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Created this account so I could create the community. Decided on lemm.ee because my main account is on aussie.zone, which does not allow community creation (and limits its communities to things about Australia). Figured lemm.ee is better than lemmy.world due to the latter's performance/federation issues.
Yeah, I have created a bunch of topic-based instances with the idea of having communities created in "neutral ground" and avoiding issues like "instance from instance Z has defederated from X and Y, so now the people need to create duplicate communities and/or duplicate accounts".
The whole list of instances is on the sidebar of !communick_news_network@communick.news if you are interested.
Also, because I got someone reporting me for not "disclosing my interests". Communick is a business. It makes money by providing paid access accounts to Fediverse services, like communick.news and mastodon.communick.com. These topic-based instances however are never going to be closed or exclusive to paying customers. Anyone that wants to create a new community based on a specific interest, just send me a DM and I will happily create it and make you a moderator. I created them to help organize communities during the migration and to distribute the load from all the mirrored content from alien.top.
Yeah I really like the idea of topic-based instances. There are some issues doing it that way with discovery, and potentially with what happens when communities split (see for example what happened with !risa@startrek.website splitting to !tenforward@lemmy.world), but on the whole I really like the way it can reduce the drama caused by entirely unrelated factors. I'm a big fan of ttrpg.network for that reason, and I guess you could describe my main home instance of aussie.zone as being one, too.
I'm curious about that business. With so many Mastodon and other fediverse instances available for free to anyone, what's the business model for a paid service?
Nice, I went ahead and created !aom@level-up.zone . As soon as you make a post there I can make you a moderator as well.
I'm really glad to see more people getting the point of these instances. Reducing drama is certainly one of the biggest factors, and "good fences make good neighbors" is a good principle here.
It's a difficult one, if I am being honest. I started this as a side project because I believed that with all the abuses from Facebook and Twitter, people would finally understand that "if you are not paying for the product, you are the product" is not just a nice slogan. Unfortunately, it seems that the large majority of people will rather live jumping from instance to instance and project to project instead of paying a few bucks per month to support independent developers.
But to give you a more cheerful response, Communick is not just about Fediverse. My background is in telecommunications, and the idea is to offer any type of service for messaging that is based on open standards, which also includes VoIP. It also provides Matrix and I've been trying to figure out how I can add support for SIP calling in a way that could make this a compelling alternative for Digital nomads that need to deal with multiple phone numbers.
Looking at the Fediverse only, some reasons to charge for access:
I appreciate it, and if I ever do get around to doing something about aoe2 or aoe4 I may use that instance, or if I see someone else express interest in creating game-related communities I'll recommend they head in your direction. But for now I've already created it on this instance, and don't see the benefits as being strong enough to outweigh that.
Thank you for addressing this
I don't mind the suspicion, but I think it is beyond silly.
I'm one self-funded developer who is stubborn enough to run this at a loss for almost 5 years now, and my greatest ambition here would be to maybe get 10-15k customers to pay me $30/year to be able to live with minimal comfort, provide for my family and hopefully contribute back to open source and the open web. Yet people want to paint me as some mastermind behind some huge corporation burning money around from investors and looking for a way to exploit users.
I'm honestly tired of this crab mentality. People think it's a sin to be upfront about their work and how much they value their time. It's also quite ironic that I can see the huge overlap: those who are always virtue signaling and complaining about bosses who don't pay enough to their employees are the same ones who refuse to patronize a small independent business, but go look at the phones in their hands and there is an 80% chance they will be holding a shiny new iPhone.
Really not sure about this on Lemmy.
Are you unhappy with your current job? It feels like all admins are doing this as a hobby, and none of them plan to make money out of it
What current job?
I started Communick as a side-project in the end of 2019, but in July of last year I lost my job and decided to make this really work.
Now I get more why you are pushing so hard to make it profitable.
Have you considered finding another job in the meantime? The Fediverse isn't going to be profitable any time soon
What makes you think I am not looking?
Good luck on your search then!
Why not "good luck on making Communick work"?
Because the chances of this actually happening are quite slim.
It would be nice the Fediverse became profitable, and if Communick could become your main source of income, but from every signal we can see, it is not going to happen anytime soon.
That's like a third of the current Lemmy userbase, who would be using exclusively your instances. Probably not realistic in the near future.
This is not just over the Lemmy userbase.
When I am dreaming of 10-15k users, I am looking at all the potential userbase, not the existing one.
Honestly, what bothers me a bit is you saying "It would be nice the Fediverse became profitable", but from all our interactions you seem to only support efforts that do not require any material (i.e, financial contribution) from you, and you have been purposefully avoiding contributing to the topic-based instances that I have set up.
I'll tell you one thing, I am thinking about giving away all the topic-based instances to the collective behind feddit.org. If I do that, would you move away your communities there?
Nice to see that you consider that my time is worthless. Or is other people's time only valuable when they are admins?
What do you mean by this? How would this work? How would pay the costs and spend time managing all of these topic specific instances?
Not going to comment on your first paragraph, as you seem convinced this userbase is there and ready to use your services.
I didn't say your time is worthless. I am actually impressed with how much you've done here. What I am saying is that you only support things with your time, and you refused to help whenever money was involved. Is that not accurate?
So you acknowledge that running instances do have costs that need to be covered somehow. That's already a good thing.
Anyway, to make the case here: I am willing to move ownership of the instances to feddit.org's OpenCollective and even keep managing it, as long as there is understanding that they should be topic specific and closed for registrations. The idea would be to have feddit.org as the instance for people, and the topic instances as home for groups.
If that were to happen, would you move your communities there?
No, I am convinced of its potential. There is a difference.
I support my main instance enough to cover the costs: based on the other thread I opened, and having a look at sopuli's FAQ, https://sopuli.xyz/post/13531 it costs them 0,06€ per user per month, so 0,72€ per year.
I don't know why you keep bringing this up, or maybe you meant that one time I refused to get a communick subscription?
Based on that other thread, some instances have costs as low as 0,10$ per user per month, so 1,2$ per year.
I just checked the Communick prices again, indeed it's 30$ per year, which is 25 times more expensive than the cost above.
Why would I? You have been always been claiming that if something would happen to you, someone else would take over, but we still only see you talking about Communick.
Managing an instance takes time and requires a team to be done properly. You are suggesting to add a number of instances on a single team. Have you ever asked them if they would be okay with this?
We have discussed this in the past already: I'm always reluctant to use your instances as you are the single point of failure of the whole Communick projects.
If lemm.ee goes down tomorrow, that would be a good news but Lemmy as a whole would recover. If lemm.ee, lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, Lemmy.dbzer0, feddit.org and discuss.tchncs.de would go down together tomorrow, that might probably kill the platform.
Having a set of predominant content instances managed by the same person (or team, if you get feddit.org's approval), wouldn't be that much different from having Lemmy.world dominating Lemmy as they are now.
Let instances develop organically. Let them be managed by different teams, with different people, different approaches. Let people use the software rather than trying to centralize its control.
Ok, so let's make it clear that the whole talk about "it would be nice to make it profitable" is not serious, and also make it clear that your idea of "supporting the instances" is just equivalent to cover the hardware costs, which is a rounding error compared to the cost of human labor involved.
There is just so much more going on that you are taking for granted, I don't even know where to start:
By saying that you are covering the cost of the hardware, you are basically saying that the work of everyone else is worth zero. This is downright offensive.
No, not really. At the moment I am more upset about the fact that you are one of the most active users here, that you jump instances every two weeks or so and yet you seem to think that contributing $1/year is "enough" to support the work of everyone involved here.
Imagine going to a farmer's market and saying "how come do you sell those eggs for 10€ a dozen, you can feed 25 chickens for a whole month with that, if they lay 1 egg per day you are getting 750 eggs, so I don't see why I should give more than 12/750 euros per egg." and tell me how well that's going to go.
First, the $29/year includes access to Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy and Funkwhale, with 250GB of space. There is also a 20% pledge of profits to go to the underlying projects. I also need to pay for things that others might be skipping on, like backups, redundant servers, etc.
Second and most important: the $29/year is supposed to buy you peace of mind. My customers are not paying me to "share the costs". They are paying me so they can feel assured that there is one professional taking care of the infrastructure. They are paying me to ensure that I can worry about the bugs in the software instead of them. They are paying me so that they don't have to worry about the instance going under without notice. They are paying me because they know that these things do not come for free.
No, I'm not. I'm saying that I can still manage it if needed. My proposal would be to donate the instances to the team to get rid of this "single point of failure" that you are holding me against.
This is (so far) just a thought experiment, which I am making to illustrate how your logic is flawed. You are saying that my work is not worth the price that I am charging, yet at the same time you think that others will not be interested in doing because it takes time and expertise. Don't you see the contradiction here?
That's very eloquent, but you are still evading the most fundamental issue: If your idea of "growing the network" is to keep waiting to get more enthusiasts who are willing to sacrifice their time and sanity to serve 1-2 thousand users at a time, you are going to wait for a very. long. time. If everyone keeps treating this as a mere hobby, and if users keep thinking like you and refuse to pay for the professionals what they are worth, then the professionals are simply going to go work somewhere else. If you don't believe me, just look at what is happening with Mastodon and Bluesky.
I'm going to add to your list the time of people posting content and animating communities. I am happy to freely dedicates some of my time to it, and if someone would show up and say "community animators needs to be paid for their time", I would suggest them to go to Nostr, which seems to exactly address this issue, rather than here, where most of the people volunteer with their free time.
A comment from the Mbin lead dev yesterday (https://kbin.melroy.org/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/444176/-/comment/3956532 )
Based on the other thread, it seems to indeed cover the costs. I usually give 5€ per year for an instance I use a lot. Still much cheaper than the 30$ for your bundle. It's a free environment, people will go to places using the donation model they prefer.
Imagine opening a restaurant serving soup next to a kitchen soup where volunteers make and serve the exact same soup as yours, and tell me how that is going to work.
See above, peace of mind is similar on lemmy.dbzer0 for instance, and their admin still said
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/21873104
They provided the CSAM detection tool and Fediseer. Those project have donations tools, but I've never seen their creators threatening to stop developing if they don't get enough money the way you are.
The single point of failure still stands as of today, and on top of that, the lack of organic content and communities creation on your communities is probably why you are not having as much users as you would like to.
It's not a contradiction. To come back to the volunteer kitchen soup above, it would be similar to donate 50 delivery trucks to a kitchen soup that does only manage one. They would need to park them, manage their insurance, broken tires, oil, etc, while they are doing fine with one truck, and that's how comfortable they are operating as volunteers.
LW host 18k monthly active users. Lemm.ee host 3k monthly active users. The issue is not with the number of instances, it is fine as of now, the issue is getting regular users.
Your perspective comes from someone who does not currently have a job and try to make the Fediverse profitable. Restaurant vs volunteer kitchen soup situation again. The vast majority of instance owners seem to indeed treat this as a hobby, hence are okay to give their time for free, and appreciate if donations cover the hosting costs.
Have a look at the other thread, there was only one other admin who shared your perspective.
I said it already, I'll repeat it: you have a much higher chance to get another source of income with another job than expecting people to pay 30$ a year for a bundle of Lemmy/Mastodon/Matrix.
Note that motivation to develop is a tricky business. I still have development motivation for FOSS, but it wanes and waxes seemingly on its own. Monetary compensation is there to help me maintain it a little bit further as it shows some direct appreciation, and I like when my voluntary work is also not costing me money 🙃
That said, I also recognize that there's other forms of contributions except monetary. If someone is contributing code, or sharing their GPU via the AI Horde, helping with documentation and community outreach, or even carrying niche lemmy community activity on their own, I consider it also valuable on its own, akin to monetary support. I do think that people who are mostly lurking and consuming the work I do, could find it in their hand to give something like 5$ a year or so. It doesn't take a lot of these people to provide enough to cover the costs of hosting and coffee.
Thank you for sharing your perspective!