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
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
Yes but you need to sign their NDA to be sure.
What’s the background on this?
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Zuck did an interview talking about how they were looking at doing a spinoff of Instagram, using Fediverse, for text based social media. Basically a competitor to Twitter. Rumor mill says it’s call Thread, or maybe he said that in the interview, I can’t remember.
I deleted the wrong comment, but responding here. I was thinking Thread like the home automation standard all the big companies are doing together. Figured Facebook was in on that. I did hear about the Fediverse entry though, just missed the name (which I bet they won’t use).
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.
TIHI
Yeah that’s a great point. I think it would be hard to fully lock other clients out, but you could have an early internet style situation where you had some websites not supporting all browsers.
The big difference with Lemmy is that it’s not really a service, it’s a open protocol and standard, like email, or http. The service itself is provided by distributed instances that adhere to the protocol. Like those protocols, no one company has been able to get a monopoly on it. Some have taken over a lot of it, like Google with Gmail, or cloudflare, but if you don’t want to work with them there are a ton of other options you can go with, and you will not be locked out of the system if you do.
Reddit was a centralized closed source system so if you don’t have a Reddit account then you are locked out of the system completely.
Lemmy is decentralized so no one instance has or can gain a monopoly. If you want to break ties with one instance you can just switch to another one and still participate with it and the rest of the fediverse.
Not only does that give you choice in a worst case scenario, it also keeps all the instances on their toes because they don’t have dictatorial control over their users.
Spez’s fatal miscalculation was that he thought he had user lock in, but unlike other social networks where it’s your only option to keep in contact with your real life friends, or it’s the only platform your favorite creator posts on, they had neither. Almost all accounts were not connected to your real life and posts were mostly links to other platforms. Very few creators had Reddit as their sole posting platform. The interactions were ephemeral and superficial. Dropping Reddit was the easiest service I ever had to drop.
The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.
Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.
As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it’s very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.
Yep. I don’t get why it is so hard for people to understand that non-profits CAN sustain themselves from donations. There’s so much brainwashing and gaslighting by corporations going on that people start to question everything outside of the ultra-capitalist system, even the most basic and genuinely nice human interactions are doubted
Yeah it’s weird, there’s plenty of examples of what people would consider “profitable” non-profits: For example Mozilla Thunderbird pulled US$6 million last year in donations alone, with the average donation being US$21, I think.
Mastodon, another non-profit, while not quite as lucrative, pulls in around £24,000 a month on Patreon donations alone, not counting any outside sponsors or Open Collective donations, and so on.
Build value, and people will happily support you.
However if reddit decided they want to plug the leak, if they offered $1 million to the admins of sh.it.just.works and lemmy.world and beehaw, if they accepted, reddit could then defederate the three largest instances from everywhere and Lemmy would basically have to start from the ground up again. A lot of users would probably not bother making an account elsewhere as they may feel it not worth it since it could happen again.
Lemmy wouldn’t have to start from the ground up. They would already have all the source code and instances, a potential userbase who was already convinced not to let these people control their social networks, who already have the frontend installed on their devices, is already used to the interface and features of the app. Even if Spez were to do this, other instances would be built and in the long run it would be a financial hole.
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully it ends up like wikipedia
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.
Cuke?!
I love Cuke!
It’s heaven in a can!
[ smiles with brown teeth ]
I just got thirsty all of a sudden.
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.
Dude! They looked so sick when I saw them in your profile pic while eating my Magic Spoon
laughably expensivesuper duper healthy cereal!I would have paid for spez protection. But it wasn’t available so I came to Lemmy lol
We call that a condom, but it’s too late for spez.
Maybe we are all ads on this disgraced day
Speak for yourself
The real ads were the friends we made along the way.
Reddit got WAY worse in the last 5-7 years though. I think corporations got more ok with it after best practices were both cemented and more publicized after the 2016 presidential election. Previously astroturfing was there for political campaigns and state actors, but more shady. Then Russia went off the rails with agitprop, Cambridge Analytical was all in the news, and everyone realized how pervasive and easy it was. Now everyone does it, and often.
Nonsense, “No, Stupid Questions!” is actually sponsored by “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
If you have real evidence of this then you have a duty to share it.
There are no ads, just as there are no added flavours in McDoubleBeef 100% flavour and 200% beef!!!
Astroturfing is just a reality we have to live with online.
Wikipedia is probably the most important thing on the internet fight now. It also needs some amount of servers, many crawlers scan it daily, I assume its a shitton of users and logins and API hits and what not. And still it survives on donations alone.
Eventually lemmy is not a streaming services with videos and and a lot of bandwidth. Its just text and people connecting. So I assume you dont need massive servers and shit.
How many hobbiests running miniature train sets in their garage have monetized those train sets? How many backyard gardeners sell their crops.
In most cases people who choose to develop and administrate an instance of their own are largely just hobbiests of another type. Sure it costs them some money. Many hobbies cost money, it doesn’t stop people from building things or growing things for fun.
I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.
For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.
I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.
It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it’s a pretty foreign concept for some folks who’ve bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.
Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.
I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.
Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.
But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it’s not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.
Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you’re not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what’s the point?
Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that’s your whole motivation it’s going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.
There’s a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.
Exactly. Federation means no single instance needs to serve millions of users. If one gets too big and becomes too commercialized, you can move to a different one that shares your values. If large instances cost more per user as they scale up, we just need more instances.
I also think people are vastly overestimating the cost to serve users on Lemmy/kbin. Last time I calculated it, lemmy.world costs were around €0.01/mo per monthly active user. That can be maintained with 1% users donating €1 a month.
Yes, the concept of the Fediverse has so many inherent advantages over classical, corporate monolith social media that I hope that in the end, after all the desperate attempts of current sites (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) to finally become profitable have failed, it will lead to a freer and better Internet.
If I move to a different instance, what changes about my experience?
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 will probably eventually be some commercial Lemmy sites. I honestly think it would be awesome if large game studios, and software companies, and anyone else who has need for a forum, made their own federated Lemmy instances as their official support forums.
I can definitely picture a lemmy.bethesda.net or whatever else
Man I’d never considered anything like that, but being able to see activity across multiple official forums at the same time. That’d be amazing
That’s a really great idea. Makes a lot more sense than relying on official accounts on 3rd party platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
Besides all the discussion of nonprofits and donations, fedi server hosts have way less overhead. They’re not generally trying to profit, so they only need to break even (or run a deficit small enough to deal with out of pocket). A corporation is trying to give 6 or 7 digit salaries to CEOs and/or shareholders. So they need to extract more than the cost of hosting.
Give it 15 years.
I’ve been online since 1990; 10-15 years seems to be the maximum time a community can live without shitting itself over greed or something new and better coming along to scoop up users.
That said, things like Usenet and IRC still technically exist… They’re just niche now. The way this shit works is more like those, so it will likely never fully disappear.
To be fair, there is a line between greed and monetization. Monetization can be simply to fund servers costs and labor. Especially as the community grows, it’s just going to get more and more expensive. I think a donation page or a toggle-able ads option (off by default) would be great ways for users to support the site to fund the costs without it being greedy. Both options could give some sort of donor badge as a thank you, because there’s no features involved with it so people don’t feel forced to donate/support.
I think the key really is transparency. I’m not going to throw money into a black hole and hope it does some good, but if there is some level of transparency showing running costs plus deficit/surplus towards those costs then I wouldn’t mind contributing.
Or, for the time being, this platform never takes off and reddit’s moat temporarily prevails. Eventually Reddit will die, but no one can predict when.
It will be interesting to see to what level the server traffic changes in Reddit. I was looking at a post last night (for was still kinda working if you weren’t logged in) and it was a lot of confused people wondering what all the fuss was about, very few people ppl against reddits actions, and it clicked, the majority of people against spez had just left once the apps stopped working.
I checked the user history of those defending Reddit, all very young accounts so I guess ppl who joined recently and only know the Reddit app are left, but the older users… Gone.
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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?
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
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.
if any corporation tries to get in on it, you can count on them trying to monetize it
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.
It’s already monetised. Just click on the links under Donations in the main sidebar or straight to the OpenCollective page for a glimpse. We pay for it with our money. That’s how we know we’re not the product.