I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It’s not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.
With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn’t. Meaning there’s fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn’t succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.
Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.
A donation drive could be a good model but the decentralized nature of the platform would complicate things.
It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Your server’s admin ask for money, setup a method to receive donations (ex: Liberapay, Paypal, etc) and there you go.
If you raise more than you need, the community can vote to donate it to other communities in need, to the Lemmy or Kbin devs or to some charity.
when you donate money, you’re not funding wikipedia’s operating costs. wikipedia itself is self sufficient. what you’re funding instead is the wikimedia foundation- which is set up to not receive grants but to give them.
the drives are misleading, to say the least
If it is not funded through user donations, how is it self sufficient? Genuinely curious.
Idk what he’s referring to, but wikimedia funds the operating costs of Wikipedia as well as the salaries etc of those that work to keep the site running.
They have been criticised for bloat, but the site itself is entirely dependent upon donations.
WP has a story that sums it up nicely: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/
Wish they would be more upfront about it. Wouldn’t have a problem donating to fund grants. But I want to know upfront.
I read on reddit that they have to do the drives in this way in order to amintsin some sort of charity or non profit status? Something along those lines. Like they have enough in the bank to be fine but they need to do this for some legal reason.
Forgive my half recollection of a reddit comment that could have been bs in the first place.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be patreon pages for servers & instances you support, which is enough to keep the lights on. Especially if it unlocks a little cosmetic token or icon.
I really don’t care how to decorate my account as long as I can keep using the same service that I would want to use on a regular basis … I’d pay for the server and I really don’t care what they give me because the fact that they exist and continue to exist is more than enough repayment for me
What happens to your account on a federated server if that one fails though?
Then you need a new account I think. It’s a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol I think (but I haven’t done any reading). Your identity is tied to the instance it was created on.
As someone who burned reddit accts regularly this doesn’t really concern me. But if it really worries you couldn’t you set up your own private instance with you as the sole user? Nothing is more reliable than yourself. Even corporations with millions of dollars can close up shop at a moments notice.