If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.
I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.
I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?
Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.
Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.
28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.
I don’t know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.
Even if you spend all of that on salaries and everybody earns the same, 4k€/month for a software dev job for example seems low in central Europe. That’s not even 50k a year. Some companies offer between 60 and 80k for entry level positions. You need closer to twice that much to be remotely sustainable with 7.
I got paid much more in the private sector, and all my labor was entirely pointless, and contributed absolutely nothing to the betterment of society.
I realized I’d much rather be doing important work, regardless of how much less the pay was. I read a book, called “the magic of thinking big”, and one of its points was to ask the question: “What are the biggest problems in the world today? And what are you doing to solve them?”
We have one life to live, and my communist politics demand that I spend my most valuable resource, my labor time, on things that can result in the greatest benefit to humanity.
I wasn’t worried about nutomic and you. We all appreciate what you guys are doing for us ex Redditors seeking a new platform, even more so that you are willing to sacrifice so much personal comfort just to bring joy and entertainment–two luxury goods–to all of us. Most people seeking a job are not in it for ideals though, so it’s not completely unreasonable to think that you might need to compete for your work force by offering salaries comparable to what’s common in your market.
I think he has a good point. I’m also more and more questioning my job, to the point that I reduced my my workload by 2.5x, to be able to focus on open source, although I’m now just earning enough to come around. But I’m learning much more, my skill has definitely increased in the last years in which I have focused on using the missing work time for developing open source. I’m having more fun with it: writing in the favorite language, actually relevant stuff, and if your open source contribution has actually a lot of feedback, and is (thankfully) used by a lot of people it certainly feels better than having finished a project in a corporate job. I think the QoL has certainly increased for me.
And I think these kind of people might be attracted to developing something like lemmy, and actually contributing something to society, the anarchistic thought of not being bound to these big centralized social media corporates (that produced quite a lot of bad press themselves the last few years…), and actually serve the community.
I guess France is not part of central Europe because 80k(even employer cost) for entry level position I never heard about it
Even 4k isn’t that easy to get at the beginning
And 4k (employer cost) is in the end like 2100e after all taxes
I don’t know about France. I live in one of your neighbouring countries and as a graduate or even undergrad software dev you won’t have a hard time finding a job that pays 60k+. 80k+ is rare but definitely also exists.
Edit: And yea all of these are pre tax obviously.
I live in Italy and here a 50k€ job is considered on the very high end for a senior developer. It means around 2500€/month (for 14 months) net and keep in mind that the medium job in Italy is just a bit less than 34k
oh okay, places i thought about it’s like 700e for a 3 rooms flat. And of course in France you have healthcare and stuff, but most likely the same in most of Europe
With the cost of living in country in east i think they could find skilled passionated devs, and pay them a fair price, which french companies already do (without the fair price)
The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance…) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.
I just hope you understand you won’t be the one determining what is “more than enough” - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it’s going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.
We wouldn’t be working on lemmy if our goal was to be rich. We just want enough to survive and pay rent, so we can make this project better.
Once we do get to the point of us two devs being fully-funded by recurring donations on our liberapay, opencollective, patreon, etc (we’re not even close yet), then we’ll add more devs to our little worker co-op, and scale up as necessary.
Even if you do not want to call your project a business, “we want enough to survive and pay rent” is too low of a bar to clear and not something attractive for prospective members of your collective.
These are donations so there are no taxes. It might not be enough to get rich, but it’s definitely enough to live. And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.
Dessalines and I worked full time on Lemmy for the past three years and received around 2000€ per month. I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.
And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.
How is that any different from employers that offer unpaid internships or a clients that ask newbie photographers to “work for the portfolio”?
No one is talking about “a lot of money” here. Whether you want it or not, you are expecting to get people to work for you (and you can call it a “co-op” all you want, whoever decides who-gets-how-much is the actual boss) for less than what they can get in the job market.
I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.
Yeah, and this is a sacrifice that you chose to make. Which is totally fine. I also took some time to work on my own open source project long after the grant money was gone. I just don’t get how you think it is reasonable to ask others to do the same.
I think I’m misunderstanding, €28k for 7 full time workers is more than enough?
It’s per month, not per year, so per year they’re receiving €336K, which seems more than enough to me unless people are demanding 6 figure salaries which are not really necessary.
Hmm ok, I’m not that aware of how much tax and what general cost of living is in the countries the 7 people are living in, so I guess €4000 (before tax)/month could be enough…
It depends entirely where people live, even inside countries can differ drastically - as an example, I currently live on around £23,000 a year before tax (about €29,000) while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount. This is in the north of England, but if you were to go further south, you would need a bit more most likely.
The discourse on the internet is that you seemingly need some crazy amount of money, but the average wages of places are nowhere near the figures people give, and most people are living alright, even if it’s not particularly extravagant.
This isn’t to say people should be living on scraps or anything, we’re all underpaid at the end of the day, but the usual “6 figures is barely getting by” you see on many (US-centric) places on the internet is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.
while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount.
Right, so basically this means that Lemmy (the company) will only be able to hire employees if they are single, young and in areas with low cost of living. Do you see the problem here?
we’re all underpaid at the end of the day.
Sorry, it seems you are projecting here. Even if that were true, going with this “we are all underpaid, so others should accept that as a fact of life” doesn’t really ring like a compelling point to attract people to work on Lemmy.
the usual “6 figures is barely getting by” (…) is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.
The point is not whether people could (or should) live on a salary of X or Y. The point no one should be pricing their work in terms of what they “need to get by” and instead they should be pricing themselves in terms of “how much value does my work produce”. When you leave to employers to determine how much you “need”, you get exploited.
Yeah hence why I said idk the cost of living and €4k might be enough. I also live in the north of England, on (28k but just went up to) 34k before tax but since I live in the city center of a big city, it’s not a huge amount… and I have a housemate
Edit and we’re not talking close to 6 figs here, another user pointed out that €4k/month before tax is not even €50k a year so if they’re living in a city that costs more than the relatively-lower cost north of England, they’re not in good shape.
Do you guys anticipate a massive increase in Lemmy traffic during the blackout, and are you preparing? It would be awesome to see Lemmy have the ability to seize the moment and capitalize here.
Yes its inevitable. join-lemmy.org is updated hourly so it will only show instances which are actually available. lemmy.ml will most likely go down at times.
I think unless you invest in servers this week it will look like Lemmy.ml crashing and redditors not considering it a viable option. The proprietary alternatives will do well.
Join-lemmy.org will stay up and point new users to working instances.
Just arrived on Lemmy through join-lemmy.org, and I could quickly find a server.
I first saw a post about lemmy.ml being out of capacity which lead me to join-lemmy.org
I guess most of refugee will do the same.
Still have to learn a lot, I still don’t know what are instance hosting, i guess profiles and subtopics, therefore if i interact on a sub hosted on lemmy.ml i guess I would also use it.
Well, going to study this
Thanks for this platform, even though reddit death was a liltle hope for me to waste less time on my phone !
I’m not a programmer, but do you have something called an API? You could probably charge fees for that.
Great idea! Surely you could just charge, oh I don’t know, $20 million a year for it? That would easily cover operating costs and so much more!
We hereby charge all users of lemmy seventy-billion dollars per GET request.
charge 10 doge per upvote
We think that’s a fair price! You just need to optimize your shit, garbage, utterly useless piece of crap app to not SUCK so much!
When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
If you’d like to help us out, here’s our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I’m sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we’re working on something worthwhile.
You may want to be very open about how much has been donated and the costs. Else you are asking for a lot of unnecessary controversy. I can understand your motivation to work on such a project, given your openly displayed ideals, and community work ought to pay, too. But once you find the time for it, it might be beneficial to make some write-up on these philosophical points. There is a lot of combative folk around on the look-out for attack surface. I myself am old enough to understand that people develop and eventually are mature enough to see through ideology … eventually.
For sure. I think all three of those ones we list are transparent, and really the main cost is just our labor time. Server / infrastructure / devops costs are minimal.
I posted about one tap collapse/expand on comment threads about a week ago for jerboa. Latest update has it. Love the speed of development from you guys, keep it up!
Just downloaded Jerboa last night so I have something to browse when I delete the reddit app during the black out. The collapse/expand tool is honestly something that would have made me avoid the app, so thank you for your service lmao.
Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?
This is our 3rd year of grants from NLNet, and they’re been more than generous with helping Lemmy get off the ground. I don’t think we’ll re-up for another year, as most of the bigger issues are done, and their resources should be spent getting other important but lesser-known projects off the ground.
Your heart is in the right place, man <3
I’m proud to be contributing to development via Liberapay for three years running now o7
o7
Thanks for all that you do. Signed up for recurring donations!
Liberapay is much preferred
Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that’s separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it’s preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.
We did have a plan to rework that entire onboarding site this month, but then this whole thing happened. I’ll make sure that’s in there.
Just sent $44… My fav #.
The good news is we’ve seen this before with Mastodon.
Not only did we see an influx of monthly donations, we saw admins expand the needs of their servers in real-time with the help of the community.
After having witnessed that in the midst of the bird migration, I have no concerns with how Lemmy will handle the inevitable influx when it comes to uptime and finances.
I immediately started contributing to Fosstodon’s Patreon and I will be happy to do the same here!
I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don’t think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don’t end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.
Recurring donations are sustainable IMO. Most open source projects have less than a handful of devs, and get less donations than the average youtuber with a patreon. Yet their work touches / reaches so many more people.
And not just devs, but mods especially should get paid. The existing centralized social media platforms are essentially built on top of mods unpaid labor.
@dessalines @honk I’m all about donating to the indy software developer. As a thank you for the quality product, I gave 40 bucks to the developer of NGINX Proxy Manager. It’s truly a project above commercial quality.
But are users going to donate to both the instance(s) they’re using, and the Lemmy devs?
Will a regular ordinary non-technical user even know to do this?
Or would it be the responsibility of the instance admins to forward part of their donations to the Lemmy project?
Think the bigger instances hosts will need ads if there’s a large enough audience but that’s OK to an extent when you weigh it up against a free API
As long as it breakeven on costs, doesnt need to make profits
There are Mastodon instances with hundreds of thousands of active users, and none of them are ad supported. Donations generally are capable of paying the operating expenses, as long as the staff is halfway decent at creating a space that people appreciate.
I’m happy to donate and will do, just like buying an app really if once per year.
Ads would only be useful when hitting the actual instance site in a browser, many (or most) users will use some sort of app I imagine.
The real donation is the infrastructure maintained by the many server admins.
Tip: you need a blank line between the quoted text and the follower for it to separate.
Try seeing this message’s source!
People do seem to donate sufficiently on the Fediverse. Of course the vast majority doesn’t, but if one person donates 10€/month, that pays for hundreds if not thousands of users.
The entire cost structure is also different when you get a lot of volunteer labour and don’t have to repay venture capital funders 3000% of their initial investment or so.
What happens to communities on instances that goes down? That’s where I fear there will be real issues. Unless there’s a way for one instance to properly adopt a community in another instance first.
IMHO, the problem is more subtle: nothing on the internet will stay forever, if you find a piece of information you like to save forever, you should save it locally AND with something like internet archive. A community can transfer to the same community in another server with proper forewarning. Finally, mastodon introduced the ability to move your account to another istance manteining your followers for quite a while now, maybe lemmy can find a way to introduce something like that too
No different than when voat went down or when Reddit goes down eventually. The goal is though that by having no big central point of failure it’s not as big of a deal. Not like you’d have to get used to a whole new kind of thing, just move to another instance.
That’s definitely my main concern I have with this federated infrastructure. It’s basically the same as IMAP email: if the server goes down, your account and everything it’s associated with goes down with it.
It’s a neat idea and has some benefits, but there really needs to be some sort of backup system in place. Maybe something like mirror instances, where anyone could spin up an instance with the sole purpose of mirroring another instance in case it goes down.
I was thinking this the other day. Without having read the spec, it seems like mirroring should be fairly straightforward - but then once an instance has gone down, how do the users find which mirror is promoted to the new main? Or should the mirrors be treated like backups, and just used to populate a new community on whatever instance is chosen (and then mirror from the new source)?
I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on !games@lemmy.ml it can merge with !games@behaw.meh and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
That sounds really smart. Let communities decide which instances they federate with. The mod team owns the community, not the instance admins.
Definitely need some kind of replication/mirroring to occur between instances for DR, I was looking at how other decentralized systems for inspiration. Something like RAID where it’s tolerant of one or two drive failures could be translated to Lemmy. When you set up a new instance it allows you to opt-in to a peer network where you host backup content from several other instances and your instance is backed up to several other (non-overlapping) instances.
Yep. This has been an issue for Mastodon.
I’m setting up my own instance now to contribute, and I think a lot of people might be willing to do so or similar. I pay for Internet search feature now at Kagi, and similarly I’m willing to pay for my social media (Reddit or Lemmy are the closest things to social media I use) to keep it stable and with less ads and data collection. I hope there are enough people like me that would rather pay a little than have all their data mined in nefarious ways.
If you think the point of anything in the fediverse if for profit, you’ve missed the point. It’s federated, if it gets too many users to support itself, it will collapse into several smaller chunks.
The whole premise is built on the same concepts as the early web, it’s interconnected, it’s self-managing, and it will scale only until it can’t and then it will peacefully split.
You should orobably read what OP wrote instead of just the title
Well, it’s working right now, isn’t it? If the load increases n times and donations also increase n times, it will keep working just fine.
The majority of the current users are enthusiasts. They usually are significantly more willing to donate compared to average.
The big migration hasn’t happened yet. There’s going to be a big spike in new users during the blackout, and then again when Apollo shuts down.
Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There’s plenty of ways to make money without VC.
Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don’t know…
Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that
Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/
They do get funding from NLNet
Yes! :)
I’ve always dreamed of, and now with even more Fediverse usage it might be easier to push, to have local municipal governments fund simple sites in the states as part of a pretty standard practice of creating community spaces, and so that local governments can have a site to host accounts without the chance of being censored by big tech in the future.
I empathize with this view - but I doubt this will ever happen. Ignoring the user training bits, and the legal bits (who is a mod, how do they do stuff), you need to have someone dedicated to fighting this though the IT/Security gauntlet. Now keep in mind im private sector (so it’s slightly different) - but we in IT generally have dimm views of hosting WebApps.
All that said. Once one local gov does it the potential for it to spread radically increases.
I still see it no problem. Does have a negative net in votes though
It has been downvoted to the bottom. Divisive behaviour is discouraged. I love it. :-)
kbin might still be good, though.
Did mastodon die, without funding?
Many instance have gone down due to costs being too high
There are more Mastodon instances now than ever before. Even though the active user count has been a pretty flat line for a few months now the number of new servers continues to increase week to week.
Is there a link where I can see the mastodon numbers? New to fediverse and interested in knowing whats happening with mastodon.
https://fediverse.observer/stats and @fediverse@mastodont.cat If you’re interested in hearing more about Fediverse stuff then @atomicpoet@calckey.social and @rysiek@mstdn.social write political stuff about it fairly often.
A big issue there has also been single-user admin/mod teams. Running a site of several thousand active users is not something just one or two people can do, especially when you also have to screen remote content that’s streaming in.
You can always shut down user registrations if the server’s reaching the point of financial sustainability.
It’s this. I love the idea of running an instance and have considered it many times. But modding the thing is no joke. It’s real work that needs to be taken seriously.
This is something that needs to happen more - The whole point of the fediverse is that you don’t need any high population instances. Look at the situation with lemmy.ml - they’re hitting major infra issues as a result of their high user count, but they’re still accepting new users (as far as I can tell). Just close the doors and post a list of reccomended other instances with similar focuses.
You can still access all the same content, regardless of your instance, or even platform
Lemmy.ml is also a stresstesting site if i understand correctly.
Oh, I’m wrong. I appear to be sort of banned but with no notification or warning. I can see the content here when no authenticated. When I authenticate, I see no comments on this post. Cute. And lousy moderation.
I love it when people get banned but somehow they’re still commenting on the same post which got them banned with absolutely no problems. Sounds like a very real ban.
Yet our messages were removed from the thread.
Seems to make my point for me. They’re hiding who they are.
Your messages are still visible.
Jesus this got massdownvoted by Lemmy tankies! xD Luckily there isn’t the same impact on Kbin when viewing the OG comment.
Down voted because if the code is good, then you can fork it if the maintainers really get out of hand. I’m very opposed to the CCP personally.
From the information in the OG reply it seems pretty out of hand to me though, which makes the switch to Kbin that much easier as it’s just plain better, and have full functionality to interact with microblogs. If Lemmy was the only one it would makes sense to fork it if needed, but now we have like 3 reddit-like fediverse platforms that we can choose between.
What’s the 3rd platform?
It is called lotide. You can read about it here https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/ , I guess there is also a 4th one called prismo, but the developer put down their project for various reasons, so i don’t count it in.
And Friendica has full groups support, AFAIK, so it functions like an inverse kbin, focusing the microblogging but giving full group access.
We should encourage more, frankly. Misskey has exploded in forks, and it’s meant good things.
So long as they’re interoperable, the diversity in experiences is good for all of us.
True!
