I think if a instance owner decides to try to profit, it can happen. They could let advertisers have an account that promotes products and allow such posts to bypass community rules and disregard vote counts. You could theoretically profit from running a lemmy instance. But now your instance risks defederation and user might start leaving.

Edit: I think the smarter thing could be just asking for more donations than is needed to run the server, and pocket the excess funds. That could go on undetected as long as you falsify your operating costs to make it seem as if more funding is required. I mean I don't know if someone could actually make a living of asking for absurd amounts of donations.

No insult intended but as you say, new here, rtfm a while before complaining.

Yeah, it is a good idea for you to pay. How's two bucks s month sound? No ads, no tracking, no personal data theft, the ability to change instances if the one you're on goes fascist/corporate/whatever you dislike. Code you could actually modify.

No CEO whims, no need for "growth" I'm that ever increasing destruction mode.

It's different than corporate media. Those of us old enough remember the early internet and beyond, bbsing. This fedi shit is the good shit. Adapt! It's pretty fkn great.

Lol it's sucks now! Lol from the hyuuge influx of new people, new code, changes and a taste of chaos. I love this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

RemindMe! 1 year

Monero.town has a donation address and while you can prove you are human by linking an existing social media account during signup, you can also do this anonymously by donating a small amount of Monero. So far this model seems sustainable :)

Most servers already seem to have Patreons or similar donation platforms running, and subscriptions would not surprise me as everyone starts to settle into this thing. It would make a lot of sense to help spread the load and since content wouldn’t be gated behind the subscription, I can’t see why it would be bad.

I think I have similar thoughts on ads. If an instance wants to run ads to support itself, I don’t see an issue as long as those ads aren’t “federated” out and sent to other places.

I think the ability to have all of these different setups, without restricting any access to content, is the beauty of the fediverse. At least as I understand it.

I'm not really clear on the way the networking works with federated systems.

Say that an instance decided to charge a subscription fee, would they then have to defederate from free instances on a cost basis alone? To handle server load for requests from those instances?

Or, say that subscription was sustainable, would there be anything stopping someone from making a free instance to give users full access to that subscription-based content? The answer there is defederation right?

Trying to work out in my head how this system could be scalable without communities becoming walled gardens and thus removing part of the appeal of federation.

Text-only forums aren't super expensive to run unless you are doing it on the scale of reddit (or do stupid expensive things like have video hosting)

Another topic, I've seen people here are super hardline about keeping Facebook out of the Fediverse, and I just don't think that's going to work, Now Lemmy Explain how I think this is all going to go down:

If I were Facebook, I'd pay a bunch of big celebrities, say, a certain very talented Academy Award nominated Australian actress, a lot of money, to use Facebook Threads exclusively for a while, and give them the Checkmark. The most difficult part of getting a new social network started is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting that initial audience, which is the problem that Federation solves. So, although some instances will reject anything Facebook related completely, there will be plenty of instances where the userbase would want to interact with their favorite celebs directly a la Twitter, so there will always be instances that wants to federate with this Facebook instance.

But then, those media companies and talent agencies are going to realize, as they did against Netflix, "Hey, wait a minute, why are we paying these middlemen like Zuck and Musk so much money to host a cheap forum? They don't own the userbase on the Fediverse, so is it just for a Checkmark?", and they are going to start their own instances of Mastodon/Lemmy where everyone on their instances is verified celebs, to be used as these celeb's official account with no shitposting allowed, so they can control everything those celebs posts on their server instead. And THAT would be the downfall of Twitter/Facebook.

So, the best path for Facebook to move forward with is to offer easy cloud hosting of federated social media software for a subscription: Pay them 10 bucks a month, they'll handle all the server and upgrades, and even moderation, which will become the easiest way to setup "your own server", and that will be much more resilient to the anti-Facebook pact that is going on right now, because instead of one Facebook instance, now you may have to block hundreds of different Facebook hosted instances instead.

I could see both ads and subscriptions work (although, the former might be "useless" for those using adblockers, after all, so I'd see persistent/static sponsorship ads similar to how some FOSS projects do it to be more likely).

Especially the latter, for certain services that focus on providing value. A friend of mine mentioned Misskey for example, apparently being used by some Japanese artists. Considering Twitter's on its way out by being harmful to commission artists, I could see someone spin up such instance and ask X amount for providing a marketplace for commissioned goods.

I think long term someone will come up with something. How hostile the community they arrive to?

Entirely up to how well we remember how it went the last time.

Hmm. In the old days, pretty much every ISP ran a Usenet server. The cost was covered as part of your internet connection bill, it was just part of the service.

I could see a potential future where running a Lemmy instance became table-stakes for ISPs, like Usenet used to be.

hopefully the cost of running it is not so much and all users chip in to a degree to keep it going.