I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
The fediverse is not a single database or server. It’s a protocol and standard that’s distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can’t be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they’ve stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.
Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you’re not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it’s a closed source centralized monopoly.
One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that’s something that can happen in the future
A point of caution:
A large company absolutely could come in and absorb the majority of lemmy traffic and build proprietary code and features on top of the main protocol, eventually making the open source protocol obsolete and supplanting it as a paid/closed-source service. It has been done repeatedly by tech companies, and it is the main reason many people distrust Meta’s interest in joining the fediverse.
For all the reasons you just mentioned, we should fight tooth and nail against that from happening, but we should at least be aware of the threat.
I think the email comparison is apt. We are currently in the bbs/dial-up ISP stage of the fediverse. When people had aol.com or netcom.com addresses.
That gave way to powerful centralized services such as Hotmail or rocketmail, that had the promise of never changing your email again. We then saw Gmail become the big boy on the block with amazing technology.
Even with these powerful entities, there were still hobbyists and corporate email.
I predict the fediverse will follow a similar path. lemmy.world and beehaw are like the netcoms, or even the bbs’s, basically hobbyists, and Internet communists setting things up for the common good, or simply because it’s fun.
We’re going to see instances fill up, become unstable, unreliable, etc. People will get frustrated when Lemm.ee, or their preferred instance can no longer support the volume they have attracted. We’ll see a professional service like a Hotmail that promises a forever home. You’ll likely also see vanity instances like what rocketmail offered. Given the nature of the interest based servers, we’ll likely see vanity instances come about singer than they did with email: starwars.fedi, lotr.verse, piano.lemmy, etc.
Once corporate interests start to see value in a powerful, stable instance that can collect user data and serve targeted ads (starwars.fedi is easy to target), they will dump enough money to push out the hobbyists. The hobbyists will not go away, but they won’t be needed anymore.
That’s when you’ll see the disruptor. Someone who comes into the space like Google did, and the fediverse will be an open protocol that is dominated by a few massive interests.
All in all, I’m not predicting doom, just the natural course of events, which actually will be great for the fediverse. Just like I love my gmail.com account more than my hotcity.com account, I think the future of the fediverse is bright, even if corporate interests get heavily involved, and dominate the 'verse, because there will always be room for innovations, and hobbyists, and while a single company could dominate, the protocol is still open for anyone to do their own thing, and not be bound to a single company if they don’t want to be.
I think this is spot on. It’s completely foreseeable that a well funded enterprise could stand up an instance that’s super robust and can handle a lot more traffic than current ones. They could, say, attract celebrities to do AMAs and handle the load. Or maybe they could create some communities that they stock with a giant amount of useful content.
They’d do it for free, and it would just be another instance, but it would become invaluable, with more and more communities hosted there, and more and more users making it their home instance, until the owners felt they were valuable enough that they put their content behind a paywall or they start serving ads. Sure, people could just move to other instances, but the point would be that suddenly doing without them would be painful.
But unlike Reddit or Twitter, it’s not as much as all or nothing situation, and other instances can compete in the same realm.
Sounds like Microsoft’s embrace, extend, and extinguish
Incidentally, Google is kinda doing this with email.
If you run your own email server for your business, they will rate limit you under the guise of spam protection, even if your emails are never caught in their spam filters. Some business reported up to 12 hour delays on their emails being delievered. They want everyone to use preferably their own service, or at least another major giant’s, so they can push the smaller players out of the market.
I haven’t read a ton about it, but isn’t this what Meta is potentially going to do with Thread?
That is the worry, yes. There’s very little incentive for them to join the fediverse as a for-profit company otherwise.
I think there are benefit of killing twitter, mocking el*n and skirting europe regulation on moderation laws. But the worry is there, I hope the devs stand their ground and rejecting any doubious modification from meta on fediverse protocols.
Please don’t start obfuscating words. Elon.
standing our ground means defederating any and all meta servers as soon as they’re identified
I’d be surprised if there’s more than one Meta instance, as “multiple instances” tends to make the UX more confusing for those who are unaware of it. So it shouldn’t be hard.
they’d abstract that away for their users, they won’t know or care. And if one instance gets blocked, they’ll just spin up a new one and migrate the data. Meta users won’t have to think about the whole fediverse aspect of it because it they had to, it would never get off the ground. So meta has to abstract it away or it’ll be DOA. Which means we have to keep blocking any and all meta instances when they’re identified as such
No insult intended but as you say, new here, rtfm a while before complaining.
Yeah, it is a good idea for you to pay. How’s two bucks s month sound? No ads, no tracking, no personal data theft, the ability to change instances if the one you’re on goes fascist/corporate/whatever you dislike. Code you could actually modify.
No CEO whims, no need for “growth” I’m that ever increasing destruction mode.
It’s different than corporate media. Those of us old enough remember the early internet and beyond, bbsing. This fedi shit is the good shit. Adapt! It’s pretty fkn great.
Lol it’s sucks now! Lol from the hyuuge influx of new people, new code, changes and a taste of chaos. I love this.
CHANGE IS GOOD!
I run my own private insurance. I ran my own private BBS. There will always be people like us.
How difficult is it running your own instance. I’m very interested in that.
Depends on your user count and post frequency. Images take a lot of space and space is still not cheap on cloud.
I’m going to tell you a secret…. Yes.
All those things could happen. Some people could run a site that has ads. Some people could run a site that charges a membership. Some sites could have a Patreon membership. Some sites could do subscriptions….
And some sites could be completely free.
The funny thing is, because of the federation, no one will be harmed. Let’s say I startup a site and all I do is pass through the cost of the site to each user. No profit, just what it costs to maintain the server is shared among the members.
Is that unreasonable?
There already are sites with Patreons set up for them, right? Not that you get anything out of being a member (i think). Having a Patreon (or similar) available seems like a good way to support an instance to me.
Agreed. But I wouldn’t say you get nothing out of being a member on Patreon. I run lemmy.ninja. If I had a paying customer (Patreon) ask for something, and I had a non paying user ask for something…
Who do you suppose gets my time first? Now, it may be that I have to tell the paying customer that what they are asking for is only possible if code is changed. In that case I can put a request in on their behalf. However if it is a thing I CAN do, then my time goes to them first, right?
I wonder how much that comes out to per user. Im sure its not negligable, but I have a hard time believing a few hundred text posts and images actually take $8/mo (lookin at twitter) to store on a server.
Yeah, that’s not how the math works. Cost of server + cost of maintaining = X. Divide X by the number of users. Example, my time is worth $60 an hour. I spend two hours a week working on the server ($120). I spend $30 a month on the server rental. $150. I have 20 users. $150/20 is $7.50…
Hmmm interesting points. Those numbers do look pretty steep for a server with only 20 users, but I can see how there’s more too it than just the costs of a server. Im sure its also harder if you have a server that ends up hosting big communities but has few users.
I was curious about Beehaw after hearing about them defederating and looked to see what was over there and what their content looked like. They have a stickied post at the very top that goes over the numbers if you’re curious what they’re saying it costs to run that instance. I feel like numbers could be totally variable based on a number of factors but that might give you a good idea. A smaller instance might be less and a larger one with the best hardware might be more but they’re probably all playing in the same general ballpark.
Yeah you could easily run a 20n user instance on a $3 or $5 server. (Hell, even a “free trial” host if you don’t care about the amount of extra time that would require!)
deleted by creator
Because there will always be rebels running small to medium size instances based off of donations. It was the very first thing to happen at the birth of the internet, and will continue to happen today. Will there be a few major instances that eat up the majority of the fedi? Yeah, probably, but the design of the fedi is that the experience of decentralized social media will stay the same regardless of what’s going on with instances of the network.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t go the way of email, it started the same way: federated service controlled by no one. Nowadays big corporations influence banlists to enforce a protection racket and non-compliant instances are both banned and filled with spambots.
I’ll be honest with you, I would rather have the ban lists than not. No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous. If someone gets on an IP blocklist because they either can’t or don’t know how to secure their system, then no one should trust anything from them. Having a way to identify them before they cause a problem is enormously helpful.
There is already a project underway to identify federated servers that just spew spam, and I am all for it.
No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous.
Okay you do have a point. The thing is they get abused for email where it’s pretty much a racket. I just really hope Lemmy doesn’t end up the same way, since if some bad faith powerful actor starts having control over a list then they get to dictate which servers can federate and which ones not, which is pretty much a walled garden.
I do get the need to identify malicious instances preemptively though, spambots are a threat wherever we go and some instances are just insufferable like exploding heads.
After getting into an IT job and dealing with poorly managed email domains with non existent DNS records. I can completely agree with you, it’s necessary.
what’s the project called? instance admin here, i’ve defederated from a few problem instances i’ve found so far but i just can’t read through all of it
You know, I’m sure I came across one earlier, but I can’t find it now. I did find https://git.sr.ht/~kline/firebee now though, but I don’t think that’s what I had found before.
While correct in that email is definately now limited to a small number of major corporations, the core function has not been monitized. In other words, because I have a Gmail account, I am not limited to Gmail apps nor do they inject advertisement into them. I can live with that.
But is hosting your own mail server and using it for work/finances/everyday life still an option? I don’t think so, at least not without workarounds because sooner or later you will have to send/receive to/from big email.
I looked into it not too long ago. It’s basically a standard spam protection to block any emails from a private server. Sure Google doesn’t own Email, but any Ody with a Gmail account won’t even get your email in their spam filter, it won’t even make it that far.
As someone who works with small businesses, most of whom run their own internal email server, I completely disagree. Yes, it does take some knowledge of DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and DNS, but any well-managed server would have those set up properly anyway. GMail has no issue accepting email from a correctly set up server.
AOL servers, on the other hand, are a massive PITA.
Good to know.
We are already cut off from big tech social networks, who cares if it were to happen again? It can only make us grow bigger than we are now.
The fediverse is the coolest thing that could happened, freedom is what all people should seek for, creating their own spaces and not supporting corporations that only want to make money out of people’s lives, data, attention, mental health, etc …
It’s better to support the instance you are in with donations for sure.
No ads, no tracking, just donations. The model proved itself when twitter went to shit and a big influx of users came to mastodon, it all worked out.
Many mastodon instances shut down. There’s always a risk that at some point the donations are not enough to sustain an instance. It could be very problematic if mods lose their communities when an instance shutdown.
Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.
Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.
I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.
Yeah, especially with Lemmy which is a lot more permanent than Mastodon is. You can screenshot your old toots but you can’t screenshot a userbase. There should be a way to migrate a community to another instance while keeping the subscriptions.
You’re just not noticing that the ads are ads.
I’ve been on Mastodon for months and haven’t noticed any ads. Just people letting me know about some product they like. Wait…
Nonsense. This place is refreshing, like the bold taste of New Coke.
I just got thirsty all of a sudden.
Cuke?!
I love Cuke!
It’s heaven in a can!
[ smiles with brown teeth ]
That’s been always the case on other platforms on top of the official ads. Damn every now and then you’d see what’s clearly an guerilla ad campaign hitting the front page of reddit.
Oh shit was I the ad the whole time??
Course not, if you were, i’d be able to tell, since i’m using the new Rayban® Aviators© Digital edition, now with poser ID embeded and polarized lenses with Spez protection.
Maybe we are all ads on this disgraced day
Speak for yourself
The real ads were the friends we made along the way.
The Fediverse SHOULD allow monetization and they don’t yet. As per Mark Bayliss:
The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining and have been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.
I’m not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.
I’m not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.
I’m not sure this is what the community wants, or what we should want. The server operators should be able to get enough money to afford operation and cover some of their time investment, but I don’t think competing with businesses that obsess over large growth is a worthy goal.
I understand what you’re saying but I do fear that we risk relegating Mastodon and Lemmy into niche apps the same way desktop Linux never got popular. As the linked author noted above, most people don’t care about “free as in speech” or whether a site is open source or not, they just want working social media where they can talk to others.
I am, somehow, on both sides. I do think monetization is necessary, but would also like to keep part of it out of it.
I guess that I see monetization a bit idealistically, like having non tracking ads and sponsorships, or having separate instances with paid accounts that is also financing others… stuff like that. But that might not be enough anyway, as it is not for reddit, twitter, fb, yt… even with all of their data harvesting and selling.
So maybe donations are the way to go? Wikipedia is one of the biggest sites of the world and is managing to collect enough money through donations.
Lemmy/Mastadon is even easier, country/cities can have their instances to allow their citizens access to social network, companies can have their instances for their users and potential users or just as giving something to community.
And we can have this kind where we donate to individual administrators.
I think that even if I would enable adds they would get less than 1USD per month for me, let’s say I donate 10USD per year for lemmy+mastadon?
Maybe tutanota, protonmail can have their instances? They are already hosting stuff, so would be a big problem (except moderation).
I can see all of this fail, but I also see it can succeed.
Why would we want to compete
Subreddits have 10 million subscribers, I haven’t seen a Lemmy group with more than a few thousand people. I don’t know about you but I’d like Lemmy to be as rich in content and discussion as Reddit was. Unless you like social media when it’s empty of users.
Were you on reddit 10+ years ago?
Yes
Well, then you’re free to go back to there. I do happen to prefer fewer more thoughtful users.
I could see a legitimate service being made out of something like an extra private lemmy, or a lemmy with additional features. Sort of like you’ll see these suites of services from Proton or Nord. Yeah, i can set up my own SMTP server, even encrypt my data, but it’s a lot easier to pay a few bucks to have a reliable service do it.
With federated services eventually becoming mainstream, i wouldn’t be surprised to see some companies offering packages that do things like provide additional privacy or larger amounts of storage.
Or like I’d imagine sustainable video hosts will have to monetize somehow just to pay for the storage space.
I think you’re missing that point.
If you’re paying to provide a free server, and along comes another server owner who wants to peer with you. Only they’re charging their users for the same thing you’re giving away for free. Why wouldn’t you be a little bit miffed that they want to take your freely-given service and sell it to their users - because that’s what would be happening in that situation.
Monetising something that’s intended to be free is very, very difficult. Not impossible (see open source software and the businesses that grow around that), but it’s a lot harder when it’s a service.
cheap subscription is probably overboard for my instance
I think the best solution to this whole monetization issue is to just make sharing bandwidth as easy as possible on the fediverse.
If hosting can be done by everyone using an instance, no one entity has to bear overwhelming costs, so there’s no excuse to demand money.
That’s an interesting idea - have a special tier on one or more cloud providers paid for out of that source, or even a flat payment to any server provider based on number of users/activity or something like that?
deleted by creator
Thanks bro
deleted by creator
Open-source projects have always been sustainable by donations. Just look at Wikipedia; it’s been around for 22 years. Linux has been around for even longer.
If lemmy.world ever sold out, I’d probably just move to reddthat.com. Problem solved.
Especially how Lemmy is right now, only a small portion of users would be needed to sustainable keep an instance running. Maybe from every 1.000 users, only 1 would be willing to pay 10$ a month and it should be more than enough.
Shit changes quickly when somebody thinks it would be a good way to start allowing video-uploads. It can get expensive fast with that amount of storage and bandwidth needed. I can see instances selling small “premium” subscriptions for videouploads. You could still host your own instance and get videouploads completely free for yourself, but if you don’t wanna go that route, it would make sense (and would be totally fair)
If we’re talking the fediverse in general, I believe Zuckerberg is launching his twitter clone very soon and it has ActivityPub integration.
That’s very concerning! Sounds eerily similar to how Google killed XMPP back in the day. Honestly we probably shouldn’t allow any federation with them to stay safe.
There was a really good writeup I saw recently either here in Lemmy or on Hacker News somewhere, can’t seem to find it. In short though, Google adopted the decentralized standard, built it into Gmail so everyone uses their client, then eventually dropped support for talking with other XMPP clients.
This is the first I’m hearing of this, interesting
Think of the Fediverse much more like Wikipedia than anything else. It is run in donations and volunteers. It is not for profit and for the benefit of all people.
I may be a minority. But I would gladly join a server that is paid and I get stability, but also a better stronger fight against the inevitable onslaught of shit - in return.
The concept of the Fediverse is horizontal rather than vertical growth - i.e. More smaller instances rather than increasing the capacity of the larger ones. We’re also seeing that Lemmy currently only scales to a certain degree. Right now, most instances are either covered by their admin because they’re so small that the cost is manageable or instances are setting up donations.
It’s conceivable that a business would set up an instance and charge for it - but I think it unlikely. A year town the road, though, who knows?
Doesn’t really make sense, if they’re federated then you wouldn’t need to pay them to access their content. If they’re not federated then what are you paying for?
You’re paying for reliability, continuity, possibly a domain name which may give a sense of exclusivity. By joining a “free” server, you don’t actually have a contract or terms of service.
Hadn’t occurred to me before - I guess instances/mods can limit the number of new users they take in so it doesn’t impact performance too much.
Yup - as the admin of a small instance, I plan to keep it small. I want to contribute the Fediverse but not have this become more than a hobby.
okay
That depends on how the admins decide to run their instances. After several crises and dramas, etc., I can say that those who decide to monetize eventually will; but so far people have been supporting their admins through crowdfunding.
The really big instances are deciding to be open to Facebook in exchange for big money. A lot of folks in other instances don’t like it, and some instances have already decided to defederate from them in advance (search for the hashtag #FediPact). Yes, there’s lot of drama involved.
I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Imagine inge a stable commercial service with high quality moderation (hopefully paid for by the operators) but with an option to follow other instances and transfer your data to another instance. That could be pretty good for drawing in people who just want something that works and refuse to leave reddit.
