Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.
What’s the general consensus as far as fear for future profiteering? Right now these platforms are great because the are run by people who genuinely care. Do you think there is any risk of this growing so much that federated content reaches the front page of search engines, followed by advertisers wanting space here? Or what about risks like reddit gold which was initially just a fun add on, which then became a “temporary” paid feature, which ended as a full scale scam.
Anyway, I love what we have for now, I just want to know what everyone else is speculating for the future.
Meta, a well-known for-profig company are gearing up to join the Fediverse, reaction is mixed, some server operators seem keen on welcoming them, some cautiously optomistic while others want nothing to do with Meta at all.
In terms of paid features, might be a thing down the line but it will very from server to server. Cool extra statuses (e.g. Wow I’m a gold tier superstar supporter on this instance) likely won’t appear on other instances unless they decide to include something in the federation protocol that would display it.
The thing with the Fediverse is that things like this aren’t really possible. The creators of Lemmy are pretty anti-capitalist, so the source-code won’t ever support ads.
An instance admin could try to modify it to incude Ad Sense, but the users would just reject that instance and move to a free one.
I personally wouldn’t mind premium features, like animated emotes and stuff for people that pay for monthly subscriptions, but again, things like that don’t work in the fediverse because they won’t be supported on every instance.
Maybe there will be some creative solutions that get made, but it’s highly unlikely due to how things are setup.
I think this may be the wrong question. I am the administrator of a reverse engineered PS3 video game server, so it’s illegal for me to make a profit or any kind of revenue or donations from that platform. However, I maintain it for thousands of users simply because I and others enjoy it and want it to exist. That’s not a sustainable model for a business or for running something as gigantic as reddit, but it’s what I want and enjoy, and for right now it’s affordable, and I’m happy with that.
People like you make the internet a better place :)
Not counting the cost of your time, how much money do you spend on this server?
It costs me roughly $15-25 a month to host our game server, but I have other costs like our website that I’m dealing with as well, so taking all those other things into account and I’m probably spending something like $30 a month for now. I’m actively working to migrate my Wix site to WordPress to save money. Now, if we had thousands of concurrent users instead of like 30-40 concurrent users on a typical day, or if we needed significantly more storage, my costs would probably go up a lot. The growing storage and user count are both important things I’m thinking about carefully, because I imagine there might come a time I need to reevaluate our strategy
Thanks!
All things considered, spending $30 a month on a hobby is pretty good.
Like many said, it’s not about profitability but sustainability. I signed up to donate $2 per month to help run the servers for lemmy.world. I’m very happy with this instance (and the fediverse in general) and want to contribute. There are plenty of other people willing to do the same. Together, we will make something much bigger and better than reddit over time.
I love their $8/month tier description: “The $8 verified user tier. You’ll be allowed to place a blue checkmark behind your name. You’ll have to do that yourself though. And you could also do that without donating ;-).”
Why does everything have to be for profit?
This is the real question we have to ask ourselves. We really need to move away from looking at the internet as just a resource to extract money from, and instead see it through a social lense again. Look what late stage capitalism has done to our digital, social gathering places. Almost everything has become a product that needs to be profitable, to compete for attention and to extract as much data from users as possible and discourse has suffered greatly from it. I mean billions are donated to content creators simply because people want to contribute. Why stop there? We can shape the internet the way we want if we simply contribute and put our heads together. We don’t have to make a profit. That’s our strength.
The funny thing is that not all human endeavours actually need to be profitable for them to exist. It’s perfectly fine and normal for people to be generous and provide services for the community for nothing in return and for some of those in the community to help out too.
It don’t need to be profitable, just sustainable and us humans are greedy.
deleted by creator
I’m going to split a hair here: any endeavour needs to be financially sustainable for it to continue existing. So yes, in terms of future growth of federated platforms, i am mildly concenrned that there may not be enough people willing to put in the work and expense of maintaining an instance just so free. If you imagine a future where the fediverse has Twitter or Instagram levels of users, it’s pretty likely that instance owners will want to monetize as much as possible, and then what happens?
it’s pretty likely that instance owners will want to monetize as much as possible, and then what happens?
why is that “pretty likely”? People have been running services 24/7 for years, sometimes out of pocket, sometimes with basic community support. It does not have to be profitable, as you said, it has to be sustainable, which is vastly different.
it’s pretty likely that instance owners will want to monetize as much as possible
I disagree. It’s find to have hobbies that don’t make money. Running a lemmy instance can be that.
Running any decently sized instance quickly turns from a hobby to at least a part-time job. A thing that you can’t just quit whenever is not a hobby and we should be mindful of that.
I’m pretty sure Lemmy has been designed specifically so it can’t me monetized. If you try to place ads people can just switch to another instance. If you try to split off from the fediverse I’m pretty sure there’s enough data on other instances in order to clone your server along with its content (and mind that you don’t own the copyright for posts made by users).
I mean, Wikipedia does it and they’re the 7th most visited website on the internet. 🤷
And they have more money from donations that what they actually need.
Donations, or with a small enough instance a server admin might just pay out of his or her own pocket. Maybe if Lemmy were ever to get much bigger there might be paid or ad-supported instances.
I think a big part of the point of federation is that the costs of hosting servers can be distributed so no one has to spend millions to keep their server running. That way there is less of a need to monetise an instance (and less of an incentive, as if you start doing anti-user stuff, people can just move to a different instance).
Reddit the company has never been profitable either, it ran on VC investments for years. But more accurately, the real Reddit, the communities, never needed to be profitable because it was run out of passion for the subject matter of the subreddit. The former isn’t a problem for the fediverse because there isn’t an entity overseeing everything, the latter sorts itself out naturally as more motivated individuals join this community.
They aren’t. Do they need to be, though? Maybe once the scale gets gargantuan, but even then - is it strictly necessary to be profitable? As long as donations cover costs, I assume most instance administrators want what the rest of us want - a good platform for discussion and content aggregation.
That’s a good point. If the organization that hosts the instance is non-profit, they merely need cover their costs.
(Apologies, didn’t want to shitpost on a top level comment)
That’s the neat part, they~~'re not~~ don’t need to be
FTFY.
I agree with this sentiment, there are a lot of admins who are very virtuous and and will pay money out of pocket and dedicate time to this cause which is appreciated. The big thing in the beginning is the actual time it takes to run an instance, when servers get big they are going to need employees, no one can be on call 24/7 for something that costs them money (with the exception of a child).
Once Lemmy has around a million active users funding the actual server costs will become a problem but I’m sure people will figure out how to make money off of it well before then, wether it be ads, data selling, alternative services, subscription models or something else.
Whats important right now is that as a community we do what we can to keep this place alive, and to help out the hard working admins.
I am a proud monthly donor. My couple of bucks I send Ruud and the admin team every month helps make this corner of the internet a reality.
So, that’s how it’s funded.
If you’re able, please consider sending in a donation. You can do so at Open Collective or Patreon.
I didn’t know you could support lemmy via patreon. Thanks for the info! I’m going to start donating right now!
Help out a sprout?
Both those links go to Mastodon not Lemmy. Am I right in assuming that your account Is on an instance that hosts both? Probably federating with M before feasting with L next?
Good question. The dude who hosts lemmy.world started by hosting mastodon.world. So all of his patreon/crowdfunding is under mastodon.world, but it’s all going to the same pool of server costs that pay for lemmy as well. He’s pretty cool, actually, posts transparency reports on a regular basis.
You’ll also notice that donations are going down every month. That’s to be expected, number of active users has also gone down, until end of may, when it stabilized. We expext donations to stabilize as well, and if they won’t we’ll post a message asking for people to donate if they can/want
If only they knew…
The word you’re looking for is sustainable, not profitable
i contribute to patreons of lemmy.world and the developers of lemmy. hopefully there’s makes enough of us to make this financially viable
Same :)
Lemmy has so far made $0 total profit. So that makes them substantially more profitable than Reddit.
This has come up multiple times in recent weeks, naturally, but it’s interesting that it’s always framed as being about profitability. As if simply being affordable or sustainable isn’t enough.
Communities being a source of free value for the server admin is always baked into the discussion.
Centralized, corporate social media has done… bad things for how we see and interact with the world.
it’s crazy how much capitalism shapes our world view
