Dame

Fediverse sustainability

https://lemmy.ml/post/6632749

Fediverse sustainability - Lemmy

I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.

Oct 17, 2023 at 9:28pmWeb
Show threadBlazeOct 17, 2023
I guess most instances are going to ask members a small yearly contribution, like 10$ per year or something. That could make the servers more sustainable
Show threadmacnielOct 17, 2023
I can only say that when the provider of my instance ask for donations, I will donate. Because they do a bloody good service on all sides and that should be honoured. I guess that this is applicable to all instances?
Show threadDame Oct 17, 2023
Donations isn’t the way to go because most people don’t. I’ve seen about three polls that have had thousands of responses and the majority of people fell in the never donated category and many fell in the never donated and will not donate category. Something feels wrong about leaving people’s hard work to donations, obviously it should be a part of the equation.
Show threadLinkOpensChest.wavOct 17, 2023

I donate, and I’ll donate again, and as far as I know it is covering costs. I believe the person who runs this instance (Jonah) does so because he wants to, and if he should ever decide to close it, then I think he should, if it stops bringing him joy and fulfillment.

I feel like you are devaluing the fediverse by reducing it to monetary value. Simply put: If we are talking about bringing in corporate sponsors and ads, then speaking for myself, not only would I no longer donate, but I would no longer feel connected in any way to this platform.

There are plenty of other forums that aren’t federated but are sustained by people because they want to, not because of monetary gain.

Just look how monetization has leeched the soul out of things like podcasts and YouTube (I’d say reddit, but reddit was never good to begin with). Do you really want that here? I know I don’t. I’d rather see it end than become another site like that.

Show threadDame Oct 17, 2023
Where did I say corporate sponsors and ads? Please state where I said that. It’s obnoxious how often people state something incorrectly particularly when the original post wasn’t ambiguous. I feel that YOU and others are devaluing the Fediverse by poo pooing over people’s hard work and time. A thank you simply isn’t enough. If im wrong for valuing people that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.
Show threadLinkOpensChest.wavOct 17, 2023

You seem to be a victim of the disease called capitalistus brainrottus. I already said I donate, but I wouldn’t even consider that to be as much a show of gratitude as someone who doesn’t donate as much but contributes more content.

I was a Skyrim mod author and you pearl clutchers were always preaching doom and gloom there too, but fortunately there you failed while those who contributed freely and openly thrived. You who can’t conceive of value beyond mere currency, where everything you do is transactional. I feel sorry for you.

Show threadmacnielOct 17, 2023

Imaging doing something because you like doing it. Unthinkable!

So thank you for your contributions to Skyrim then and to the fediverse now!

Show threadharmoneaOct 17, 2023

You said you want good faith discussions, but you preemptively dismissed one of the biggest answers because you don't think it's a good solution. Then you have people here disagreeing with you, explaining why, and pointing to examples of it being done successfully, and you continue to completely dismiss a donation as nothing more than a "thank you" - how is this in any way a good faith discussion if any opposing viewpoint is immediately met with this kind of response?

I do understand your frustration in those cases in which donations fail, but it seems like you're not willing to meet us halfway and acknowledge that sometimes, donations succeed, and not by accident or luck. There's data there - test cases we could be picking apart and seeing what critical mass needs to be reached before an instance can reliably secure donations and what we can do for admins until their instances reach that threshold. But you're just dismissing it as nonviable even though it clearly works for a lot of places.

That is not good faith.

Show threadDame Oct 22, 2023
It’s not good faith to point to a donations working and saying that’s why it should remain that way. It’s not good faith when people are disagreeing with me yet participate in capitalism daily. I’m not talking about the important needs, we can’t escape that. I’m talking about leisure: vacations, video games, etc People here do those optional activities yet it’s some sort of sin to say let’s explore options to keep this place running and compensate the people that makes this all work
Show threadrglullisOct 18, 2023

What is your definition of “covering costs”? If the person running the instance goes to say "I actually enjoy this so much that I want to make my full-time job. My salary as whatever is $150k/year, so to this full-time I need to make at least that much. "

Do you think that the admin is being fair? Are you going to continue donating? Is the amount of your donation contingent on how much they are getting in total?

Show threadramOct 17, 2023
You say you want good faith discussion, but you’ve completely nixed the main point we have today, with no room for argument. You may not know it, but you are coming at this in bad faith.
Show threadDame Oct 22, 2023
How?
Show threadramOct 22, 2023
Donations are a sustainable model for development. Less sustainable than government taxation, but more sustainable than subscriptions and fees by a mile.
Show threadKillerTofuOct 17, 2023

Servers aren’t free though. So you’re going to get people who do it as a passion project and hope they have the tools to moderate their own instance or a small team of volunteers to help which is dependent on unpaid labor.

There needs to be money behind any stability.

Show threadDame Oct 17, 2023
Exactly! Judging by the downvotes already people don’t agree. It’s bothersome to let people’s hard work on multiple levels to go undervalued. Servers absolutely aren’t free. Moderation is a heck of a job.
Show threadLauchsOct 17, 2023

I’ve wondered a lot about this.

Ultimately, I think we’re going to need to compensate the devs, mods and contributors if we want this to succeed long term.

How to do that with a group that is (understandably) allergic to ads is another question.

Show threadDame Oct 17, 2023
Oh, it is absolutely understandable when it comes to the ads part. But there are other ways. Plus, there are ethical ads and Open Source ad companies, maybe that’s something to look into. I just know we need to explore ethical options and not just rely on donations.
Show threadLauchsOct 17, 2023

Yup. I wonder how much transparency and a self sustaining model (vs maximize profits) could bring down costs to even make it a subscribe free but with ethical ads or something.

It’s tough. We want to walk the line between accessible for everyone vs thing that crashes and relies pretty heavily on a handful of posters and an even smaller number of mods.

Show threadShadowOct 17, 2023
Wikipedia does it just fine.
Show threadfuboOct 17, 2023

The “financial aspect” is much smaller than you seem to think.

It is not that expensive to run a server, and there are lots of people willing to contribute. You can look at the previously posted expenses and donations information from the lemmy.world admins.

You might be telling yourself these things are difficult and expensive because you don’t know, and precaution leads you to overestimate the actual costs and difficulty. That is fine when you’re making choices for yourself, but it reliably produces incorrect results if you try to apply it to the world at large. In reality, there are lots of people out here who know how to run Internet services; and some of them have set this one up pretty well.

Show threadDame Oct 17, 2023
I don’t know yet there have been several instances that shut down do to finances. Tell me how does something shut down due to finances if it’s not costly for the person? The Fediverse is also much larger than Lemmy.
Show threadfuboOct 17, 2023

Look at the actual numbers.

In August, total expenses = €1205, total donations = €2649

People want this thing to work and are willing to donate to make it happen. And again, it’s not as expensive to run as you seem to think.

August 2023 update

A good day to all! It's time for the monthly update about the .world. Here's what happened last month. Mastodon.world It's all nice and...

Mastodon.world Blog
Show threadDame Oct 17, 2023
This is ONE instance. Search or make a post and ask how many instances have shut down due to finances. Outside of finances it’s burnout due to moderation.
Show threadfuboOct 17, 2023

Could you explain in detail how you, personally, are helping?

Or, more generally, on what basis do you think you know better?

Show threadShadowOct 17, 2023

“shut down due to finances” really means “it was too much work to organize this, collection donations and run a production website” or “my site was too niche to attract users and i didn’t want to put the effort in”.

There’s enough instances with public finances, to show that it’s a solvable problem.

Show threadrglullisOct 18, 2023

Do the expenses include the cost of labor from admins and moderators?

When there is a big issue hitting the fediverse (like an bunch of script kiddies attacking servers and pushing CSAM), are we going to just wait for the admins to clock out of the regular-jobs-that-pay-the-bills and then take a look at it?

Lemmy.world is the largest instance and is getting less than 25 cents per user in donations. Meanwhile, Facebook has shown that the true price of what a privacy-respecting social media site is around 10€/month. Do you really think that 25 cents per user is enough to keep this minimally professional?

Meta charges EU users for ad-free Instagram and Facebook

The new subscription tiers, which roll out in November, are an attempt to comply with the EU's crackdown on personalized advertising.

Insider
Show threadShadowOct 17, 2023
For context lemmy.ca runs on $125/cdn month and could be downsized still, we’ve overspecced for the load we get today.
Show threadFootnote2669Oct 17, 2023
Totally out of a blue idea. Probably stupid but… what if there was a system which shows the community in real time how much money is needed/dev,mod,hoster time is worth, and people “top up the jar”. No mystery of „they’re probably already been donated enough”. We’d see how much is needed. Probably would need to have a bit of trust to the receivers not to abuse it but… idk just random thought lol
Show threadDame Oct 17, 2023
I know that those that use Open Collective it does something like this, but you have to be approved
Show threadoriginaluciferOct 17, 2023

As a numbers junkie and server admin, I would like to see this start as part of the servers public/private metrics... the server admins can update a few values regularly (cost/time/usage) which can be mashed with active user stats to give a final cost/user that could be publicly available.

then you bolt on the donation pieces and youve got community funding with transparency.

yeah, youre going to need to trust a human being or 3 along the way, but .. yeah.

Show threadlinkOct 17, 2023
As a small instance owner, I can say its not sustainable. I’m paying approximately $40 monthly from my pocket but with it, I have a non-defederated, long-term instance. So I don’t mind much, just enjoying Lemmy.
Show threadisoOct 17, 2023
As a small instance owner, I can say its not sustainable. I’m paying approximately $40 monthly from my pocket but with it, I have a non-defederated, long-term instance. So I don’t mind much, just enjoying Lemmy.
Show threadmaegul (he/they)Oct 17, 2023

Though I was technically naive about how the fediverse could work, I was generally curious … but when I found out it’s distributed data synchronisation it was one of those moments in tech when you realise something isn’t that fancy and is done essentially the way most people would do it if they had to design it.

My presumption was that there was some robust but efficient network of servers that aided cache and data retrieval.

As you say, data synch seems to put a decent load in all servers which grows as the network does. Seems like a problem that’s been kicked down the road. As you say.

Show threadramOct 17, 2023

As a result, as the number of instances increases, the load on the network also increases. Ironically I think it should be the other way around

It’d be neat if there was some form of peer-to-peer activity-push to resolve this; basically offload your pushes to other instances, and in return they can offer some of theirs to yours. I think that gets quite difficult though, especially as large lists of federated/whitelisted/defederated instances come into play.

Show threadOpenStarsOct 17, 2023
Hehe, I wonder if some technology like Tor could help here, distributing the work across many servers instead of each one having to do all the work entirely by itself? One day, if someone wants to build it, that may come, but it will not be me, nor today it seems:-P.
Show threadwillyaOct 17, 2023
The moderation could be the biggest part of wanting to just quit. Humans are pretty shitty creatures especially when anonymity is involved. This definitely has nothing to do with finances. It’s not expensive at all. If someone shut theirs down due to finances then their life was probably crumbling and that can happen to anyone. What is your question?
Show threaddonutsOct 17, 2023

I've never run a server, so I can't really say much about how sustainable it is to do it right now, but ultimately I don't see why it should be able less sustainable than running any other popular website.

Granted, I think you're totally right that there's a generally unsustainable attitude that's pervasive on the fediverse and the open source community in general, which amounts to a sentiment that "someone else will pay for all this". It's wrong, it's naive, it's unhelpful, and it's basically an express lane towards the tragedy of the commons. I've worked for non-profits and I've seen first hand how difficult it can be to turn users into supporters, but the sad truth is that non-profits are just like businesses in the sense that if costs are higher than revenue they will not survive very long, and this is true for community run fediverse services too.

I do think that people who like the fediverse should want it to become financially sustainable, at the very least.

I'm open to the idea of limited, non-invasive ads for example. (Plus I think that if the fediverse ever becomes massively popular we're going to see thinly veiled ads anyway, in the form of "influencers" and "sponsored content". That's inevitable, and honestly probably even worse that straight-forward ads.) I would not leave my Kbin.social or my current Mastodon instance if there were a small number of ads.

Also I could be wrong on this but IIRC, Misskey supports user data storage quotas that can be expanded for a price. And I think that's potentially a smart and sustainable method of getting those people who make heavy use of their server to chip in a little bit. If someone wants to post a lot of images, audio and video to their Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, etc., instance then I think it's reasonable to expect them to cover some small fraction of the hosting cost by becoming a paying member or paying for a server-level storage plan.

Tragedy of the commons - Wikipedia

Show threadLvxferreOct 17, 2023

At the end of the day, there are three ways to finance a server.

  • The server owners do it, by paying from their own pockets. Only viable as long as the server is small and the owners are deeply concerned with the success of the server.
  • A third party does it by sponsorship, advertisement, etc. Bad idea as they will eventually want to meddle with your content - astroturfing, selective enforcement of rules, etc.
  • The userbase does it by donations, membership, etc. Frankly I think that it’s the most reasonable solution.

    • OP raised the concern that most people won’t donate. Does it really matter? I don’t think so; what matters is the total amount being donated, not who does it. If it is a concern, perhaps a subscription model could work, too, but the instance would need to show some service beyond what you’d expect from a Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin/etc. instance.

    I’m from the belief that “ethical ads” are a trap. 90% won’t be ethical, and the 10% left won’t pay you much. That’s how the cookie crumbles.

    Another concern that I see is moderation, as it’s part of what makes an instance viable or not. The old Reddit model (let users moderate users) is surprisingly good in this aspect, as it allows the server owners to only address server-wide issues, but IMO it needs to be improved on (for example, letting admins and mods recruit users for specific tasks - e.g. I might trust someone to remove content, but perhaps not to ban users).

    Show threadDame Oct 22, 2023
    I agree with everything you’ve said. I think option 3 is the best and most reasonable option. A Freemium model makes the most sense.
    Show threadmaegul (he/they)Oct 17, 2023

    My thoughts:

    • I think this is ultimately about growth. The Fedi can survive in its current DIY donations based form, but growth, seems less likely I agree. This growth need not be crazy, I’m talking about normal healthy growth.
    • The issue, as you say, isn’t just server costs, it’s giving the people who do the work a helping hand to live and be rewarded. It’s the sustainability of the admins and moderators where burn out is a real problem.
      • There’s also a bit of a privilege problem too I’d guess where underprivileged people are naturally pushed out of admin work because they just can’t afford to do it. I think it’d be culturally nice if that weren’t the case.
    • so in a way a question here is whether admins and moderators should at least in some instances get some form of salary. I think that’s an interesting idea, and that the Fedi would certainly benefit from having people dedicated on a more full time basis to making things good.

    Being all that, my general take is that for the Fedi to grow it has two major cultural issues it needs to address:

  • The lack of software collaboration and reusable and composable software
  • The aversive relationship with money, as you say. You can’t deny the existence of the capitalistic world outside, and doing so, no matter your values, will I bet ultimately come with some trade offs that maybe aren’t worth it and maybe more will not want.
    • Show threadDame Oct 22, 2023
    I appreciate your reasoned response and approach. I’m not denying the harms of capitalism but let’s be honest here we all benefit and we all participate. We buy clothes, shoes, games, etc everyday people here against capitalism participate by buying goods that are leisure. So, why then to suggest options outside of donations is terrible? Admins/mods put in a great deal of work that shouldn’t just be left up to donations. Sure, money can make things get ugly but if one truly believes in the ethos of this place then we can trust it would be handled correctly.
    Show threadmaegul (he/they)Oct 22, 2023

    Sorry, I’m a little confused, I didn’t suggest options outside of donations are terrible.

    To quote myself (amongst other statements in my post)

    The issue, as you say, isn’t just server costs, it’s giving the people who do the work a helping hand to live and be rewarded. It’s the sustainability of the admins and moderators where burn out is a real problem.

    Show threadOpenStarsOct 17, 2023
    You could test out your idea by spinning up an instance that offers curated ads, or probably better yet go entirely ad-free and have a subscription service. Some people may be interested in sustainability, especially if you speak in a language that resonates with them, like explain the value-added benefits of being on a sustainable server vs. a "free" one. e.g. the devs get a salary there and also contribute to the overall Lemmy codebase, beyond that instance so that it benefits the entire Fediverse. But it would be up to you to be the change that you want to see in the world, and make it happen. Also, I am guessing those kinds of discussions won't happen so much on the Fediverse itself, but rather in Matrix or Discord (or Slack?) servers were the actual developers of the Fediverse hang out.
    Show threadrglullisOct 18, 2023
    I’m doing that for 4 years already and I’m arriving at the sad realization that no, not enough people care about “sustainability”, “privacy” and even less about the actual benefit of using a social media platform that does exploit user’s data and their attention.
    Communick: social media and messaging hosting that respects you and your privacy

    Communick, open communications and social media hosting services

    Show threadOpenStarsOct 18, 2023

    Then you are definitely adding more to this conversation than me: actual evidence trumps mere armchair theorizing every time:-).

    There is nothing new under the sun it seems, and so many people are so very short-sighted, that your story makes perfect sense, unfortunately.

    Show threadmaegul (he/they)Oct 18, 2023

    Yep … the whole “this giant platform is free (because you’re the product)” era has done some serious damage that the internet may never truly recover from. Genuinely, with whatever AI is going to do to the internet, that moment we had of people freely associating and building their own spaces online may never return to any mainstream degree.

    In many ways, some of the user-friendliness issues the fediverse has had is people being so accustomed to being able to just sign up to free stuff and expect it to be awesome without any work on their part. Now while the fediverse does have genuine user-experience issues IMO, it’s obvious by its very nature that it requires effort on the part of users and organisers etc to make it work … becuase it is literally a “by the people for the people” type of situation. That so many can’t even recognise that this is true of the fedi let alone compute what it means and requires is a loss for the internet and in many ways the actual “front-line” of this movement.

    Show threadDame Oct 22, 2023
    Yes, there’s the Matrix spaces and ActivityPub forum where these types of conversations are had, but the masses don’t know about them and or aren’t involved. I like getting the people that will be directly impacted opinion. I don’t care about ads, it was a post to explore options. You bring up very good points and I appreciate that.
    Show threadFizzOct 18, 2023
    I dont think you are right that most people dont want to donate. All big fediverse instances are funded by users. Every user may not want to pay the few cents that it costs to host the instance for them but there are enough users that donate $10+ to cover hosting costs for the other users.
    Show threadrglullisOct 18, 2023
    None of the big fediverse instances are in the black when you account for the cost of labor from admins and moderators.
    Show threadFizzOct 18, 2023
    I dont count the cost of moderators and admins volunteering their time. I’m pretty sure there are instances that pay admins and contribute to the dev team upstream. The admin pay only covers the few hours a month they are doing admin work since there isnt enough work to do fulltime.
    Show threadrglullisOct 18, 2023

    I dont count the cost of moderators and admins volunteering their time.

    Then you can not say that these instances are well-funded. Computers and electricity is peanuts when compared to the cost of having real people doing moderation, dealing with moderation issues, etc.

    The admin pay only covers the few hours a month they are doing admin work since there isnt enough work to do fulltime.

    You are going at this backwards.

    There is plenty of work to be done on the fediverse, but the people doing it can not do it full-time because users don’t pay or support them.

    Show threadFizzOct 18, 2023

    Firstly I did not say that the instances were “well-funded”. The discussion is about sustainability and the main on going cost is server hosting. Most big instances can cover server costs by donations and still have thousands in the coffer. These instances also have people that are happy to volunteer their time to moderate and resolve sysadmin related problems that arise. This has been the case for many years and I dont think we will run out of contributors as the fediverse grows.

    Secondly, I may be misinterpreting you but it seems to me that you are mixing development and testing work of the lemmy/mastodon/whatever software with hosting an instance. So we should look at an example of a group that does both. If we take a look at Mastodon.social we can see from their annual report they pulled in 327k euros in donations. Operating costs were 127k and personal costs were 80k. The staff are freelancers and work as required are paid with rates ranging from 50/h to 200/h. This includes developers and UX designers for multiple platforms.

    Since Lemmy is quite new and the project is growing rapidly it is experience growing pains. These issues require the sys admins in each instance to do work to resolve the issue and maintain the instance. As the software matures I expect the work required to maintain the instance will decrease. I expect that instances will need to use volunteer labor while they are small but will be able to pay staff once they grow large enough. I do not expect moderators will ever be paid because that would be very expensive and a nightmare to manage. Small instances are cheap to run and run into less issues requiring admins to step in.

    Going by what I outlined about I believe that the fediverse is sustainable for large servers and small. I dont think we will ever reach a stage where the only servers are corporate servers sustained by ads and investment. I dont think OP provides enough evidence that donations are not enough to sustain the fediverse.

    Show threadrglullisOct 18, 2023

    personal costs were 80k.

    And that is for their two-full time developers. Do you realize how low that is?

    you are mixing development and testing work of the lemmy/mastodon/whatever software with hosting an instance.

    Take any service that you use and paid for: do you know exactly how much of the bill is for each role?

    When you pay for a movie ticket, do you know the exact split of how much goes to each person involved in the production?

    It makes no sense to try to separate the costs here. At the end of the day, what really determines the viability of the whole enterprise is a simple balance sheet. If the consumers are giving enough money to satisfy the people involved, great. If not, there will either be someone getting exploited or there will be no product.

    Show threadFizzOct 18, 2023
    Where does it say the 80k is for their two devs? If it makes no sense to breakdown the costs then there is no point in debating that the donation model is unsustainable because we can look at history and see that the fedidiverse is growing and instances continue to run fine.
    Show threadrglullisOct 18, 2023

    Where does it say the 80k is for their two devs?

    Because that’s all they have on payroll, full-time. Gargron and ClearlyClaire are the only employees of Mastodon GmbH. Gargron is reportedly taking 30k€/year as a salary. This is laughably low. I’m not saying it to dismiss Eugen, but to demonstrate how little the most prominent developers in the Fediverse are being rewarded by their work.

    the fediverse is growing and instances continue to run fine.

    Let’s drop the hopium. The Fediverse is not growing. We saw occasional waves of people coming due to Musk’s take over of Twitter, but few of them stayed around. Lemmy had over 100k MAU in July, and now we are at ~36k MAU.

    “Instances continue to run fine” is absolutely not true. Lemmy is looking a bit more stable nowadays, but a lot of it is simply due to the fact that there is less activity now and because the LW admins are shutting down / defederating from any instance that sneeze at their way with a bit more activity. If we look at the Mastodon side which is a bit more mature:

    • Mastodon’s instances shutting down because admins got tired of the abuse and entitlement from its users is a weekly occurrence.
    • Newsie.social (an instance with 20k registered users) was on the brink of closing down but got saved on the last minute because it soft-merged with journa.host
    • Go to /r/Mastodon and you will see stories of instances that disappeared without notice.
    Show threadFizzOct 18, 2023

    With open source software you are always going to run into issues where a lot of the development work is done for free or as charity. You can say this is unsustainable but I use a lot of open source software and in many cases its almost as good or better than software by companies running around with budgets in the 100s of millions.

    You can say the fediverse isnt growing and point to user decreases after peaks but the current active users are higher than they were before the peak and higher than they were a few years ago and thats growth. You point to one point where lemmy had 100k users and now it has 36k but before that it had less than 3k. Is that not growth? Think of how much money other companies spend to get 36k MAU and lemmy gets it through grassroots support.

    In terms of instance instability you are right that instances can disappear without any notice and even with notice its not any better. With everyone having the ability to host and instance there are going to be many cases where people are not cut out for the task of long term server hosting I think everyone signing up should know that at some point their instance might disappear and be pointed towards established instance hosters. This is valid criticism and something that we can improve. The fediverse needs a way to backup our fediverse identity so we can move it around maybe some smart people are already working on this idk. Thenewsie.social example is interesting because it shows another advantage of the fedivese and distributed hosting. If something isnt working we can merge. I also looked at their expenses and they pay moderators and journalists which is cool. I checked and both instances seem to still be up and running racking in thousands in donations. I expect they will both still be here next year and the year after.

    Its not like the fediverse is the only site that is prone to being shutdown out of nowhere. Even google cuts its services 1 year into running basically nuking all the time users spent on that service and giving them no alternative. At least if 99.99% of lemmy instances go down I can host my own. The amount of users affected by instances shutting down does not seem to be massive amount but maybe it can seem this way if you look on reddit since most people will go to the mastodon sub only to voice their complaints.

    If the current model did not work I don’t think we would have gotten this far. I would support an option for instances to be able to place ads but I also think its a bad path to go down and unnecessary.

    Show threadrglullisOct 18, 2023

    Even google cuts its services 1 year into running basically nuking all the time users spent on that service and giving them no alternative

    Google is known for cutting free services which are not profitable. You are making my argument for me here.

    I use a lot of open source software and in many cases its almost as good or better than software by companies running around with budgets in the 100s of millions.

    Every popular FOSS product has either received itself investment from some corporation which wanted to profit from it, or it was financed by some large group who wanted to commoditize their complements.

    If the current model did not work I don’t think we would have gotten this far.

    “This far” in relation to what? Are you hoping to have the Fediverse as a viable alternative to everyone or are you feeling satisfied because it fulfills the needs of small niche? Do you want Lemmy to be like Linux, or do you want it to be like *BSD?

    Strategy Letter V

    When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u…

    Joel on Software
    Show threadpetuniaOct 18, 2023

    All big fediverse instances are funded by users.

    This isn’t true for a lot of them if you actually take a look. Consider the top 10 instances according to fediverse.observer/list

    Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.

    Fediverse Sites Status. Find a Fediverse server to sign up for, find one close to you!

    Show threadDame Oct 22, 2023
    I didn’t state that it was my opinion. It was three separate polls that asked about donations. The second highest was always the have not donated and will not donate
    Show threadDavidGarciaOct 18, 2023
    Honestly even if the Fediverse is mainly run by corporations, that is still 100x better than the non-fediverse. Mainly because the direct and immediate competition from other instances will keep them in check. You can’t pull shit like Reddit, when users could immediately leave and get an almost perfect substitute. And I believe there will always be a substantial amount of crowd or privately funded “community instances”, whose major goal is just good social media.