• Rob@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    One thing that’ll need serious consideration:

    I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.

    If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.

    (Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).

    Edit: sorry if you saw this comment two or three times, posting can still be a bit buggy…

    • croobat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I will tell this nonstop, online advertisement (as a form of monetization) is pretty damn dated nowadays. You could give them literally a dollar every year and they would make more from you than serving you ads.

      Unpopular opinion: I kinda feel like a reason ads are so popular nowadays is because it gives the user a way of feeling they are supporting a product/creator by doing pretty much nothing.

      • Rob@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think pitching in a dollar every year is preferable. Heck, I even pay much more to Youtube to get rid of advertisements. But it does pose a significant threshold for new users.

        A hybrid model doesn’t sound too bad to me, where you can pay for an ad free server.

        • cucumberbob@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Get a VPN to India or Turkey (there are likely a bunch of other countries too). It’s a lot cheaper: I pay around £1.50 (RS129) a month

      • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They are popular, because it’s a way to squeeze out extra money out of the users (often in addition to paying for the product) and since the software is proprietary the users often can’t do anything about it.

        Btw notice how most youtubers turned into salesmen that want to sell you something in each video and their sponsored segments are often minutes long.

    • CaptainBlagbird@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m thinking about creating my own personal instance hosted on maybe a RasPi or something, just for myself. It would cost very little (RasPi and Domain name are already laying around unused…).

      It might not be the fastest, and if my internet is down then the instance won’t be available (but then again I’d be the only one using it anyway).

      But I’m still trying to figure out other pros/cons with that approach.

    • MasterKitty@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I fully support that idea. Nothing comes free and as a lemmy.world user I’m using lemmy.world resources to browse lemmy.ml pr whatever. It’s only fair that I fund this server to do it’s work in some way.

      As long as we aren’t charged for getting the content itself.

        • Gsus4@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Thanks, I have another question: what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won’t have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?

          • foggenbooty@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo

            That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it’s overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.

            That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it’s relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.

    • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t understand why people think it’s necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?

      No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don’t notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).

      Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.

      • Troy@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Back in 2008 I met a bunch of the VLC devs at a KDE related open source software conference. They talked about their experiences getting approached by companies with “fuck you” levels of money with offers they couldn’t refuse – and yet refused. In 2008 it was about bundling spyware with installers, largely. I always admired their stalwart refusal to bend.

        Side note: this was shortly after they’d completed their transition to Qt as their toolkit. They stole their little volume control widget from KDE’s media player, Amarok. The beauty of open-source and cross pollenation. I expect Lemmy and kbin and others in the fediverse will freely cross pollenate too. In the end, open source wins.

      • 𝓣𝓞𝓑𝓘𝓝@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.

        • Fylkir@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.

      • funkyb@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The difference is you cited software projects, not hosted infrastructure. A person can contribute to a FOSS dev project and not incur expenses dependent on end-users activity. Hosting a fediverse application isn’t like that, somebody has to pay for the hosting and the hosting expenses will scale with user activity.

        • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The projects I mentioned weren’t made for profit, but they are now so important that they are funded through donations. Both from users and corporate sponsors. With that money they are able to hire full-time developers. So they still cost our society money, but no ads or spyware is required. I think hosting could work the same way.

    • epicspongee [they/them or he/him]@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501©(3) status).

      Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we’ve gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.

      Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I’m sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don’t need advertisements or to profit.

    • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Advertisements are fine, as long as it’s not too hard to block, or if they follow the same rule as other posts in that you can always upvote/downvote and comment on them.

      I don’t think many instance admin would go for it though currently, as that would be the fastest way to turn your users against you.

      • FringeTheory999@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I would prefer that ads NOT be the same as regular posts to prevent people from mistaking promoted ads for actual content. Reddit was really bad about this, you would click a thing thinking it was legitimate only to find out it was an ad after the fact. I want my content and my ads to remain separate. They need to be clearly marked (not stealthily marked like on reddit), the ratio of ads to content should heavily favor content, and they need to be dismissible.

      • eatham 🇭🇲@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Maybe admins could start with opt-in ads that they ask if you want when you create an account? Very few people would accept them but some would and even tho it wouldn’t cover the costs it could help a bit. You definitely shouldn’t just enable ads for all tho

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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    1 year ago

    Not exactly. Lemmy has separated the developer role from the admin role.

    From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development. Two full time developers isn’t going to be enough to get Lemmy to a position it can compete against Reddit or the next Reddit. Lemmy is rough around the edges and needs work; it needs to develop ways to incorporate code from others.

    From an admin role, the various servers are going to need to solve major issues, including how to fund server costs. We are also seeing the fraying of the federation model as different admins have different goals for their part of Lemmy and these goals clash with each other.

    There is going to be a ton of growing pains, and some of them are going to come from the fact that there isn’t a CEO of Lemmy to choose which way to resolve problems.

    • falconfetus8@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      From a developer role, Lemmy is going to need to figure out a way to scale up development.

      No they don’t. The platform is open source, so the more users they have, the more of those users will become contributors.

      • daguito81@waveform.social
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        Yes they do. This is why some FOSS goes to places like Apache, why there’s a Python foundation, Spark has Databricks, Kafka Confluent and Trino Starburst.

        The good thing about open source is that it allows everyone to contribute code to the base. The bad thing about open source is thay it allows everyone to contribute code to the base.

        You need repo maintainers, developers that are constant contributor, code reviewers, people maintaining CI CD Pipelines, etc etc.

        Yes it’s less than having proprietary, but it’s nowhere near “0”.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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        1 year ago

        But how is the organization going to handle and review all this additional code? You can’t just trust someone coded something correctly without reviewing the code.

  • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting.

    If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.

    • average650@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      But there will be other instances. If this one does something stupid, then we go to another one and miss almost nothing.

      • daguito81@waveform.social
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        1 year ago

        That’s a bit like saying “Yeah so we don’t care what reddit does, because you can always go somewhere else”

        It’s the biggest instance, so it’s where most of the community and content would be etc etc. Just like what happened with beehaw could happen to world as well. This is only true for a mature decentralized federated ecosystem with a lot of redundant communities so that if one goes down you can easily consume the same content from a different instence. Is that the case now? I would say no, so it’s even less leader-proof.

        • average650@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Lemmy is perfectly fine with beehaw defederating.

          There is certainly the risk of a single instance dominating. But even now there are a few significant instances and losing beehaw didn’t ruin anything.

        • JesusTheCarpenter@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Why so doom-and-gloom already? We just moved from Reddit and peope are excited about the possibilities that fediverse brings. Which are undeniably much broader when compared to Reddit.

          Of course we don’t know what is going to happen in the future, but this model certainly has better chances of being run “by the people for the people”.

          I don’t care that the admins of lemmy.world money make a business out of it. In fact I would be glad if they did.

          Having said that they know perfectly well what happend to Reddit when the company wanted to become more authoritarian. And we are talking about people jumping ship from Reddit to fediverse which is way big of a deal than people jumping from one instance to another which, once you are versed and familiar with how fediverse works, is child play.

          My point is that the only business to make with fediverse is the one that servers the users, that is, a “CEO” or a collective will have no option but deeply care what the users want and need to make some bucks. Otherwise this enterprise can collaps really quickly when people jump to another instance.

    • lightrush@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It depends what he’s the CEO of. For example whether it’s a non-profit, a for-profit, a co-op, etc. It also depends on the licensing of the data. I don’t think this last bit has been tackled by Lemmy yet. Wikipedia has done it quite successfully. If the data is licensed under CC for example, and backups are published, then migration of the whole instance becomes possible like it is for Wikipedia. That would be one hell of a disincentive to fuck around, even if the company is for-profit. Non-profit co-op plus CC-licensed data is probably the most resistant.

    • cincoswim@lemmy.world
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      Beehaw’s choice was Beehaw’s choice, and reading through their reasoning for it, I can understand why they’d defederate with the current influx of users seen.

      And that’s the point and their right- we all have the choice. If you’re unhappy with a server’s federatipn choices or user base, you can move to an alternative and still federate with the other servers for content.

    • average650@lemmy.world
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      But then you just use another instance. As long as it stays decentralized, it will be robust. If one instance takes over, then it’s no different.

      • citizen_lemmy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I still don’t quite understand what happens to all the content on the decentralized instance.

        Say I belong to the lemme.world but subscribe to a sub about, oh I don’t know, let’s say Movies, on Beehaw. Once they decentralize all that content become inaccessible, to me from any other instance, right?

        I mean i know i can find another Movie sub on anther instance but it may many be as good as the one on Beehaw.

        Unless I created a login on beehaw instance I’m not going to be able to access any of their content or participate in that sub on that instance.

        Did I get that right?

        • average650@lemmy.world
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          Almost, but not quite. If lemmy.world doens’t defederate from beehaw (it’s a two way thing) then you can still see all their posts, and interact with lemmy.world users on those posts. But beehaw users, and users of every other instance won’t see your comments, and you won’t see theirs.

          I’m not saying nothing is lost when an instance goes haywire. But, it’s certainly much more robust against those things then reddit. How much have you lost by not being part of beehaw? Something, but, it’s still a very good community.

  • ransomwarelettuce@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Does not have CEO, yet …

    But I can solve that. From now on I will take that burden.

    Refer to me as super cool Lemmy CEO

    First order of business, I command you lemmings to vibe.

    Stay tunned for upcoming changes !!!

  • drapermache@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.

    Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn’t until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail – donations are nice but are never enough.

    As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.

    • Brickhead92@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      We’ll need someone to input that data, I guess we’ll need to create a new position for that.

      I shall be the CAIIO (chief AI input officer) and may salary will only be $150m.

      • OpenHammer6677@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Hey that’s a lot of work for one dude. I’ll be your associate. I shall be the ACAIIO and my salary is twice as much as yours because of the longer title

    • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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      I disagree. The Free Software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system weren’t created for profit, but for user freedom. There is nothing wrong with making money in an ethical way (unlike what Reddit does), but that is not necessary for projects to survive and there are plenty of examples of this. Debian for example is a fully free operating system and it’s maintained entirely by volunteers for free.

      The Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Blender Foundation. They are all non-profits.

    • spiritedpause@lemmy.world
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      The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances

      It’s not quite the same, but Meta/Instagram is working on a Twitter competitor that will use ActivityPub and therefore is essentially one huge Fediverse instance that they’re launching.

  • HighJudge@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Every platform/service/product that is owned by a single company is eventually going to breakdown and turn into the worst form of itself. Companies are driven by this fiscal quarter being better than the last and it is inevitable that eventually quality has to go out the window to increase profits. The only sure-fire way to “reset” quality or force the company to ensure quality is to not monetarily support them. But with the internet, that is very difficult to achieve with having so few platforms that connect us all owned by companies. The only answer on keeping the internet a quality space for socialization and connecting with each other, is decentralization.

    • Odin@lemmy.world
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      Well I’m not so sure about that. Just give it time, someone will find a way to monetize it. People are creative.

      • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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        The problem isn’t necessarily people monetizing a platform, it’s forcing everyone to participate in the monetization whether they want to or not.

        If there was a hypothetical Lemmy instance that was ad-supported or even subscription-based, that would be fine. Because we always have the choice to go to a different instance.

  • ronaldtemp1@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And with the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy which created a significant base of decentralised online community, we just witnessed history where human beings achieved the next level of freedom of expression free from manipulation by a handful of powerful individuals

  • CliveRosfield@lemmy.world
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    So who actually owns the server this instance runs on? Doesn’t it just mean they do whatever they want? So confused

    • jawknee530@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There are a ton of Lemmy instances that all communicate with each other and each instance is ran on hardware by different owners. So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.

      • s38b35M5@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.

        My understanding is that (at present anyway) since accounts are not federated, your account on that “gone to shit” instance will be gone. Your content will still be on many federated instances, but not your account. That would be lost.

        • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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          Yeah, one thing Lemmy needs to solve is account migration. Instead of creating a new account on a new instance you move your existing account from one instance to another. It won’t save the account if the instance is already removed, but it at least gives an option to move if you feel like there’s a better instance for you.

        • iamsgod@lemmy.world
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          this is my understanding too. like, I was confused why my account doesn’t work for lemmy.my, but then I find out that I still can comment on it from lemmy.world

      • CliveRosfield@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ah… dope. So it’s currently just running through donations I presume. Another dumb question: If an instance owner goes rogue and just nukes it are your posts gone too or is it archived somewhere?

      • GalacticRobot@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So if a Lemmy instance goes down, all of the communities and comments go down with it? Seems almost worst than having a CEO?

        • CliveRosfield@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Seems like the saving grace is anyone can either start or move to a different lemmy instance whenever. It’s not like someone can just host their own copy of Reddit if spez ever went nuclear.

    • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      Hence the E in CEO: executive.

      They execute the will of the board.

      Given that boards and CxO’s are all cronies anyway there’s very little difference.

      Hiring CxO’s happens at the golf club.

    • Berserker@programming.dev
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      Exactly. Decentralized services and servers that are unified in a common standard is the way the web should always have been.

      Someone fucked up and told the advertisers that a dollar could be made so we end up with the ad cancer that is the ‘modern’ web.