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So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
611 points (91.7% liked)
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But it’s sustainable if it’s non profit.
Most third party Reddit users were happy to pay in the range of $5 a month. The reason everything is shutting down now is because they don’t just want to break even, they want profit, and a shit ton at that.
The fediverse makes social media non-profit by default which means that we can all share the cost.
Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in the world and is still non-profit. It shows that it’s sustainable.
Exactly right. I never had a problem with Reddit wanting to make money for their services. If you give me exactly what I want, I will pay.
But even non-profits have costs that they need to cover somehow. If they don’t, they’re still not sustainable.
You ask for donations. I'm donating to my instance for instance.
If something is free then 99% of users won't spend a penny. Anyone who ever did any business knows that. You either make 1% pay for everyone (just like "free" games on mobile phones do), force everyone into subscription or sell your users to advertisers. Choose your poison.
Yes, but that's not the point.
The point is to keep the servers relatively small so that the non profits can keep breaking even on nothing but donations, even with an influx of new users entering the fediverse.- bigger instances should ideally only be trying to grow when their donations are more than covering the costs. (That being said I wouldn't be surprised if the bigger instances started having problems what with their seeming ability to continually accept new users without closing once)
In the grand scheme of things the bigger instances having 20K users isn't a whole lot, and can be done using smaller servers - the thing with social media is that usually only about 20-25% of people are actually "active" - the rest are lurking or dead accounts and maybe occasionally commenting.
The smaller instances (like the one Im on) have anywhere from 1-1000 users and are highly unlikely to fall outside the range of the low cost of a little bit higher than a hobbyist side project, and what with the tendency for smaller instances to have more % of their members also be donators probably never have to fear running out of money
It really only becomes an exponentially expensive problem when you reach twitter and Reddit levels of users on the same instance - as you end up needing more and more expensive custom load balancing and caching solutions in order to keep up with the demand - basically it's more sustainable for a few thousand people to support the costs of a 1000 instances with 100,000 total members than it is for a company to try to make a profit off of a single monolithic structure supporting the same number of users.
The fediverse splits this load across servers, even segregates it. There are areas of the fediverse that I will never see due to a lack of direct connection through the nature of how your feed works, this helps as not everything is needlessly routed through a single point.
Also Wikipedia faces the same issues and still manages to get through - sure they put up banners asking for donations when margins are getting in to what they consider the "danger zone" but usually the danger zone is more than what's required.
I'm wondering whether I would do good or bad if I host my own Lemmy instance for myself, to lower my impact on other instances.
That's sustainable for now, because instances are microscope. If at some point in time we expect lemmy to become a mainstream platform for communication with tens or hundreds of millions of users in their respective communities. It will become unsustainable long long before then IMHO (I'm happy to be wrong only time will tell)
The cost/user for Lemmy instances is through the roof, and the grand majority of people will not be willing to make donations. Perhaps awards like what Reddit did is a good option?
What about longevity. Who is going to pay for the storage for the hundreds of petabytes of storage for comment and media history? What about replication between instances? Do you have a retention period and delete history, losing knowledge to time?
I worry :/
Edit:
Maybe I worry too much, but now after Reddit maybe I'm just gunshy and am afraid of finding and contributing to new communities that end up being wiped due to sustainability issues.
I hope this problem gets solved, or worked around in some capacity.
Non-profit organizations still take in money to pay for their expenses. That doesn't negate their non-profit status.
They also wanted control over the user base, so they could do more intrusive bullshit to push more ads onto users. With the fediverse there's no monopoly on the platform so no one instance can get full control and abuse their power. With Reddit the only choice was to either submit or leave completely. With Lemmy all you need to do is swap instances.
If only you could save all your user activity along with swapping the instance... But as I understood, this is not implemented yet.
I think this is something that's hard to organize with our current economic system, but very much worth experimenting with.
The neat thing is we can try any concept we can dream up and federate. People can run through funding concepts and structures and failure isn't all that bad.
Im still wrapping my head around the concept but FOR EXAMPLE could someone create an instance that requires a subscription fee, link it to their own app (like a retooled RIF) and offer a curated and managed experience?
Vs
Join a free instance, use what free software you want and have to figure out the nuts and bolts yourself?
Each federated instance can have their own requirements for signing up, so they should be able to.
Oh then thats absolutely where I see Lemmy going if its a success. Give it 10 years and people will know their app or their managed instance and have no clue what Lemmy is.
In the root comment or the one that started this I mentioned a downside. Fast iterating paid instances can gain from larger federated instances without returning value. There needs to be a method to share bandwidth, processor time, and/or value.
The great bit is we're all now part of this expirament!
It's not hard at all. Tons of organizations and websites exist purely from the money collected from members and donors.
The difference is non-profit and systemically listening to your user (and mod-) base!