Asklemmy

I bought a server for about 100 a year... With my whopping 2 users... It's overkill... So... My comment is a wasted way of saying idunno

I think Lemmy, like Mastodon, will crumble if people don't wrap their heads around federation. Mastodon stuggled because everyone just joined mastodon.social, not understanding that the server you join only affects your local timeline.

We need to teach people that you can join a small instance and still get 99% of the stuff you want from every other instance

It's literally all donated

I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to 'award' posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.

Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.

The thing is, Lemmy is decentralized. You don't need to have an account on an instance (server) to use that instance's "subreddits" (communities) - instances communicate their activity to each other automatically, so any instance will do (provided the instances haven't banned each other). It's just like email.

So it's pretty simple to just stop accepting sign-ups once an instance starts to become impractically large. Anyone can start an instance for just the cost of a domain ($10ish/year, or free if it's a subdomain of an existing website) and a server (that random computer you already have lying around will do just fine, for free). And a small instance can do fine on just donations and the good will of the operator.

Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:

1. a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
2. not shift the page content when displaying the donation banner!

Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.

This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.

I signed up for the lemmy.ml Patreon and am happy to support an open, federated site like this. I'd never pay for Reddit Gold, Twitter Blue, Discord Nitro, or any of those other nasty pay-to-win commericalized things but I'll pay to keep an open platform from implementing stupid "premium" bullshit.

Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It's not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.

With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn't. Meaning there's fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn't succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.

sell checkmarks like Tumbler.

for x$ a month get a checkmark next to your name on posts. in whatever colours you pay for. buy checkmarks for others.

As paradoxical as it is, I think that these open source non-profit projects are a lot more efficient than profit-driven, debt-fueled corporations.

First of all, the main contributors to a FOSS project do it for passion and do not take a salary.

Secondly, they don't have the infinite growth mindset that pushes enterpreneurs to to spend as much as possible for maximum growth, all financed by a growing amount of investors (and debt, which costs interest fees).

If a FOSS project reaches maximum capacity, they will close subscriptions, they will throttle traffic, i.e. they will slow down growth, but they will not go into debt. Slowing down growth is something that a for-profit company would never do (at least until the interest rates were low and the investors were plenty, today idk). Eventually someone else in the community will decide to do a generous donation or open their own instance.

As everyone else has already said that's a very good question, one that doesn't necessarily have an answer, but Im not too concerned.

I'd point out (rather excitedly) that this really isn't unlike how the Internet used to be up until the late 00s or very early 2010s and the rise of insta, FB, birdsite, digg and reddit. EVERYone had to shoulder hosting costs (unless you were on Geocities,Myspace then it was ads)

Yes, we've had bulletin boards and discussion forums since perl and CGI were a thing; each was self hosted at the hoster's expense. Newsgroup and IRC servers too - THOSE all acted like "federated" instances - common newsgroups and chat channels would be synchronized and replicated from server to server EXACTLY how federated Lemmy/Kbin/etc. instances do it now.

And the infrastructure costs were a struggle then and they will be now. Back then to have a capable CGI forum host, or to colocate your server in someone's data center it cost a lot - like decent hosting/co-loc plans started at $50/month and went up from there. Most hosting plans had steep bandwidth caps, think like 5GB included and +$5 per GB - if you hosted a popular site 40-50GB of traffic wasn't abnormal. If you ran a newsgroup server you frequently had to futz with how long newsgroup msgs were retained to save disk space; like 48 hrs or less (then the data would be purged).

What you can get for $50/month THESE days is quite a lot more capable, and you can run a low retention instance for a lot less. Bandwidth and disk space are ludicrously cheap (at least compared to 10-15+ yrs ago). If your instance is low user, low community, and reasonable data retention/cloning, you could run Lemmy or a Mastodon or Calkey server on an old computer you have kicking around and host it from your home internet connection with a dynamic DNS mapping.

Obviously the big instances with gobs of users will struggle with how they pay for the server infrastructure - some will use crowdfunding, patrons, donations etc. Others will run ads, or subscriptions.

My home instance lemmy.ca is at 1400 users (as of right now) and is on a $25-30/month hosting plan and so far the site is doing just fine (or seems to be). I'd guess that a massive instance like lemmy.ml might be north of $1-200. But, if you think about it, all you need are 20 ppl to donate $10/month. I donate yearly to Wikipedia. As they discuss in this thread here https://lemmy.ca/post/599590 Mastodon gets $28k Euros a month in donations and pays for two? full time developers, so its not like there aren't people donating to open source projects... and so far Fediverse servers are doing fine.

Lemmy is never going to handle an entire migration of reddit's whole user base. Most redditors use the official app, and the mainstream audience for the platform now represents the largest user group. They're not going to wholesale make the jump to Lemmy. That wouldn't even be possible without widespread coordination of resources. Each instance can only handle so many users, so new instances will have to continually be created to accommodate influx. Theres no profit incentive either, meaning whoever is running the instance server is purely doing it out of their passion for the platform. That doesn't scale linearly, there's only so many people out there with the resources to run a large instance.

Measuring the cost isn't possible. It depends on electricity and equipment costs which vary a lot. And the question doesn't make sense either.

You bring up a very good point. Currently lemmy.ml has thousands of users. Lemmy.world has thousands of users. The hardware they have selected to run their instances is adequate for now, but, what is the plan for scaling out if the user base grows? Is there one? They have a donation page on each lemmy instance (click or tap the heart icon,) but that can’t be enough to pay for the cost of running something used by millions of people, even if only 100s of thousands are ever only online at any given time.

I’m terms of UI/UX, @dessalines@lemmy.ml has mentioned in a post they are currently working on major performance improvements and enhancements.

The cost will be spread out, and people can monetize how they see fit. I'm wondering if there will be additional benefits you can add to your instance for a charge that people might be willing to pay.

I'm considering offering an Element server and maybe email on mine with a shared username for each service. That's going to take time to setup, though.

We must prove that it's valued and let the monetization come later. I'm working on this in my spare time. Once I can grow, maybe I can put more effort into it. I think it'll be a lot of people like me for a while financing it out of pocket.

By not all ending up on the same server.

You can always have paid-access Lemmy servers

That's why I'm running my own server. Mastodon is much bigger than Lemmy and it does fine with community run servers.

I think the idea is that many people can run lemmy servers so the load is split between everyone hosting them.