
If you think it’s just a matter of “they don’t care”, go ahead and write the code yourself.
There's one big issue with that: I don't care enough either. It's not a priority for me.
Isn’t elest.io/open-source/lemmy still a thing? Different model from you, though.
Put those under “self-hosting”.
This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.
It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say… Just like an email address or URL.
Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.
We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.
But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.
I think it’s the best starting point. University and government resources can handle the volume and will motivate widespread adoption. In one sense, it is only kicking the can down the road, but it is kicking it into a future that will be better prepared for these questions.
I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.
If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you'll immediately lose huge amounts of users back to Reddit or whatever alternative is free to them. The echo chamber will be even more pronounced, and whatever success Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed have had will dry up.
Most people don't want to self host. And most people aren't willing to pay. So you have an issue in front of you. Do you actually want users and interactions? Or do you just want a place where very dedicated nerds can crow to each other about whatever self-hosting tricks they pulled off while occasionally backed by an addicted whale (who, upon noting the monotony and small userbase, will probably move on quickly)?
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else. It's a mix between addiction and community-building instincts. Right now, said whales are the server hosts and a handful of users. Because of the desire to lead a community, and the addiction of social media, it keeps going. You say it isn't sustainable. I say it's a cycle. The specific instances don't matter until it becomes a corporate situation. All that matters is that there's at least one instance with enough people active to provide the gratification to the whale.
That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don’t have to be completely open registration.
You don’t need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.
Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.
Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.
The reason is easy: one likes the fediverse, wants to contribute for it and wants to enabled people to use it even if they can’t afford to pay for it.
On a smaller scale, that’s not much of a problem. I’m glad I can host for some people who don’t have money at all. Some of the others donate and some don’t and that’s fine as well.
I am not sure if the “he” reference is me, but I did ask and people did step up to support the costs of running the instance.
@jerry@infosec.exchange , I’m sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?
If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don’t you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?
I wonder why it needs so much money for infra? Last time I rented a VPS it was €7/month for 8 Core Xeon E5 V4, 12 GB DDR4 RAM, 150 GB SSD/NVME, Unlimited Traffic, 1 Gbps Port.
Storage. In the video he says that backups alone costs $500/month.
Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.
Maybe the problem is that they are using ridiculously overpriced enterprise services like AWS or Azure, which provide their own solutions for a lot of common things like backups, replicas, logging, etc, but cost 100x more than what you can get with DIY on some cheap VPS if you’re fine with spending 1.25x more time.
Why not, though.
because cheap VPS will not give you enough bandwidth, or they oversubscribe their datacenters and their advertised speeds are far from real, or they have terrible support and if something goes down you are going to have a hard time to bring things up while having to explain to 10-15k people why things stopped working, or because the reason they manage to get such low prices is because they are selling user data on the side…
I’m not saying that the only correct alternative is to go to the big cloud providers, but there is a reason why “cheap” is not the sole criteria to choose a service provider.
Yes, the cheapest ones might have some risks, I mostly presented it as an example of what the opposite extremity looks like. There is a lot in-between, something a bit more expensive is even more guaranteed win. For example last time I used Hetzner, I had a server with 64gb RAM, 2TB SSD, and 16 cores Ryzen for something like €34/month. Hetzner support is very decent and they’re very well known, have decent reputation and been providing their services for a long time.
I’m currently watching the interview (quite interesting, to be honest, funny to watch an interview about Fediverse services). Could you please share the timestamp when Jerry talks about finances and costs?
34 minute mark. It says in the blog post from OP.
Thanks
@rglullis @blenderdumbass I have donations from members that cover the costs.
Thank you for chiming in, Jerry!
Great interview, I only watched a part of it, but it was very interesting and refreshing to see your perspective on things. Thank you!
Ok, so you are not taking anything out of pocket at all? That’s better than most, I suppose.
Still, during the interview you touch on the subject of how the donation model is not sustainable and it can only works at the scale that Fedi is right now. Wouldn’t you consider then switching to a different model?
@rglullis I think the donation model is working ok at this scale, but I don’t believe it will scale up to the hypothetical future we were discussing on the show where the fediverse became the social media platform for the masses. There are somewhere around 1 to 2 million active fediverse users, depending on how you count. If that were 100x or 1000x larger, we would simply crumble - I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage that we end up paying for across various instance) and generally, people who use social media are far less concerned with the core value propositions of the fediverse, like privacy and whatnot. I know that’s hard to accept, but we’re here because that’s how we think. So no, I don’t think we will have a future where a 500,000,000 active user fediverse can be operated off of donations from members. I also very much doubt that people would pay a fee to be here when corporate social media alternatives are “free” to them
Why shouldn’t the donation model keep working? Wikipedia works on donations, why can’t the fediverse?
Wikipedia had big donors who can donate hundred thousands of dollars and even millions
I think “hundreds of thousands and even millions” is a bit of a stretch. Wikimedia’s annual report mentions donors at a level of “$50,000+”, and I’m guessing most of those are probably closer to 50,000 than to 100,000. Tbf I suppose that’s over just one year, so perhaps your statement isn’t entirely inaccurate.
Thank you!
That’s my hunch too, although haven’t studied in detail - so I wonder how we can fix it ?
Is there an forum that discusses this scaling issue (in general, across fediverse) ?
I suppose this community is as good as any. But it’s difficult to talk in general about this as each fediverse app has different performance needs/characteristics, so I’m not sure if you can extrapolate anything in general. But perhaps?
Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it’s good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer ‘hot’, and folded away … Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.
Well, that’s the nature of link aggregators. Lemmy’s and Reddit’s style is a link aggregator, not really what you would consider an old-fashioned forums. It’s a different sort of use case with different pros and cons. A con is that you don’t get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. A pro is that… you don’t get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. :P
“New comments” sort helps with that
Sort of, but doesn’t it just sort by the latest comment? I.e. any thread would be bumped to the top by a single comment? I might be wrong. But that makes it kind of less than ideal if true.
That’s indeed how it works (and that’s I was able to see those comments).
It works for me, how would you like to have it differently? IIRC on old school forums a single message would also bump the thread
Yes, but that doesn’t scale. If there are thousands of comments being submitted constantly, the All feed would just be a new page every time you refresh for the new comments sort. It would be chaotic.
It should instead be based on a recent rate of comments for instance. Much like normal votes but comments instead and not based on the age of the post.
Piefed partially solves that with multicommunities
That way you can follow your hobbies feeds, your tech feed, your art feed separately.
For All it would indeed be messy.
Yea it’s still only a partial solution. Even those feeds could get very active over time (we can hope 😅). The way Piefed implemented feeds is interesting but seems almost overengineered? Sharing feeds could have been done via a simple query parameter I feel like.
Feeds can be personal, so you can decide how granular to you want them. So far I’m able to follow every conversation on the different topics I like, so I would say it works quite well so far.
They can be public too, but personally I prefer to customize my own.
“New comments” sort helps with that
Storage Duplication is I think not necessarily an issue of ActivityPub, it’s an issue of implementation of it. Because all posts can technically live on their respective servers. And rendered directly or almost directly. Like it can be copied over for the time it is relevant, and then discarded to be available only from the original server.
That makes sense, to store only popular stuff, or temporarily - especially for ‘heavier’ images (although as we see with lemm.ee, that leads to issues when an instance dies). Yet I also wonder about the scalability of just the minimum meta-info, whose size does depend on the protocol design.
For example with Lemmy every upvote click propagates across the network (if i understand correctly, mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency, but this can make it seem ‘empty’). Maybe such meta-info could be batched, or gathered by a smaller set of ‘node’ instances, from which others pick up periodically - some tree to disperse information rather than directly each instance to each other instance ?
As the fediverse grows, gathering past meta-info might also become a barrier to new entrant instances ?
It is not a matter of efficiency, but solely of how AP works. All it takes is someone one an server to to follow a community for that server to receive every vote/post/comment, while to get a whole conversation thread on Mastodon you’d need to be on the same server as the original poster or your server would need to have at least one person following every server involved in the conversation.
Thanks, that makes sense if I think about it, but maybe users shouldn’t have to - i.e. the Mdon part-conversation way still seems confusing to me (despite being a climate modeler and scala dev), although haven’t used Mdon much since I found Lemmy. And I still feel that both ways seem intrinsically inefficient - for different reasons - if we intend to scale up the global numbers (relating OP).
Yeah, I am 100% convinced that we need to rethink AP to make it less dependent on servers.
I agree with most of what you say. I’m a long-time fan of calculating more complex things client side, as you can see from my climate model (currently all calcs within web browser, evolved from java applet to scalajs).
Also, in regarding social media, keeping the data client side could make the network more resilient in autocratic countries (many), and thelp this become truly a global alternative.
On the other hand, some ‘trunk’ server interactions could also doing more not less, bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json, and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?).
Seems like an optimization that is not really needed. The data format is not really the bottleneck, there are ActivityPub relays that can send messages in bulk and ActivityPub is built on LinkedData, which means that there plenty of powerful libraries in most languages that can parse and produce JSON in a way that keeps application developers with a consistent semantics. The more people try to change the data format in the sake of “efficiency”, the less portable and useful it would be.
Yes and no. Most of the current software do authentication by using HTTP Message Signatures, so after you fetch the actor’s public key every request is authenticated by seeing an HTTP header, which makes it no different most common authentication schemes.
I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I disagree on the solution. I think that us insisting on the donation model is putting an artificial limit on further growth. It “works” for this 1M-2M MAU, but these numbers are not enough to attract other players and who might be willing to try different approaches.
I think we need to change the general mindset that we “need” the donation model to keep the people around, and flip to a system where every user is expected to pay a little bit. And yeah, you might argue that not everyone is able to afford it, but it would easier to come with systems where not-paying is the exception instead of the rule. We can have a system where every N paying subscribers guarantee one free spot, with N=2, 3, 5, 10, up to the admin. We can have a system (like I have in Communick) where customers can buy “multiple seats” and invite whoever they want. Alternatively, we can set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
You are misunderstanding the main idea behind the whole system. It is fork-able. So people can always change things they personally find they don’t like about it. You can not have anything where everybody has to do. Because those who don’t agree have all the technological and legal right to ignore you and do what they want instead. And this is the point with libre platforms ( or libre software in general ).
Whatever solution we find needs to take this fundamental thing into consideration.
Sorry, I don’t see how what you are talking about relates to my comment. At all.
I am not saying that people should be forced to pay, at least no that they need to pay to any specific admin. What I am saying is that we should stop to hand wave the total operational cost of an instance. Keeping the servers running, developing fixes and improvements to the software, dealing with moderation issues… these are all costs that need to be covered by someone.
Some people are willing to do all this work just to avoid “paying” someone else, but they end up paying with their own labor, their own server, their own time. If they are willing to do all of this, good for them. But for the majority of people who are simply looking for a social media alternative that is more ethical, it will be better for them (and everyone else) if they just go on to contribute with direct financial support and give a a few bucks every month.
We need to make it easy to check the financial health of an instance. And things like costs and money made from donations should be visible, and rendered as progress bars or charts. So people would know when and to whom to donate.
These things would be good but they wouldn’t change the general incentive. There are still plenty of instances that are properly “funded” but still go under, lemm.ee being the most recent example. The problem is that these donation-funded instances are bound to hit a ceiling even when they hit their raising targets.
Mastodon instances that have good transparent reporting of their status (hachyderm, fosstodon, mastodon.social) are all receiving enough donations to support the hardware, but no one accounts for the labor of the admins and moderators and these are the real operational costs for the instances - and no one wants to pay for those.
These need to be part of the report. We have to fund not just hardware, but good life ( worthy of envy ) of those people. If their lives aren’t worthy of envy now, the fediverse isn’t healthy and we need to donate more.
Let’s make a quick case study?
Take a look at Mastodon’s Patreon and their OpenCollective page. The largest project in the Fediverse gets 16500€/month from Patreon + $10k/year on OC, and that money is meant to support an instance with ~ 280 thousand active users (mastodon.social), another with 9.600 active users (mastodon.online) + the salary of ~5 developers. And we are not even counting the tens of moderators who are doing a lot of stressful work and have to deal with all sorts of issues that arise from being the largest instance out there.
An instance like mastodon.social should be pulling at least $1.5M/year in donations to make this work for the admins and moderators alone. Double that if we also used to fund the work of the developers. Which means that they would need an average donation of $4-$8 per user/year. Now, going by Jerry’s number where he says around 4% of his users donate, this would mean that each donor would have to contribute $100-$200 every year.
And this is for the flagship instance, which has all their “please donate” narrative (deservedly) on their favor. Imagine how much harder would it be for other instances. Do you really think that we would be getting 4% of every instance contributing $100/year, or 8% contributing $50/year, or 20% contributing $20/year?
Now, let’s compare with a different funding strategy, where we have independent service providers providing a service. Each one of them is working with different levels of investment, ROI expectations, etc. None of these instances would be getting hundreds of thousands of users (which makes operational costs per user higher), but at least their growth would only come if they have enough people willing to pay the asking price, and none of these users would be expected to pay $100-$200/year.
For example: my magical number with Communick is to get 10 thousand customers, each paying paying $29/year. That’s $290k. Minus a reasonable salary for me ($180k/year), that’s $110k. Minus my operational costs (let’s say I can make things run with $25k/year) that’s $85k. Minus my 20% pledge to the underlying Fediverse projects on the profits (20% of $85k is $17k). The remaining $68k would be used to reinvest in the business, hire people to help, etc.
Can you realistically make the case where someone with ~10k users could be getting $15k/month in donations? Not as an one-off kickstarter (like the Pixelfed devs did), but consistently enough that people can actually make long-term plans around this revenue, treat it like an actual job?
Do you think that all that is missing for the “open registration instances” (the .world servers, the infosec servers, fosstodon, hachyderm.io…) is “transparency”? All these people are already doing very good work and they are transparent about their costs. Do you think if the admins start also including other costs on the list, that the donations will keep coming forever?
I think that we need to have a panic making notification when some instance is below a comfortable ( of it’s operator ) level of money. So that people could direct their money into stopping the panic. Basically I want automatic sense of urgency when and where it’s needed. FSF does it well. When they are low on money they just make a progress bar on every page they operate, with a link to a donation page. It works amazingly for them, because it immediately creates a sort of soft panic about the health of the FSF.
I still feel like you are talking about one “ideal” scenario, but all your examples fall short of it. I’d really have a hard time to see anyone working on any of the projects from the FSF that is “worthy of envy”.
That is because the problem is not solved yet. Again “We have to solve the money problem!”
That means it is nowhere near being solved. It will be solved when FSF staff ( from donations ) will have a life worthy of envy. And any fediverse admin too. And any libre software developer too.
Right, so the problem is not solved and you are talking about “solutions” that have been tried before and do not work.
You know that quote about “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”? This is what is happening here.
Expecting to fund commons infrastructure through donation do not work in the long run. It’s that simple. You can try to come up with all sorts of flashy gimmicks to make the issue more visible,.but the issue will continue to exist.
If there is a new gimmick there is, by definition, a change of some kind. Which means maybe all we need to do is tweak a few very easy to tweak parameters and that will unclog the flow of money. I don’t know if that is what going to help. But not just try and see what happens?
I’m sorry. When I first saw your blog post I thought you were closer to what I’ve been saying for three years already , but it seems that you don’t have an actionable proposal.
Maybe I am just overly optimistic. I don’t know. But it seems like with enough gimmicky advertising tricks we could get enough people excited about giving money.
Again, I’m sorry. This is not “optimism” but baseless wishful thinking.
If you want to talk about actual strategies to get people to see the value of a free Internet and how to educate them, I’m all ears. But I’m not interested in continuing the conversation if you are just arguing what you wish would happen.
The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.
There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.
Provided there is an “upper limit” on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn’t private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.
I realize this isn’t exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we’re trying to “solve” the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance’s server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.
This kind of distributed “load balancing” on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a “federate” form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.
Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.
I think that would just be a different instance.
I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I’m not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.
That’s why I’m saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.
My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.
I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That’s where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their “free” idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.
Instead of going for these complicated architectures, it would be better to simplify and make activitypub less dependent on server software.
Great link, and I fully agree. If it’s possible anyways.
That’s not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn’t very scalable.
I responded above, but my point kind of was that it doesn’t work that way, but as we rethinking content delivery we should also rethinking hosting distribution. What I was saying is not a “well gee we should just do this…” type of suggestion, but more a extremely high level idea for server orchestration from a public private swarm that may or may not ever be feasible, but definitely doesn’t really exist today.
Imagine if it were somewhat akin to BitTorrent, only the user could voluntarily give remote control to the instance for orchestration management. The orchestration server toggles the nodes contents so that, lets say, 100% of them carry the most accessed data (hot content, <100gb), and the rest is sharded so they each carry 10% of the archived data, making each node require <1tb total. And the node client is given X number of pinned CPUs that can be used for additional server compute tasks to offload various queries.
See, I’m fully aware this doesn’t really exist on this form. But thinking of it like a Kubernetes cluster or a HA webclient it seems like it should be possible somehow to build this in a way where the client really only needs to install, and say yes to contribute. If we could cut it down to that level, then you can start serving the site like a P2P bittorrent swarm, and these power user clients can become nodes.
Something similar is available for PeerTube:
- Platform redundancy by P2P, and
- offload of transcoding and transcription to Remote Runners
Most people are only willing to pay with non-monetary resources (PII, ad data, etc.). You can't approach this with charging money in mind, because people will just go back to the places where they aren't expected to pay. Start charging for Mastodon? The majority will go to Bluesky, Twitter, and Threads. Lemmy would just feed back to Reddit. Either that or they'll drop off social media altogether.
We've already got proof of this: PeerTube. Most PeerTube instances either charge a fee to upload (call it a 'donation' if you prefer, but if you're gating an action behind money, that's a fee), or simply don't allow any users not connected to the admin to upload. YouTube, Twitch, Dailymotion, and a few other sites are free. The sites where it's free to perform the core activity will keep winning, especially as we see rising inflation and increasing costs.
Do you know that the person you just responded to is one of the first subscribers of Communick?
No, I stopped looking at instance or software a while ago. The threadiverse has seemingly matured enough that the average user doesn't have to care anymore.
It’s not about the software. I am just pointing out that Communick’s instances are only available for paying customers, so his argument (everyone should pay a little bit) is at the very least backed by his own actions.
Regarding Peertube: I see the problem of Peertube on the other end of what you are saying. People are not using that much because even those that have a presence on PeerTube still depend on YouTube to make money. If PeerTube had a way to help with monetization, then more creators would be interested in publishing exclusively on PeerTube, even if they had to pay something to upload/distribute videos.
Fair point about his actions, and I'm glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us. I disagree strongly about everyone paying. We 'pay' by adding content and being members of the community. We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit. Money shouldn't need to change hands.
See, I get your point on PeerTube, but I counter with the fact that we did have video online before YouTube. That wasn't the revolution. It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut. Same with streaming before ryan.tv. Before it was free, it was extremely niche. When monetary investment stopped being needed, it hit the mainstream. If the monetization of video content comes directly from viewers, you will go back to dedicated hobbyists and those who are certain that videos will be funded in advance.
What “whale”? Communick costs less than $2.50 per month. It is less than the average donation people send around.
No one can use your content to pay their bills.
The network is not expanding. It is stuck in this 1M-2M monthly active users (if you count all of the Fediverse) and Lemmy/kbin/piefed is hovering around 50-55k/MAU for two years already.
Meanwhile, Reddit’s revenue has grown 62% in 2024 (from $800M in 2023 to to $1.3B last year). Do you really think they care about losing a few thousand users who are all talk but no bite?
There were other platforms offering free video and free hosting as well. There were even p2p alternatives. Remember Joost? It’s not that people didn’t have a choice then and YouTube was better. It’s that could Google leveraged its capital to run Youtube at a loss for as long as needed until there was no competition left.
If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There’s no reason instances can’t use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I’ll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.
The reason they can't show ads is actually pretty simple: if I'm going to have ads in my feed, I'm just going to go back to Reddit for the same experience. Plus, when you consider dbzer0 et al, you're going to come to the conclusion that ads will either be a waste because everyone is using a strong adblock on Firefox or a browser that doesn't care about Google manifest standards, or the people who see them will be incredibly pissed, leave the instance, and either return to Reddit (or an alternative) or move instances and make a lot of noise toward defed'ing from the ad-ridden instance.
For me, I would rather just run an adblock and an anti-adblock-blocker on a different service than go through the frustration of ads on a non-corp platform.
It sounds like you’re thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren’t ads and it’s free?
That's basically correct, yes. I don't see the fediverse platform(s) as being "special" compared to others. Sure, there's political and social momentum that keeps people here, especially due to anticorporate causes. People are here because they got ticked about the Reddit API changes, the ads, and the monetization (Reddit Gold, etc).
If any of those things change, people will see that they're not getting the value they were looking for, and will go back.
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?…
Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can’t afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.
Jerry was in this thread, feel free to convince him rather than me: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46526295/19376934
The thing is that ads pay almost nothing. I’d be very happy to pay 4x what an ad would pay. But the problem is I can’t sent 0.12 to someone when I watch their video because 50% of that is gobbled up by transaction fees. So the only option is to bulk donate which either requires pooling money in a 3rd party or the user donating a bulk amount ($10). Users really dont like giving away $10 when it feels like they get nothing in return. Its all mental but its a very real problem. We will pay for $10 of dogshit food but not $10 for a software product we’ve used for 100s of hours.
Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let’s say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.
I’m already paying my instance and lemmy and kinda loyal to it. I’d alsp like to properly support the software i use before trying to support content creators. One day in the future something like communick would be appealing.
The website says 20% of the profit is donated? Does that mean to charities?
This is separate from the Communick Collective. The collective is just a way for people to support creators directly. My pledge of 20% is for the underlying projects. I am pledging to donate 20% of the profits to Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix Foundation, Funkwhale, GoToSocial, Pixelfed, etc.
For that to happen Communick needs first to turn a profit, though.
You can actually do it using USDC (USD stablecoin) on Ethereum via Base for free:
www.coinbase.com/en-br/…/zero-fee-usdc
Most people think of crypto as a scam, but there are actual useful products being built on Ethereum, and this is a great illustration on where it is a useful tool
I think something like this is going to be a necessity to make a federated video platform work.
What are the transaction fees for USDC?
It has been around USD 0.001~0.008, but they are scaling aggressively so fluctuations aren’t as significant in the future regardless of usage. Details here: www.growthepie.com/fees
Are there options with lower fees? It’s not much but if people pay per view it adds up quickly.
Sorry, I mistakenly read your original comment, transaction fees for USDC are actually free (gasless) via Base on Ethereum, eg: xcancel.com/coinbasewallet/…/1800653787960406031
Costs mentioned on my previous post are for other assets
Neat, might have to try that sometime
i know most of ao3's budget goes to server costs. they get by with volunteer labor and donations, but they mostly host text. i genuinely have no idea what a sustainable model would look like for the fediverse, that doesn't just treat volunteers like disposable rags we toss when they get inevitable burnout.
If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don’t hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don’t do another one until I get the feeling “it’s been a while”.
Wrong Blender, my friend…
I’m talking about 3d software one, and author obviously talks about that one too.
<img alt="" src="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/500/fbd/55cd3129bc8bf5d0730c86f83dd81a13e6-12-bye-felicia.2x.h473.w710.jpg">
I joined my instance’s patreon and donate $1 / month. I know it is not a lot, but so far the admin says he is doing fine on cash flow, should that change I will up my donation if able.
He missed a bit:
Wtf!?
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?…
For the host question, it’s at 34:11
Hey all, Jerry here (from the interview). Happy to answer any questions.
No questions from my side, just a big thank you to mention Mbin, Lemmy, the Fediverse in that interview. It’s probably the first time for me where I watch a video talking about all of this, which is curious with how part of my daily life it is.
I still haven’t watched everything, but one of your quotes sounded resonated with me “We’re only here for a short time. Why should we be a-holes to each other, and not just try to enjoy ourselves?”
Anyway, thank you for everything, take care!
Seems to be some misunderstanding somewhere - Jerry states elsewhere that the costs are covered by donations.
The Mastodon instance I'm on has around 200 people (not all of them active), and received around €800 in donations last year,. Total costs were less than €300.
I think the problem of scaling kicks in when we go after demographics that are less charitable on average.
I’m one of them 🖤
Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.
I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.
Time to start putting ads in.
I support ads.
Oh, calm down. I don’t support the ad level of Facebook, nor the targeted ads, nor the algorithm.
And we, as users, get to decide when too many ads are too many, with our feet.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. People need to be able to exist without having hypercommercialism forced on them everywhere.
I’d rather have a… gags… Subscription.
Yup. As jerry illustrated, this shit isn’t free.
No ads and no donations, they’ll put wishful thinking into the skillet and eat that I guess
Donations, subscriptions, etc are definitely fine. They are not invasive fuckery that inflict themselves on people without consent, nor do they seep into the space in a commercial manner. Ads do not respect consent and they fundamentally force commerce into every place that they touch.
Ads are the root of the rot in the www.
Thank you
Freemium is the way to go. All the essential features are free; you can pay for extra stuff like special emojis, coins(like Reddit silver/gold), or customizable profiles. It could be either a subscription or à la carte.
Simply giving something in return would incentivize people to donate more.
Unlike Reddit, the profit should give back to the communities by adding more features, paying developers to maintain open source projects, giveaways etc.
Misskey is probably the only fediverse software that actually allows admin instance to put ads.
Its flagship instance, misskey.io (which also the second/third (?) biggest instances on fediverse), use freemium scheme for running the server. They have to do this as they have 600K users, with 20K visits per day. Their paid tier upgrades are mostly adding non-essentials stuff, such as drive capacity from 5GB to 30-100GB, profile and avatar decoration (similar to Discord stuff), or more webhook. They runs community ads, from indie games, vtuber promotion, comic release, or local art event. They also have one corporate backer, Skeb.jp, which an art commissioning platform.
Not saying that all instance should do this, but it could be a great learning.
I wouldn’t mind ads like these.
Feddit.dk is not a huge Lemmy instance but I’ve managed to not have to pay anything so far due to generous user donations. It works quite well I think. I think Mastodon is just not quite as effective in gathering people like this to donate, that’s my guess at least.
start a nonprofit that hosts services, gather donations for equipment and other stuff.
what is so difficult here?
omg and do NOT do fireside chats like you are a bunch of enlightened executives. no wonder you need to beg for donations.
Probably that people have jobs, families and lives. Otherwise, why haven’t you already started a nonprofit that does that and donates to them?
Everyone has jobs, families, and lives. What is your point?
We did start a nonprofit this year, electronica.repair. We don’t have a lot of money so we do our due diligence on who we support.
Bro, what fucking project ever solves “the money problem?”
As soon as they get more, they spend more and then it’s back to square one.
Why the fuck should we be paying admins to have control over our data and be able to arbitrarily ban us because they feel like it?
No. Their reward for having users is that they’re in control. Expecting users to then pay them for that control is fucking stupid, but I don’t expect most people to realize it.
You DO realize that not everyone works to attain power over other people, right?
The reason people don’t realize that site owners’ reward for forking over half a salary in hosting costs for some nebulous power to hold other people in their clutching fists and cackle maniacally is because that’s not the motivator here.
I look forward to when you can see that.
Bro, why do you just trust these people when they tell you what their expenses are?
Even if some dumbass is spending $5000/month (which sounds like a load of bullshit if you’re not a moron) to host a fucking lemmy instance, why do you trust that they need to spend that money in order to provide the instance?
Have you noticed how most people buy things they don’t need just because they can? If not, then you need more life experience and it makes sense that you would take admin’s word at face value when they try to sucker you out of money.
As always, when money is involved scumbags and useful idiots come out in droves to justify each other’s existence.
You don’t sound like a very pleasant person to try and have a constructive conversation with.
I’m not sorry. Money brings out the worst in people and they need to be held accountable.
You can always ignore me.
What is “our data” in the case of Lemmy. Specifically.
Fuck you :)
Expected response from useful idiots.
thats because its thier site, instance they get set rules like it. just like reddit bans you force certain things. dont use the site then.
I think one of the biggest obstacles in donations is lack of transparency of what’s going on with the donated money.
Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.
I don’t know if it’s the case as the presented case is not an instance I use. But on general before donating any money is the first thing I look up, and if it’s not clear I just hold my money.
But it is known that donations usually cannot sustain projects, specially “user donations”. For a project to be able to have a steady and sizeable influx of money there need to be whale donators or corporations that donate to it. Relying on user donations will always mean a very little amount of money, and I don’t think that’s going to change as most people don’t have that much disposable income anyway.
I think p2p and true decentralization is the way to go. Don’t get me wrong, fediverse is great, but is not as much decentralized as “less centralized”, truly decentralized model should be p2p. I’ve said several times that the ess centralized" model have a critical failure point and that is that instances are under a lot of pressure, economic, legal and administrative. And we are burning people out and spending all their money, because it’s a model that relies in a few number of people taking that big burden.
I think a model that the burden is smaller and more spread among the user base will be more resilient, at least on this aspect.
Also I take the chance to put up a critique on domain costs, it’s not much, but it’s part of this topic and surely they should be cheaper, as domain cost is 90% speculation and very little labor cost. I don’t know if there’s any project to democratize domain names in the clearnet, but there should be one.
Yep, cant even see how much they got a month or anything like that as far as im aware, there are some piracy sites where the donation number stays at like 200/350 goal forever and it feels like you really never kniw if they’re just making bank and pretending to be in need lol
If you believe he’s spending $5k/mo to run the server, even if you send him $20 and he blows it on blackjack and hookers, it means he has to spend $20 of his bj/h money on the server. So I don’t really see an issue. Does that make sense?
The transparency is needed to know if the server is actually costing $5000
Not that the server cost only $500 and the rest go to cocaine and hookers
I don’t need to keep track of my bill precisely, what I want is budget transparency.
If somebody says it costs $5000/mo, how could they say it in a different way that you would define as “transparent” - do you want receipts?
The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven’t even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the “server” is a hive of users’ computers all sharing the load? I’m a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area, but since BitTorrent works it certainly seems feasible. Comments?
Personally I think self-hosting (Docker containers and stuff) would be a good solution, but for the Fediverse that would mean making a ‘family size’ edition of the server software.
I imagine if it became a common hobby and every geek interested supported ~4-25 friends, it might work.
We have to think about that a lot of people on the fediverse today ( and that number only grow the more people join ) that are normies. They expect it work the same exact way anything else works. And they won’t know or care to know any of the underlying technical things about it.
I talked to Jerry and here is my interview: blenderdumbass.org/…/clarifying_costs_of_running_…
I brainstormed with Chatgpt (i know evil chatgpt) and will hopefully not be banned for presenting the idea.
Alright, let’s push way past the usual and synthesize a radically creative, scalable, and totally on-brand Fediverse funding solution—one that would not only fix the “who pays?” problem, but make the network more resilient, social, and even fun. This is going to blend a bit of tech, social engineering, game theory, transparency, and maybe even a touch of “digital folklore.”
🚀 Fediverse “Co-op Cloud Commons” Model
(A new take on digital mutualism and collective intelligence funding)
The Vision:
A network-wide, federated cooperative where every user, moderator, developer, and instance is a “member-owner.” Funding, decisions, and rewards flow not just by usage, but by a mix of social trust, verified contribution, and creative cooperation—and the entire process is public, auditable, and playful.
1. The Heart: The Commons Ledger
Every instance runs a lightweight, open-source “Commons Ledger” plugin.
The ledger tracks:
Everything is published in real-time on a public dashboard across the network, viewable per instance or across the entire Fediverse.
2. Funding: The Digital Barn-Raising
Monthly or Quarterly, the network holds a “Digital Barn-Raising”:
Rewards/Recognition:
3. The “Quests” Mechanism (Gamification for Good)
Every instance can post “quests”:
Anyone in the network can pick up a quest and earn credit (points, badges, or even a slice of the monthly prize pool if donors opt for it).
4. Liquid Funding Pools with Smart Distribution
All donations (small or large, any payment method) go into a federated, multi-instance fund held transparently.
Funding auto-flows to where need and contribution intersect:
5. “Transparent, Playful Accountability”
Every transaction, quest, and badge is publicly logged (think: GitHub meets Wikipedia’s edit history meets RPG scoreboard).
Annual “Festival of the Commons”:
6. Optional: “Proof-of-Play/Proof-of-Help” Sidechain
If the network ever wants to dabble in lightweight tokens (not as a currency, but for tracking contributions), use an open, federated, non-speculative “Proof-of-Play” or “Proof-of-Help” chain:
lol, wow
Doesn’t sound too insane except for the social contributions tracking and realtime dashboard. Maaaaybe all of the social data could somehow magically not end up as a ton of traffic just for metadata, but a realtime dashboard would exponentially exacerbate how much data would have to flow around.
It would be very unwise to make the gamification of financial support end up being a significant % of the overall traffic required to run a service, though I guess as long as it stays a low %, it could be worth it.
Post receipts or something official to back up your claims.
Saying it costs $5000/month to host infosec.exchange radiates bullshit like a nuclear explosion. You must be doing something very wrong, or lying about the requirements.
Don’t trust people when they want to take money from you. Money brings out the worst in people.