Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
It takes money to run, but it doesn’t need money to “be”.
Imagine a group of people rent a building to hang out in; of you’re a regular you chip in some bucks. Lots of people, a few bucks each, roof over your head.
Get out of that “free” mindset. It was a trap all along. Some of us old pharts have known this, some of us (not me) have been coding stuff like Lemmy and other open software all along.
Right away i knew Lemmy.world was viable; I’m gladly paying 5 bucks/mo! No ads! No corporate extraction of personal data!
Hell, pay TWO bucks a month. Seriously wtf 2 bucks you could lose and not notice.
Yup. You can be profitable without expecting to get rich. The insane corporate expectations of “20% growth every year forever” directly leads to the enshitification of everything it touches, especially social media.
You can pay in Lemmy? New user here. It is confusing enough to understand the concept of federation.
I’m sure popular instances have setup Patreon accounts and the like for donations. Each instance is (essentially) being run by some person. It’s just someone who decided it was worthwhile to set it up. They probably started with a small server in the cloud. At the start, it might have been free. But as more people join/interact, it starts to cost money. So the owner of an instance probably looks to the community to keep it running.
It’s cheap to run, but it does still scale with the number of uses. So, it’s very fair to have a place to ask for donations to keep an instance running without burdening the person who ownsit.
Like many said, it’s not about profitability but sustainability. I signed up to donate $2 per month to help run the servers for lemmy.world. I’m very happy with this instance (and the fediverse in general) and want to contribute. There are plenty of other people willing to do the same. Together, we will make something much bigger and better than reddit over time.
I love their $8/month tier description: “The $8 verified user tier. You’ll be allowed to place a blue checkmark behind your name. You’ll have to do that yourself though. And you could also do that without donating ;-).”
Why does everything have to be for profit?
This is the real question we have to ask ourselves. We really need to move away from looking at the internet as just a resource to extract money from, and instead see it through a social lense again. Look what late stage capitalism has done to our digital, social gathering places. Almost everything has become a product that needs to be profitable, to compete for attention and to extract as much data from users as possible and discourse has suffered greatly from it. I mean billions are donated to content creators simply because people want to contribute. Why stop there? We can shape the internet the way we want if we simply contribute and put our heads together. We don’t have to make a profit. That’s our strength.
I like this take.
Due to life circumstances, I basically live on the internet, and have since the late 90s. My first comment on here was about how I support socialized social media.
I want to go back to a time when I could actually talk to random people, and have meaningful discourse, even if it isn’t as big of a community or as content-filled. I want my social space to be interactive, not passive.
Profit-seeking models push for passive consumption rather than actual meaningful engagement. I’d much rather have a non-profitable platform that people keep alive because they want the same thing I do. I’ll donate to it, as long as it stays that way.
I think they are asking “how are things paid for” not necessarily “are they making tons of excese profit”
Profit is the money leftover after everything has been paid for, though. All profit is, by definition, excess.
You’re probably right and the OP is just confusing terms, but I think it’s an important distinction to make.
Yep yep, I think it was a mis-speak, definitely agree with you. Trying to giving the benefit of the doubt.
One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.
What’s the general consensus as far as fear for future profiteering? Right now these platforms are great because the are run by people who genuinely care. Do you think there is any risk of this growing so much that federated content reaches the front page of search engines, followed by advertisers wanting space here? Or what about risks like reddit gold which was initially just a fun add on, which then became a “temporary” paid feature, which ended as a full scale scam.
Anyway, I love what we have for now, I just want to know what everyone else is speculating for the future.
The thing with the Fediverse is that things like this aren’t really possible. The creators of Lemmy are pretty anti-capitalist, so the source-code won’t ever support ads.
An instance admin could try to modify it to incude Ad Sense, but the users would just reject that instance and move to a free one.
I personally wouldn’t mind premium features, like animated emotes and stuff for people that pay for monthly subscriptions, but again, things like that don’t work in the fediverse because they won’t be supported on every instance.
Maybe there will be some creative solutions that get made, but it’s highly unlikely due to how things are setup.
Meta, a well-known for-profig company are gearing up to join the Fediverse, reaction is mixed, some server operators seem keen on welcoming them, some cautiously optomistic while others want nothing to do with Meta at all.
In terms of paid features, might be a thing down the line but it will very from server to server. Cool extra statuses (e.g. Wow I’m a gold tier superstar supporter on this instance) likely won’t appear on other instances unless they decide to include something in the federation protocol that would display it.
I think this may be the wrong question. I am the administrator of a reverse engineered PS3 video game server, so it’s illegal for me to make a profit or any kind of revenue or donations from that platform. However, I maintain it for thousands of users simply because I and others enjoy it and want it to exist. That’s not a sustainable model for a business or for running something as gigantic as reddit, but it’s what I want and enjoy, and for right now it’s affordable, and I’m happy with that.
People like you make the internet a better place :)
Not counting the cost of your time, how much money do you spend on this server?
It costs me roughly $15-25 a month to host our game server, but I have other costs like our website that I’m dealing with as well, so taking all those other things into account and I’m probably spending something like $30 a month for now. I’m actively working to migrate my Wix site to WordPress to save money. Now, if we had thousands of concurrent users instead of like 30-40 concurrent users on a typical day, or if we needed significantly more storage, my costs would probably go up a lot. The growing storage and user count are both important things I’m thinking about carefully, because I imagine there might come a time I need to reevaluate our strategy
Thanks!
All things considered, spending $30 a month on a hobby is pretty good.
They’re not - Some instances have a clearer funding structure than others. I picked Lemmy.world in part because they have a clear source of donations.
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld/donate?interval=oneTime&amount=20&name=&legalName=&email=
The open collective link goes to Mastadon world. Is it related to Lemmy.world? I look on lemmy.world website, and I don’t see a clear link to funding.
Run by the same people. Donations to that link are used for both.
Some have raised concerns about wanting to fund one but not the other (e.g. earmark their donation to Lemmy but not Mastodon) but the admins said they weren’t gonna do that yet.
It doesn’t have to be profitable. Especially for people that already have computers running 24/7 and good Internet, a Lenny server is just another process they run on their machine. Admin/mod duties would probably be the hardest part.
They’re not, and profit isn’t the reason people run Lemmy instances. In fact, avoiding the problems that arise when human communication is capitalized upon is a driving theme behind open source software and federated social media.
Its been so long since ive been on a part of the internet like this, it used to be almost all like this, now its almost all a buisness.
Right. I’m loving this. It is a huge breath of fresh air. Obviously the people hosting Lemmy.world have to pay for this though. If they put out a subscription that was minimal in cost I would pony up even now with the jank and all. This place is worth investing my time and energy into I feel.
Profit might not be the point, but it is going to cost time and resources to run an instance. Unless the admin is just planning on paying for everyone’s ability to use Lemmy on their instance out of their own pocket, ads or subscriptions may be necessary. And depending on how much time and effort goes into keeping it up, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them to want to make a profit on it so they feel like it’s worth the effort.
I’d hate for an instance to blow up in popularity only for the admin to decide it isn’t worth the time/effort/cost and shuts it down.
I mean, Wikipedia does it and they’re the 7th most visited website on the internet. 🤷
I am a proud monthly donor. My couple of bucks I send Ruud and the admin team every month helps make this corner of the internet a reality.
So, that’s how it’s funded.
If you’re able, please consider sending in a donation. You can do so at Open Collective or Patreon.
Help out a sprout?
Both those links go to Mastodon not Lemmy. Am I right in assuming that your account Is on an instance that hosts both? Probably federating with M before feasting with L next?
Good question. The dude who hosts lemmy.world started by hosting mastodon.world. So all of his patreon/crowdfunding is under mastodon.world, but it’s all going to the same pool of server costs that pay for lemmy as well. He’s pretty cool, actually, posts transparency reports on a regular basis.
I didn’t know you could support lemmy via patreon. Thanks for the info! I’m going to start donating right now!
Just a heads up. The link he posted is to support the lemmy.world instance not the Lemmy developers. I’m a co-admin at lemmy.world so ofcourse thankful if you decide to donate but I see your account is on another instance and want to avoid confusion. If you’re looking to support the developers go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and check one of the 3 donation links below. Thank you for your support, where-ever you choose to donate :)
I’m pretty sure Lemmy has been designed specifically so it can’t me monetized. If you try to place ads people can just switch to another instance. If you try to split off from the fediverse I’m pretty sure there’s enough data on other instances in order to clone your server along with its content (and mind that you don’t own the copyright for posts made by users).
I would go as far as to say the point is that it’s not for profit. Profit incentive ruins everything, most of all online services and platforms.
I think it’s more than just “not for profit” - there was actual effort to make this platform as difficult to monetize as possible (probably as a lesson learned from Reddit lol). Let’s begin with the code - it’s under AGPL, which means you can’t set up a public Lemmy instance without making its code public. This prevents you from creating an improved version and keeping it to yourself to gain an advantage over other instances. Second, the fediverse means that it’s less likely for a single instance to become so big that it can unfederate itself without consequences, and while you’re federated you can’t really place ads - people would just view your community on another instance.
I don’t agree - while you could copy it, if an instance gathered a large user base and had some well-implemented quality of life features, there’s nothing stopping them from putting ads on it and I’d guess that most users would continue to use that instance. If it has quality content, they already have an account, and it has compelling improvements over other instances, I can’t imagine that some unobtrusive ads would bother people enough to go to a clone of that instance and create another account.
Sure, it could be done, and ad blockers are common enough, but I don’t think well-placed ads would cause some mass exodus. I’d even be okay with it if it’s in the name of paying the server bills for such an instance.
I think part of a system like the fediverse is that it only needs to annoy one person enough that they go get the code and make an ad free clone. Then people could just migrate over. Especially once we have beeter tool to be able to move accounts across instances
Any Lemmy/fediverse instance could come up with a localized monetization scheme for people that browse through it, but it wouldn’t affect other instances (or if they were injecting ads into feeds, they’ll just get blocked by everyone else), but for the most part, it’s got more of an IRC server vibe, no monetization needed when community volunteers are plentiful and the barrier to entry is low. Eventually ‘big boys’ like Lemmy.world will want a more formal and reliable way of paying for their server and bandwidth needs beyond primarily unsolicited donations ($ and time) by volunteers.
These are not profit generating services, they are community services. For now.
Things can be valuable without being profitable. A hug from someone you love does not generate any profit but is still a good thing that should exist. Likewise, a community resource like a Lemmy instance does not need to justify it’s existence by being profitable. It can simply exist as something that people get value from. The fact that we often lose sight of this is a result of living in a capitalistic society that over-emphasises the value of something producing profit and underemphasises any other possible value. As for the implied question of, how does a Lemmy instance get the money to pay the costs required to run it? That’s going to vary from one instance to another and how that money is raised should be a factor in which one you sign up to and which ones you connect with. In the case of Lemmy.world, it is, afaik, presently (and likely in the future) run as a non-profit for it’s own inherent value and is funded by user donations. A big point of federated communities is to allow those communities to be able to operate for their own benefit, rather than be reliant on commercial investment that will later create a tension of different incentives.
I don’t think a hug was a good example, for the exact reason you mentioned in the second half of your comment. A hug does not cost anything to give, other than a small amount of time. Everyone gets time for free, until they don’t anymore.
Servers cost money AND time, both to get and run the equipment. Not to mention regular maintenance as hard drives especially don’t last forever. It’s easier to do something unprofitable for the sake of it being a valuable thing, such as picking up trash on the side of the road. But most people can’t just give shoes to the homeless because it’s a good thing, simply because that costs money and time, which the average person does not have an exorbitant amount of money to give away.
To me, the question is moreso how do lemmy instances get the money to exist, and OP just used the wrong word. Which as you mentioned, through donations. I also think it would be a pretty neat feature to have a setting where you can enable ads (off by default) to further support the instance without having to directly enter your credit card information.
To me, the question is moreso how do lemmy instances get the money to exist
Yes it is.
That is not the same thing as making a profit.
The short answer is it really isn’t profitable, and will be hard to ever be profitable simply because of how it is indeed run by donations.
Being able to spread the load over many independent instances does help to spread that load.
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